University of Glasgow

Taking Scottish theatre and cultural institutions as a case study, this course thinks through the relationship between creative practice and cultural policy. How are theaters influenced by their material conditions and institutional frameworks, e.g., regarding their position within specific national contexts? What is the role of cultural policy for shaping the future of theatrical practice and/or society?

This course explores key features of "modern" European societies and the nature of modernity. Students explore ways historians make sense of change over time by looking more closely at various aspects of everyday life, including consumption, social identity, labor, power, gender, race, protest, violence, religion and ideology, the body, nationalism, empire, crime, and social control.

The course has four distinctive aspects. The first is a coverage of methodology and history of economic thought, which are not usually part of standard micro and macro courses. The purpose of this section is not to provide a narrative of what came before "current" economics and when, but to situate current economics historically so as to understand the context in which it emerged and its scope of application, and the institutional and political reasons for its persistence. The second aspect is a critical analysis of orthodox micro and macro theories. The purpose of this section is to examine central features of these theories, reveal their possible deficiencies, and bring out the sorts of considerations that could enhance our understanding of the economy. The third and fourth aspects of the course introduce students to two schools of thought alternative to the current orthodoxy, namely, Marxist economics and post-Keynesian economics.