University of Galway

This course explores the ways in which music operates as a means of challenging, disrupting, and resisting the social order. It encourages students to reflect on the relationship between art, power, and resistance by critically engaging with a wide range of "protest" songs. To this end, the course critically analyses specific pieces of music through the application of a wide range of conceptual tools drawn from critical, decolonial, race, and feminist theories. It intends to advance students’ sociological imagination by fostering the awareness of the value of the "aesthetic dimension" as a means of dissensus, with a particular emphasis on the theme of social change.
 

This course concentrates on literary culture and its production in Ireland and Scotland in the transitional period of c.1100-1600. Students review the literary corpus that existed in Ireland before the arrival of the Normans, looking at the structure, genres, and typical content of this literature. The 12th century in Ireland witnessed the changeover from monastic to secular schools, a new professionalization of poetry-making, and the perfecting of syllabic metres which had been in use for some 500 years. Students assess the function of the poet and the nature of his relationship with his patron. Irish-Scottish literary connections at this period are often over-looked and forgotten, but the same standard literary language stretched across the straits of Moyle from north east Ulster to Gaelic-speaking Scotland. 

This module studies deep-sea, coastal, and pelagic habitats. Students learn how to identify the major groups of cnidarians commonly associated with seamounts and submarine canyons; describe the biology of deep-sea communities; provide detailed description of a range of marine systems including epipelagic, rocky benthos, soft sediment benthos & estuarine systems; describe the physico-chemical gradients found in these habitats and discuss their role in structuring the marine communities found there; describe biological structuring processes in these coastal marine systems; describe the features and adaptations of animals in these systems; and define the relationship between area and species richness and apply this relationship to real conservation problems.

This course explores transitions that occur in children's and adolescents' lives, including "vertical transitions," described as "developmental and predictable" and including moving on from one setting to another at the appropriate stage in education/life and "horizontal transition," described as the movement between activities during the course of a normal day. The course explores transitions that result from migration, changes in the family structure, and bereavement.

This course provides an introduction to ocean properties and processes. Topics include processes that exchange energy and water within the Earth system; main sources, sinks, and pathways of material; temperature, salinity, and density structure; temperature-salinity diagram; waves and tide generation; Eulerian and Lagrangian co-ordinate systems; hydrothermal circulation; biogeochemical cycling of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nutrients; biogenic sediments; volume transport and fluxes of material; and instrumentation used in oceanography.

This course focuses on key concepts in evolutionary biology including the mechanisms operating on molecules, on populations and those involved in the formation of new species. It will also include topics on macroevolution, such as the role of mass extinctions, ​radiations, and biological constraints and biases in shaping evolutionary patterns.

This course provides an introduction to 20th Century Irish literature in English and the Irish language (in translation). It considers how writers have participated in the negotiation of modern and contemporary Irish identities. Through a close critical reading of key selected texts, it investigates the ways in which writers have imagined and reimagined Ireland and Irishness from the literary and cultural revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries through to the new millennium. Issues to be addressed include Ireland’s transition from a traditional to a modern society, language, gender, and the connections between literary production and the imagined "nation." Knowledge of Irish is not necessary for this course, as all Irish language texts are studied in English translation.

This course introduces fundamental structures and principles of education with the aim of broadening students’ ideas and knowledge about education systems and policy. Students are shown a diversity of approaches by highlighting European and international developments which involve an emphasis on creative pedagogical thinking and they analyze how Ireland fits into this framework. There is also an examination of the socio-cultural aims and requirements of education focusing on pedagogy but also addressing key areas of policy and practice as they relate to social justice, for example, social inclusion, race and ethnicity, gender, and belief systems.

This course introduces students to critical scholarship in Irish popular music, drawing on writings in ethnomusicology, cultural geography, popular music studies, and Irish studies. Particular emphasis is given to histories of popular music styles and performances from 1960 to the 21st century examining key canonical figures within Irish popular music and significant recordings/events heralding new Irish identities. Topics for discussion include regional and transnational Irish music scenes; musical hybridity; gender and Irish popular music; Irish popular music and LGBT; Irish popular music in literature and visual media; and marginalized ethnic voices in Irish popular music.