University College Dublin

A sustainable future requires to focus not only on the responsible use of natural resources but also on the social, economic, and cultural challenges we face as a global society. This course explores the role education plays in key global issues such as poverty, migration, conflict, human rights abuses, and climate change to better understand how it can contribute to a sustainable and equitable society.

This course walks the students through the complex set of concepts and projects that form the Big Data stack. Students learn how to set up Big Data environments, how to use efficient data management operations and how to run algorithms - to the scale and speed required by Big Data datasets. At the end of the course, students design and implement their own solutions to address Big Data problems.

This course introduces students to a range of contemporary Irish writings, spanning non-fiction, the novel, short stories and poetry, closely examining the choice of theme, the significance of form, and the nature of the works' impact. In analyzing the depiction of contemporary Irish urban and rural society in contemporary fiction, students engage with ongoing debates concerning the function and importance of literary representation in the context of social crisis and change. The interrogation of Irishness and identity in the course texts is examined as is writers' preoccupation with the transnational and the global.

This course offers an in-depth study of Irish cinema and television from historical, cultural, social, and economic perspectives. Spanning different cinematic and televisual genres from documentary to political thriller, and from the sitcom to reality television, students learn how Irish people and society both shape and are shaped by screen culture through an analysis of key texts. Eschewing unhelpfully narrow definitions of Irishness, this course examines the Irish experience both at home and abroad, looking at how these films and television programs shape the conception of national identity at a time of increased cultural and migration flows both into and out of Ireland (both North and South).

In Ireland, as internationally, the period from 1500 to 1800 was characterized by major political, economic, and social change. Recently, historians have placed increasing emphasis on the impact of early modern environmental and demographic transformation at a time of sustained political upheaval and social reorganization. In the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, Ireland was subject to a complex process of evolution from an essentially rural island controlled by diverse Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lordships to an island dominated politically by a colonial elite who effectively differed from the native population in terms of ethnicity, language, religion, and financial status. This course examines the transformation of Ireland in the period 1500 to 1800 from the perspective of migration and environmental change. In particular, the course considers how changes in demography, land ownership, land management, climate change, urbanization, and commerce significantly reconfigured Ireland’s landscape and environment.

Sport is central to life in the modern world. Why do people play sport, watch sport, talk about sport, dream about sport? And why do they choose the sports that they choose? This course examines the modern passion for sport and seeks to explain this passion. It assesses to what extent the straightforward pursuit of pleasure overwhelms everything else when people chose to engage with sport. But it also looks at how such choices are defined (or refined) by the influence of ideology and tradition, class and gender, commerce and geography, education, and employment. From the colosseum of the Roman Empire to the stadia of the 21st century, this course considers the creation of the modern sporting world and analyzes the place of sport within the context of social, cultural, political, and economic change.

 

This course introduces students to contemporary feminist ideas and key feminist debates, specifically feminist legal theory. The course illustrates the ideas by focusing on specific campaigns that relate to women and girls’ human rights and gender justice in both Irish national and global arenas. The course focuses on some important areas of contention, debate, and power struggles to see how feminist approaches to legal issues are deployed in important campaigns relating to: reproductive justice; prostitution/sex work; lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) issues; and redress and restorative justice for survivors of trauma and abuse relating to gender violence. Through case studies the course offers an introduction to feminist concepts and to international conventions relevant to gender justice such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), United Nations Conventions on Human Rights and relevant Security Council Resolutions as well the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Yogyarkarta Principles. The case studies are also used to introduce and illustrate key concepts of feminist legal theorists such as Martha Fineman, Catharine MacKinnon, Suan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum, and Janet Halley.

Students are introduced to environmental sociology with a focus on the interactions between human societies and the natural environment. By focusing on this two-way interaction, the course examines key theoretical perspectives, debates, and issues within environmental sociology. The course considers interdisciplinary perspectives examining a range of topics such as environmental inequality, sustainability, public attitudes towards climate change, renewable energy, consumption, pollution, environmental social movements, climate-induced migration, green crime and transformation to "green societies."  These issues are examined at multiple levels, including rural and urban, local, and global, and from different perspectives of key stakeholders. 

This course focuses on introducing students to the core concepts of the Unix operating system and how to program this system. Today, Unix and Unix-like operating systems are ubiquitous; they are widely used in servers, embedded devices and have a growing desktop and mobile market (Linux, Mac OS X, Android etc.). This course teaches students how to develop applications for such systems, assuming no other software layer but OS. Students improve their existing C programming language skills and learn some key POSIX APIs to support designing and writing programs in a portable, maintainable fashion. They learn how to write multithreaded and multi-process applications as well as some basics of Unix networking. This is done through the Unix command line, and students learn basic tools and how to write shell scripts to automate common tasks. Students need a version of Unix installed on their own laptop (ideally Linux), help with this is provided in the first lab.