Sociology

The course explores food as the essential link between nature and culture, examining how food classification, production, cooking, and eating shape cultural identity, social organization, family and gender systems, and religious practices. By studying practices of commensality, students uncover how food reveals ideas about similarity, difference, politics, religion, and social hierarchies. Students also explore contemporary issues such as how food consumption ties to identity, the obesity epidemic, and the environmental challenges of sustainable food production.

This course has been developed through an exciting international collaboration with seven institutions across the UK and Europe. Teaching content has been designed by international experts in various fields of cultural competence, linguistics, and translation/interpreting. Each week, the course tackles a theoretical and practical aspect of multilingualism and multiculturalism, in the context of topical issues, such as generative AI, climate change, democracy, global health, equality and diversity, and civic responsibilities. Having a second or third language can be an advantage, but the course does not require students to be multilingual. The course develops cultural competency in the context of multiculturalism and multilingualism (M&M), particularly through learning from translation and interpreting studies in the age of artificial intelligence to provide students with an essential understanding of the topic and the skills to learn to effectively navigate the complexity of M&M in real-world situations. to challenge students to go beyond the recognition of the coexistence of cultures and languages, by actively engaging them in discussions centered around democracy, climate change, and global health.

This course examines how individuals, communities, societies, and states address legacies of violence and atrocity. The course considers how best to commemorate and memorialize the experience of victims and survivors. The course opens by introducing the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of key concepts of war, crime, atrocity, and genocide, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of transitional justice on the other. In the first half of the course, students look at key mechanisms of transitional justice – trials, truth, and reconciliation commissions and reparations, drawing on a set of empirical cases including former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Cambodia. In the second half, students look at some emerging areas of transitional justice practice, and the potential for transformative approaches using the arts and education and in relation to gender, and memorialization. Finally, the course addresses the question of what works, and how we measure success in transitional justice, drawing implications for policy and research.

The observed correlation between economic growth on one hand, and a worsening environmental situation on the other, calls for greater consideration of ecological issues in economic thinking. In this respect, and in parallel with the reflections on a hypothetical "decoupling" that would reconcile continued growth and decarbonization of the economy, it may be useful to look at the competing hypothesis: an exit from growth. It is this second hypothesis that this course studies, by taking stock of various works in economics and political science that help us to think about a post-growth society. After briefly recalling the main foundations of the critique of growth, the course sketches out the contours of an economic and social organization that breaks with the imperative of growth. The course addresses the various difficulties that would be posed by an end to growth: unemployment, how to organize production, and how to define what should and shouldn't be produced. The course provides a better understanding of current and future debates around the concepts of green growth and degrowth, questions current growth models, and engages in critical reflection on post-growth perspectives.

In this course, students analyze and discuss the different cultural forms (literature, film, art, philosophy, etc.) of the last 200 years that have influenced Western tradition, from Goethe to Miyazaki. The course aims to be a theoretical, practical, and experiential journey that helps students question and reflect on the humanities and their current relationship with nature, creating a baseline for analyzing any other discipline with ecological thought. This course is taught in Spanish and requires level B2 Spanish language background.

The course explores the influential criminological theories of crime and criminality, it then proceeds to look at how responses to behavior defined as criminal have emerged and changed over time. The course explores the rationalities of punishment including deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation, and incapacitation, as well as the institutions and practices that have been developed to give these rationalities effect. This includes a focus on policing, prison, and wider sites of detention as well as probation and community sanctions. The course also explores the coverage of crime and justice in contemporary culture, and how this influences public perceptions. The course draws on contemporary criminological examples and historical case studies and explores these issues from both an international an Irish perspective.  

This course analyzes how the issues related to LGBT+ populations give rise to power relations in and for space, between different actors and at different scales, from the local to the global. On the one hand, the course emphasizes the spatial dimension of the minority experience of LGBT+ people. On the other hand, it shows that the issues relating to this group are invested with multiple meanings by different actors, leading to an accentuation of the processes of opposition between “us” and “them”, between “here” and “there”. To this end, the course draws on several social science disciplines. In addition to providing knowledge about gender and sexuality, this course allows students to look at contemporary issues (urban spaces, migration, globalization, international relations, etc.) in a new light. It also introduces students to the research process in the social sciences. 

As the main and most comprehensive undergraduate course on economic elites, this class is an introduction to several streams of cutting-edge sociological research on the latter. It presents and discusses the definition of economic elites in terms of organizational positions, wealth, multiple forms of capital and/or class. It explores the different quantitative approaches to describe and study national and transnational business elites, as well as their relations with other fractions of a larger power elite, using – among other methods – network and correspondence analyses. It also draws upon the many contributions of cultural sociology to the understanding of the meaning-making processes and the symbolic economy underlying the professional habitus, the morals, the consumption patterns and the philanthropic practices of these elites.

This course examines the many different ways that we might think about fans and fan cultures, from what they think about, talk about and produce, to the way they are seen by themselves, other fans, media industries, the culture more broadly. This course encourages students to observe the media around them and to assess it critically, including understanding economic and power dynamics, as well as the role that is played by gender, race, ethnicity, language, sexuality, and cultural and social capital.

This course examines race and racism in contemporary Australia. It introduces theoretical tools from sociology to assist us in understanding how race and racism operate in Australia, who benefits from racism, and why racism is difficult to change. It looks at situations faced by First Nations people in their fight for sovereignty and justice, anti-migrant racisms, and how race, a social construction, is constantly shifting. The course also explores anti-racism efforts, why most are ineffective, and what might be more effective.