Ireland

This course introduces various ways in which psychology can contribute to understanding and improving facets of everyday life. The course critically reviews theory and research and their applications to a variety of life domains. Students are encouraged to develop critical thinking skills in considering the relevance of evidence-based psychology for specific areas of everyday life. Lectures are delivered by staff and guest speakers, who present material from their own areas of expertise. The specific topics covered vary by year, but examples of previous topics include: psychological wellbeing; child & adolescent mental health; disability & society; group relations; humanitarian emergencies; media & entertainment; law & crime.

This course introduces major organ systems that contribute to the "constancy of the internal environment" of an organism. Physiologically, homeostasis is the body's attempt to maintain a constant and balanced internal environment for living processes to take place, which requires persistent monitoring and adjustments, as external and internal conditions change. The major organ systems covered include the cardiovascular system, the respiratory system, the gastrointestinal system, and the urinary system.

This course introduces students to the range and scope of social policy analysis by showing how the subject has developed over time. It covers the history and development of Irish social policy and examines how social change has influenced and has been influenced by social policy developments since the nineteenth century.

This course explores ideas and representations of race, gender and enslavement in 18th and 19th century British Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. Focusing on questions of colonial connection, representation, identity, creolization, resistance, and power, the course engages primary and secondary materials in order to analyze and critically interpret the ways in which those who were enslaved related to, and resisted, the oppressive systems under which they were forced to labor, as well as the convictions and actions of enslavers and anti-slavery campaigners.

Using examples drawn from all animal life (invertebrates to humans), this course provides students with an overall review of the fundamentals of animal behavior. Following a detailed introduction into proximate and ultimate causation of behavior, the course covers key behavioral phenomena: sexual reproduction, selection and mating systems, kinship and cooperative breeding, habitat selection, movement, migration, and territoriality, aggression and game theory, group living and anti-predator behavior including vigilance and foraging behavior, and animal personalities. The practical element of the course allows students to develop the skills necessary to measure behavior in addition to allowing an exploration of some aspects of behavior through experimentation.

Migration is at the forefront of contemporary debates globally, and has been a centerpiece of electoral and political discourses in the Global North since the 1990s. From the so-called “migration crisis” of 2015 in Europe to the Brexit debates on keeping migrants out and to the current anti-immigrant mobilizations in Ireland, the UK, the USA, and elsewhere, migration remains a contentious issue. Often entangled with racism, discourses on migration show us how societies categorize themselves and others, and how they deal with otherness through policies and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In this module, students learn to disentangle the terms used in public, media, and political discourses on migration and race by using concepts and theories from the sociology of migration and race.

This course examines the region of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean between 1500 BCE to 100 CE. Topics include an introduction to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world, the Neo Assyrians and their Empire – 900 to 600 BCE, the Neo Babylonians and their rule – 600 to 537, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire – 537-333BCE. The Hellenistic Empires, Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empires, and the Romans and Parthians are also covered.

This course focuses on practical statistics and computation in real-world scenarios. It covers how statistics are used, how to turn data into information, how to create statistical graphics, how to obtain data from surveys and designed experiments, probability theory, and random variables.

Systems do not in general naturally behave in a manner which accords with the user’s wishes. Systems must in general be extended by the addition of a controller in order to force them to behave in an acceptable fashion. The controller may be a human (as in the case of the driver of a car for example), but the controller may also be a human-designed engineering system in its own right. In the latter case the controller is called an automatic controller. This course addresses the need for, the value of and the design of automatic controllers for some of the most common classes of engineering systems. Automatic controllers appear in more or less every engineering environment, from automotive/aerospace to biomedical equipment and including almost everything in between.