University of Manchester

The course introduces students to the foundational concepts in the study of language from the perspective of cognitive science. It explores questions that are still a matter of debate in the field, critically evaluating both evidence and arguments. Students develop a deeper understanding of how language works, some of the principles governing the complex interactions between language and other cognitive dimensions (such as attention, perception, and thought), and a basic understanding of how language functions in the brain.

What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? This course looks at how everyday views or framings of inequality emerge. The course examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, and how inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change. The course explores people’s sense of inequality’ through their attitudes and perceptions, reflexive and self-conscious values and beliefs, expressions of injustice and indignity, struggles against inequality through organized protest, resistance and mundane non-compliance, but also through the more tacit, embodied, and affective ways in which people know and sense the world.