University College Dublin

This course outlines the processes leading to the formation and behavior of economic geomaterials and energy resources. Geomaterials covered include groundwater and the sources of metallic and non-metallic resources. Geoenergy resources covered include coal, conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons, wind, hydroelectric, ocean, solar, geothermal and nuclear energy. The use of and demand for geomaterials and geoenergy are explored, and strategies for transitioning to a clean energy future, including carbon capture and storage technologies, are discussed.

This is a course that focuses on student wellbeing, personal growth, and coping with stress, so that students can equip themselves with lifelong skills for learning, working, and being well. Students learn how to thrive in university life and beyond - including leadership skills for future employment - through fostering physical, cognitive, emotional, and social skills that will support their wellbeing. The course is delivered in the context of our digital world: understanding data and finding digital supports and strategies for life management. Expert speakers join for sessions around areas such as nutrition, sleep, and mental health, and students track their own personal data and progress in areas of their choice (e.g. emotional wellbeing, study habits, time management, exercise). 

This course helps students look differently and critically at objects from the past (and the present) and to appreciate the huge importance material culture holds for understanding human society. Much older than the written record, objects are a major category of archaeological evidence and a vital tool for the archaeologist. Students review key artefact assemblages from prehistory through to the medieval period. While there is a general focus on Irish artefacts, students also consider things from Britain and continental Europe. Students explore such topics as object classification (typologies), the scientific analysis of archaeological materials, and the contribution of experimental archaeology. Alongside this, students examine the many different roles and functions that objects had in the past and how these often diverge from our modern views and practices. They explore concepts such as ownership and wealth, object deposition and discard, and the life-cycle of objects.

This course introduces concepts from psychology (e.g. beliefs, emotions, or personality) to better understand politics (e.g. elite decision-making, voting behavior, or popular uprisings). Topics are structured around three types of methods that are frequently applied in psychology: experiments, surveys, and interviews. Students gain first-hand research experience by working in small teams to evaluate primary data on a topic of their choice (e.g. right-wing voting, state decisions to go to war, or emotional effects of terror attacks). 

This course deals with the analysis and design of electronic circuits containing diodes and transistors. Topics that are covered include physical operation and modeling of diodes (pn junction diode, zener diode) and transistors (MOSFET, BJT); DC analysis, large-signal and small-signal analysis of basic electronic circuits containing diodes and transistors; and design of basic electronic circuits, including simulation and laboratory exercises.

Cities are very important spaces within which complex economic, political, cultural, and environmental processes are produced and experienced. This course introduces students to urbanization from a global perspective. The objective is to understand contemporary processes of urban change in historical perspective from both the global north and the global south. The course draws on case studies and examples from South America, North America, Europe, South Africa, and Asia to exemplify key themes in urban studies including industrialization, suburbanization, global cities, inequality, and sustainability.

The key question of this course is how freedom is compatible with the authority of the state. During the course, students look at some classical responses to this question as well as to the related questions of how to organize statehood in a way that balances concerns for liberty, equality, and community. In exploring the theoretical foundations of today’s debates on these issues, students initially focus on a selection of historical thinkers from the pre-Enlightenment period onwards, later bringing the debate more up to date with scholarship by more modern thinkers.

This course introduces students to the Earth, to its environmental systems, and to the ways in which these systems operate and change both spatially and temporally, producing distinctive physical geographies. Topics include: the history of physical geography; the theory of plate tectonics and the rock cycle; and the atmosphere, the hydrological cycle, glacial, fluvial, and coastal systems.
 

This course provides students with both a thorough introduction and an experiential immersion in the music of Ireland, and encompasses all its richness and variety. No previous knowledge of Irish musical history is required and neither is it necessary to be able to read musical notation. The course engages with the music of Ireland from the medieval period to the present day and encompasses three principal types of music – traditional, classical, and popular. The music of Ireland is examined in its historical context and is situated within the wider international context. The music's historical, social, cultural, and political dimensions are discussed.

Students develop their understanding of many dimensions of the relationship between gender and social policy. In the first section of the course, students become familiar with the fundamental concepts necessary for gender policy analysis, including how gender operates as a social structure and its intersectional relationship to other social structures such as race, class, and disability. Students develop their understanding of the concept of patriarchy in both its familial and non-familial meanings and ideas about post-patriarchal welfare states. Students learn about prevailing approaches to measuring gender inequalities, including indicators. Next, students focus on gendered typologies of welfare states and the importance of varieties of capitalism to gender inequalities in work, organizations, and families. In the final part of the course, students focus on how the concept of care is becoming increasingly significant for policymakers and private sector employers.