University College Dublin

This course introduces major organ systems that contribute to the "constancy of the internal environment" of an organism. Physiologically, homeostasis is the body's attempt to maintain a constant and balanced internal environment for living processes to take place, which requires persistent monitoring and adjustments, as external and internal conditions change. The major organ systems covered include the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, the gastrointestinal system, and the urinary system.

This course introduces students to the range and scope of social policy analysis by showing how the subject has developed over time. It covers the history and development of Irish social policy and examines how social change has influenced and has been influenced by social policy developments since the nineteenth century.

Using examples drawn from all animal life (invertebrates to humans), this course provides students with an overall review of the fundamentals of animal behavior. Following a detailed introduction into proximate and ultimate causation of behavior, the course covers key behavioral phenomena: sexual reproduction, selection and mating systems, kinship and cooperative breeding, habitat selection, movement, migration, and territoriality, aggression and game theory, group living and anti-predator behavior including vigilance and foraging behavior, and animal personalities. The practical element of the course allows students to develop the skills necessary to measure behavior in addition to allowing an exploration of some aspects of behavior through experimentation.

Migration is at the forefront of contemporary debates globally, and has been a centerpiece of electoral and political discourses in the Global North since the 1990s. From the so-called “migration crisis” of 2015 in Europe to the Brexit debates on keeping migrants out and to the current anti-immigrant mobilizations in Ireland, the UK, the USA, and elsewhere, migration remains a contentious issue. Often entangled with racism, discourses on migration show us how societies categorize themselves and others, and how they deal with otherness through policies and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In this module, students learn to disentangle the terms used in public, media, and political discourses on migration and race by using concepts and theories from the sociology of migration and race.

This course focuses on practical statistics and computation in real-world scenarios. It covers how statistics are used, how to turn data into information, how to create statistical graphics, how to obtain data from surveys and designed experiments, probability theory, and random variables.

Systems do not in general naturally behave in a manner which accords with the user’s wishes. Systems must in general be extended by the addition of a controller in order to force them to behave in an acceptable fashion. The controller may be a human (as in the case of the driver of a car for example), but the controller may also be a human-designed engineering system in its own right. In the latter case the controller is called an automatic controller. This course addresses the need for, the value of and the design of automatic controllers for some of the most common classes of engineering systems. Automatic controllers appear in more or less every engineering environment, from automotive/aerospace to biomedical equipment and including almost everything in between.

This course examines the housing crisis as a central social justice challenge in contemporary cities. Focusing on issues of supply, affordability, and homelessness, with particular attention to Ireland, the course explores the economic and political dynamics of housing markets and the reasons these markets often fail to meet social needs. Drawing on social scientific concepts and empirical evidence, the course analyzes how governments and societies value, regulate, and provide housing. Emphasizing housing as a fundamental human need, the course adopts a social justice perspective to critically assess current conditions and develop creative, realistic solutions aimed at building more equitable and socially just cities.

This course introduces students to social theory in medical sociology. It does this by exploring sociological factors that impinge on health status, health chances and health care. It looks at concepts of health and illness, the social context of health and illness as well as changing patterns of health and illness, and the social organization of both formal and informal health care. This also includes a critical analysis of formal Western biomedical approaches to health and health care. A number of theoretical positions are considered ranging from Functionalist, Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives through to Postmodern, Realist and Critical Realist perspectives and the relevance of these in medicine and health care. These are applied to key substantive areas covered in the course.

This course explores sociocultural, legal and political framings and debates around what constitutes drugs -licit (e.g., alcohol, caffeine) and illicit substances- (e.g., cannabis, cocaine), factors that facilitate drug availability and use in society, drug policies, policing and control, drug-related intoxication and pleasure, drug use and crime, etc., situating these and other related themes within the local and broader societal contexts. It critically examines the nature, extent and impact of drug supply and drug taking and intoxication in Irish society and internationally and how each society responds and reacts to alcohol and other drug taking and those who take legal and illegal drugs/substances.

People seem to be increasingly concerned with security. There is a marked perception that insecurity is on the rise, and that the world has become an extremely unsafe place. Security policies like predictive policing, urban surveillance, border control, and antiterrorism have grown in technological sophistication and legitimacy, and are increasingly debated in electoral campaigns, among policy makers, and in the press. And yet, crime statistics show unequivocally that we have never been safer. How do we explain this discrepancy, and how do we analyse critically society’s concern with security and surveillance, as well as the solutions proposed by different actors to solve such concerns? This course explores what security and surveillance teach us about our society, its fears, and the way different categories of people think about and act on (in)security both online and offline. It discusses case studies such as urban insecurity, digital surveillance, border control, and citizen initiatives to increase security, and explore the causes and consequences of such practices in our society. It reflects on whose (in)security matters and why, and assesses whether practices such as predictive policing, CCTV cameras, face recognition technologies really work, for whom, and how. Students think about what it means to live in a Big Brother society – where a lot of what we do is subjected to surveillance – and explore sociological insights on surveillance and security.