Ireland

This course examines the dynamics, roles and politics of culture, art and creative agency in the reproduction and transformation of society. It focuses on the ways art and artists respond to, dismantle and reimagine beyond the discursive and institutional formations that construct difference as ‘problematic’, and the injustices they give rise to. This is an empirically and practice-based course that interrogates the relationships and tensions between knowledge, aesthetics and pedagogy through examination of ground-breaking works of art and scholarship across a range of pressing social justice issues and national contexts. It is interdisciplinary, convening readings from sociology, anthropology, art history and social movement studies. Course materials are gathered across theoretical traditions of feminism, Black, indigenous and queer studies, as well as post-colonial and decolonial studies. There is no ‘textbook’ or singular approach to this area of study. Coursework requires equal measures of weekly scholarly and weekly arts-based work: it involves a variety of exercises using a range of visual art techniques, and students are welcome to experiment with sonic and performative practices for the final project. Completing work on a weekly basis is essential.

This course teaches critical thinking approaches, methods, and techniques for evaluating information and making sound decisions. It examines misinformation, common logical fallacies, and misleading uses of statistics and data visualization, using everyday examples to build practical analytical skills. Emphasis is placed on assessing the credibility and validity of information in an environment saturated with competing claims. By strengthening the ability to identify and challenge misinformation, the course highlights the importance of critical thinking for informed decision-making, scientific literacy, and the functioning of democratic societies.

Friedrich Nietzsche infamously declared that God is dead. Later, Carl Jung diagnosed the distinctive illness of the twentieth century as that of a godless age in search of meaning. The twentieth century witnessed a rejection of old, official myths (God, the immortal soul, the nation state, etc.), which are supplanted by new ones that first emerge in so-called low, popular culture. Fantasy texts address various crises of meaning, by providing readers and audiences with new myths, new gods. This course explores the connections between fantasy, popular media and crises in the conception of the modern self, as mapped through events such as WWII, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the triumph of late capitalism, and present-day fundamentalist terrorism. Sigmund Freud asserts that fantasy fulfills unconscious wishes, or 'lacks'. What do our enduring popular myths of roughly the last 100 years reveal about us, individually and collectively? Why are characters like Aslan, Superman, Batman and Bilbo Baggins such enduring figures of the modern imagination, easily translating from medium to medium (cheap paperbacks and comics, to film and TV)? Do they represent a hunger for old authority? Or, could they be archetypes of new humanist liberation? The course addresses these questions and others through analysis of a selection of key comics and fantasy texts.

There are two distinct parts to this course. The first few lectures provide students with a general overview of connectionism: its origins as an attempt to model the functioning of the brain, and the various classes of algorithms created starting from these foundations. The second part focuses on the last 10-15 years. The course provides a general framework for designing machine learning models that deal with complex structured data, introduces graphical models and Bayesian networks, and describes inference and learning algorithms for them. The course also addresses the case of neural networks, i.e. to describe possible strategies for effectively training them in real-world scenarios.

This course looks at historical approaches to political trials in the twentieth century with a focus on the Scottsboro Trial, a major civil rights case in the Depression-era United States. Which historical sources can we use to understand the history of political trials, justice, and law? What makes a trial 'political'? The course examines a diverse range of sources including the contemporary press, poetry, theater, legal documents, speeches, and literature from the period, as well as the memory of the case through the Cold War and beyond. The course places the case in an international perspective and uses it to examine the controversial and contested intersection between contemporary law, race, and politics.

This course provides an understanding of the key concepts underlying Geographical Information Systems (GIS), how Geographical Information (GI) may be defined, measured, structured and represented in a GIS, and the development of skills in the use and application of GIS through practical exercises. The course also covers the role of GI in society; the nature and construction of GI; measurement of location; principles and techniques of spatial data modelling; field-based and object-based conceptualizations of space, and their expression as spatial data structures; and concepts of spatial and non-spatial data retrieval, manipulation and analysis. Hands-on training in GIS will be provided in the laboratory sessions.

This course provides an overview of some of the major developments in American culture since 1840. It introduces the basic methods of cultural history and teaches them how to place cultural developments within broader economic, political, and social contexts. Some of the themes discussed in the module include: the way culture has shaped racial, gender, and class conflicts and identities; the role of popular music in American life; the growth of advertising and consumer culture; the role of culture in debates over immigration and multiculturalism; and how the conquest of the American West was registered in American culture.

Nowadays Cloud Computing is everywhere. Cloud Computing (CC) is not a revolution of Information technology (IT), but It is one of the key evolution steps of IT. It is computing as a utility, which has recently emerged as a commercial reality. The main characteristics of CC are 1) the illusion of infinite computing resources, 2) the ability to pay-as-you-go, and 3) the elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users. In other words, CC is a style of computing which can be scaled dynamically, and virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Network. The key idea behind this course is to provide fundamental CC topics taking into account both technology and business considerations. The course is divided into a series of lectures, each of which is accompanied by one or more hands-on exercises. Some of the topics covered are: Fundamental CC terminology and concepts; CC definition an its specific characteristics; Benefits, Challenges and Risks of CC platforms and Services; Roles of CC administrator and owners; SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS delivery models and their combinations; Various Public, Private, and hybrid CC environments; Business Cost models and Service Level Agreements for CC; Case Studies: Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and Amazon Cloud.

This lecture-based course addresses some of the major themes which have characterized Irish history since 1750 – the rise of nationalism and campaigns for Home Rule and independence; the establishment of the new state; Irish engagement with Britain, Europe and the world; religious and ethnic divisions within Ireland; impact of gender and age on life experiences; socio-economic events and developments like the famine in the 19th century and economic planning in the twentieth. The particular range of themes to be addressed may change from year to year and will be announced by the Department at the start of the year.