Trinity College Dublin

Social innovation has been described as the process of developing and deploying effective solutions to challenging and often systemic societal and environmental issues. This course examines patterns of social innovation against a backdrop of the great climate and biodiversity crises of our times, with cases drawn from climate justice, the circular economy, nature-based enterprise and food systems. The course critically assesses the evidence in support of social innovation and examines theory and practice – local and international - in social innovation, social purpose scaling, social value creation, and impact measurement.  Students consider the organizational settings that social innovators adopt, including social and solidarity enterprises. Students work with theory, case studies, and their own projects to identify how social innovation can respond to and even drive social-economic-political change in the current context. 

This course gives an overview of contemporary approaches to tissue and cell engineering, including stem cells, cellular signaling, biomaterial scaffolds, use of bioreactors in tissue engineering, and controlled release strategies. Students explore ethical considerations related to clinical application of tissue and cell engineering technology. Topics include stem cells, embryogenesis, cellular signaling, extracellular matrix as a scaffold, degradable biomaterials for tissue engineering, cell-material interactions, scaffold design and fabrication, controlled drug release in tissue engineering, bioreactors in tissue engineering, production of mesenchymal stem cells, industrial tissue engineering manufacturing, cartilage tissue engineering, bone tissue engineering, cardiovascular tissue engineering, corneal tissue engineering and replacement, tissue engineering of the intervertebral disc (IVD). 

The course offers an overview of Western philosophy and analyses the questions treated in its main branches. This course studies the Greeks as the founders of the Western philosophical tradition, key texts, and ideas relating to Presocratic philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, emphasizing on metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and of the soul.  The course covers the medieval era through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, emphasizing on his use of an Aristotelian approach to metaphysical notions of substance and soul, as well as his arguments for the existence of God. The study of modern philosophy focuses on Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein. In this part of the course, students explore the views of these thinkers on questions like: What is knowledge, and is it possible? How is the mind related to the body? What is meant by virtue ethics? What is the relation between language and the world?

This course provides an overview of Islamic history. It presents and discusses Islamic scriptures, doctrines, and rituals. The course demonstrates the significance and development within Islam of concepts such as prophethood, revelation, jihad, theology, law, and gender. Students develop an understanding of the contribution of Islamic civilization to human culture and examine various scholarly approaches to the study of Islam. 

The course provides instruction in agile development methodologies and promotes close collaboration between team members. The development of the project is structured as two product releases as part of the development cycle. Each week, the current state of progress is reported and discussed, both in the lectures and in the group meetings. A project mentor meets with each team weekly and will advise on setting up the team structure including the assignment of roles and responsibilities within the team and on reporting systems both internally and externally. Weekly peer code and design reviews are a core component of the delivery of the course. These are to encourage a team approach to learning and introduce the practicalities of software quality control. 

This course offers students the opportunity for an extensive study of one of the most important writers of the 20th century: George Orwell. Students study the representative sample of Orwell’s writing across a variety of forms and subjects, looking at Orwell as a novelist, a journalist, a memoirist, a social theorist, a political thinker and writer, and an essayist and cultural critic. 

This course introduces students to global mental health from a critical perspective, with a particular focus on contextual constructions of mental illness, mental health programming in low resource and humanitarian settings, and for marginalized populations. The course covers global differences in definitions and incidence of psychiatric disorders, the validity and effectiveness of mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) interventions, and the wider role of power and inequity in shaping national mental health policies and international guidelines. 

The course introduces rings, subrings, homomorphisms, ideals, quotients, and isomorphism theorems. It includes integral domains, unique factorization domains, principal ideal domains, Euclidean domains, Gauss' lemma and Eisenstein's criterion. Fields, field of quotients, field extensions, the tower law, ruler and compass constructions, construction of finite fields.  Students state the definitions of concepts and prove their main properties, describe fields and rings and perform computations in them. Students discuss the theoretical results covered in the course and outline their proofs. They perform and apply the Euclidean algorithm in a Euclidean domain, giving examples of sets for which some of the defining properties of fields. They focus on proving the tower law, and use it to prove the impossibility of some classical ruler and compass geometric constructions. Students learn to identify concepts as particular cases of fields, rings, and modules (e.g. functions on the real line as a ring, abelian groups, and vector space).

The course situates Chaucer’s exceptionally diverse canon within the literary and historical contexts that produced them, while also considering how archival discoveries and fresh theoretical approaches make possible new understandings (or at times misunderstandings) of the medieval author and his works. Given the increasingly diverse and global readership of Chaucer’s work in 21st centuries, it is unsurprising that these works elicit such varied and often contradictory responses. As readers of Chaucer in the 21st century, students are encouraged and supported to develop their own voice and critical skills, and it is not expected that they have extensive previous experience with medieval literature. 

This course addresses the history of economic thought, which is done in two sections. The first section traces the elaboration of basic economic principles by classical, socialist, and neoclassical thinkers. The second section splits up 20th century economic thought into its constituent disciplines. The course provides insight into the historical and ideological context in which different economic systems and policies arose. Students interested in interdisciplinary work focus on subjects as diverse as economics, political science, sociology, history, and philosophy.