Ireland

This course examines various collective strategies adopted to selectively know and understand inhumane conduct and consider how publics morally disengage from acts of extreme violence and rationalize inhumane conduct, especially during periods of upheaval social unrest. It asks if social and political under-reactions to widespread evidence of violence, hunger, poverty, or ecological destruction today offer us any insights into the relationship between knowledge of suffering (its production and dissemination), social relations among humans, and propensity to act? Using classical Marxist and Weberian analysis, it will explore how social and affective identification with fellow humanity is routinely blocked. It will also assess the role of narrative in establishing the acceptability and coherence of certain violent realities today. The second part of this course considers occasions when societies choose to engage with traumatic memories of violence. Topics include collective trauma, denial, forgetting, societal guilt, inhumanities, the by-stander society, alienation, and societal learning.

The course is future oriented and explores the concept of sustainability in the face of global change. It encompasses a wide range of theory and practice, including social, economic, and environmental issues, and links international examples to local context and relevance. The course challenges students to critically reflect on sustainability and current approaches to sustainability.

The phenomenon of globalization is vital to our understanding of the world since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since the 1970s. In this course, students look at the processes that made the world a more integrated and interdependent place in the second half of the 20th century.

Political sociology examines the social origins and dynamics of political phenomena such as the state, nationalism, political mobilization, civil war, and conflict. It focuses in particular on the changing relationship between society and state. This course provides an overview of the major debates in the field, tracing the changing relationship between state and society in the modern era. It provides an introduction to both classical and contemporary issues in political sociology and reviews the leading theoretical and historical approaches in the field. The course explores how the nation-state became the dominant form of political organization and why it persists; why nationalism is such a powerful force; why people get involved in political parties and social movements; how civil wars break out; how governments maintain their legitimacy; the changing nature of warfare and its role in shaping societies and states; and the changing character of politics in the Information Age.
 

In this course, students gain a broad understanding of the roots and character of the international trade in illicit drugs, and the difficulties in restricting its strength and influence. The course goes over the origins and history of the global drugs trade, relationships between the international drugs trade, globalization, and capitalism. Students learn about the spatial distribution and general economics of the drugs trade globally and the social harm to populations of this trade. They gain knowledge on the efforts to regulate, control, and eradicate the international trade, and evaluation of those efforts.

The Celtic literatures contain a variety of strong and memorable female and male characters, some positively portrayed and others negatively. The idealized gender characteristics which may underpin these portrayals is explored in the lectures. In the case of the ultimate model of masculinity, the male hero, the myth of heroic prowess coupled with the underlying threat of unpredictability and violence is examined. In addition, the blurred lines of gender identity in poetry is a particular focus. Saints' Lives of the Middle Ages, often an expected source of gender role reversal and fluidity, is also covered. A range of representative texts are read in translation, and discussed and analyzed in lectures.

This course offers an introduction to the history of cultural anthropology, tracing the formation of anthropological theory from its roots in the Enlightenment and European colonial expansion up to the present. Partly an intellectual history of the discipline, students explore key texts that mark critical shifts in anthropological thinking about what it means to be human. In doing so, students explore theories and critiques that have shaped, complicated, and haunted anthropological conceptions of humanity, including ideas about nature and culture, notions of race, progress, and civilization, and theories of personhood and social life.

This course considers how intrinsic war is to human nature (the Hobbes/Rousseau debate), the causes and escalation of conflict, the conduct of warfare, its physical manifestation and immediate outcomes. The focus is on small-scale societies of prehistoric and recent date, using archaeological information and ethnographies of conflict to study and define "primitive" war as an anthropological phenomenon. The course takes a comparative, evolutionary, and historical perspective, to look at the broader impact of war and conflict in a sample of early and indigenous societies.

The course allows students the opportunity to explore through embodied engagement a range of methods of movement practices in order to performatively understand place, movement, and cultures. Students study, through practice and seminar, some of the key writings and practices of movement and place in contemporary culture. This can include a range of contemporary and historical approaches to dance, choreography, physical theatre, somatic practice, and contemplative practices.

Ethnography as both the methodology and the set of methods by which anthropologists gather our data from the field has a long and controversial history emerging during European colonial expansion. Students critically examine the early ethnographic works, particularly in relation to Ireland as well as abroad. Contemporary texts comparatively show core issues and debates in how the "other" is written. As students move through these texts we engage with different ethnographic methods developing the student's own skills in collecting and curating social data.