University of Galway

Climate change is not a modern phenomenon, as Earth’s systems are dynamic and rarely stable over extended periods of time. Climate variability occurs across multiple spatial and temporal scales, but we generally lack long enough scientific or historical records to directly measure most long-term patterns of climate change. Palaeoceanography fills this void by providing evidence of past changes in ocean conditions including temperature, salinity, productivity, circulation, and ecology. These variables are typically reconstructed through analyses of the geochemistry, microfossil composition, and organic contents of ancient marine sediments that have either been exposed on land or collected through seafloor drilling. Palaeoceanography offers an opportunity to reconstruct past climate change across timescales, providing a broader context for studying modern climate change.

This course provides the opportunity for students to engage critically with the philosophical literature on the concept of political liberty. Students read and discuss key texts in modern political philosophy, beginning with Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Students critically analyze the various ways in which liberty has been conceptualized by the most important political thinkers in the modern era.

This is a 15 ECTS course focused on children with special needs in family, community, and educational contexts. The course delivery is through a blended mode of lectures, tutorials, and inquiry-based project work. Students explore holistic models of conceptualizing the diverse needs of children, as well as examining and reflecting upon practical support strategies for inclusive environments. Students explore and understand the Disability Act (2005) and the process of Individualized Education Plans (IEPs).

This course introduces students to key concepts and research in the study of developmental psychology, with particular focus on cognitive development, social and emotional development, moral development, and gender development.

Writing the Flâneuse, this seminar course explores representations of metropolitan spaces and experiences in 20th-century women’s writing. The figure of the flâneur – a term used to define a male wanderer and observer of urban life – has long been integral to critical explorations of modernity, from Charles Baudelaire's THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE through to James Joyce's ULYSSES (1922). However, students on this course are introduced to the contrasting feminine figure of the flâneuse – a female wanderer and observer of urban life – across the 20th century, drawing attention to the many re-evaluative efforts to bring matters of gender as well as the centrality of women's writing and experience to the forefront of studies of modern literature. It offers a critical and historical framework for approaching the figure of the flâneuse, reading primary texts alongside key critical works, and further incorporating discussions of space, spectacle, urban geography, mobility, consumer culture and labor. The course follows a broadly chronological trajectory, drawing on examples from novels, short fiction, and poetry by a diverse range of British and North American writers.

This course concerns the status, roles, and representation of women in medieval Irish and Welsh society. The student is introduced to primary material which can inform us about the socio-legal position of women in these societies as contrasted with that of men, including legal tracts, literary texts, historical texts and didactic writings, the originals of which were written in Irish, Welsh, and Latin (but read in English translation). The importance of marriage and other kinds of union in the lives of women is examined, and the impact these unions had on women’s social status will be assessed. Various literary texts are read, with a view to considering how femininities and masculinities are constructed in them, and the characters of prominent literary women are examined and analyzed. The question of women’s agency in society, especially in the area of learning, as well as the factors that wrought change on women’s social position, is also addressed.

This course surveys Irish labor history. It examines the character of rural and urban social protest movements representing the working poor, the development of trade unionism throughout the island of Ireland, the impact of radical ideologies, the competition from nationalist and unionist politics, and the reasons for the stunted political development of Irish labor. It considers how trade unionism became part of the "social furniture" in the mid-20th century, and examines the ideological and practical challenges faced by the movement in the closing decades of the century.

Burial mounds, megalithic tombs, enigmatic earthworks, ringforts, ancient churches, medieval castles, and shipwrecks these are just some of the vast array of archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape. This course teaches you how to recognize and date these various sites and monuments, how to access and use various online resources that contain detailed map-based information about all known Irish archaeological sites, and finally, how archaeologists progress from this abundance of "raw" data to interpreting and presenting archaeological monuments and landscapes to the public.

The course examines the development of rationalism from Descartes to Leibniz. Special attention is paid to the historical context of the rationalist attempt to give a systematic account of knowledge and reality. Students examine the relation between empirical science and metaphysics in the 18th-century period of Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on the philosophies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.