Sociology

This course provides students with an introduction to the criminal justice system in England and Wales, as well as introducing students to key debates on crime, justice, and punishment.  Students learn about policing, the courts system, prisons and community punishments.

This course critically examines the issue of endangered languages, focusing on the impacts of globalization, ethnic identity, and language policies on language survival. It explores historical and contemporary factors, including population movements, war, trade, and colonization, that have shaped linguistic diversity. The course investigates why a small number of global languages dominate while thousands of minor languages face decline, and considers debates around language preservation, revitalization, and the pressures of modernity. Students analyze the political, cultural, and educational forces that influence language use and endangerment, developing insight into the tension between preserving linguistic heritage and adapting to a globalized world.

This course offers an in-depth study of the social structure of Spain, recognizing it as a specific case within the context of a broader model. That is, an analysis of the characteristics of the modern social structure system, its transformations, and the evolution of contemporary societies, with particular attention to the phenomena of wealth distribution, power, and social classes. It focuses particular attention on changes to social structure and social wealth distribution as a result of the economic crisis.

This course focuses on race, discrimination, and racial inequalities. The course addresses three key questions: what is race as perceived in the U.S. and Europe, and what are the sources of racial inequalities; what does social science research tell us about patterns and trends of racial inequalities; and what policies can alleviate racial inequalities? The course systematically adopts comparative perspectives focusing on the North American and European contexts. It also addresses research on race and racial inequality within an interdisciplinary lens particularly building on sociology, economics, and social psychology.

This course examines media through a social justice lens – revealing hidden costs and social, political, cultural implications of emerging media technologies and longstanding media practices. It covers key concepts and theories from media studies, journalism studies, cultural studies, sociology, and criminology, with an emphasis on First Nations knowledges and critical approaches to race and gender. 

This course introduces one of sociology's sister disciplines, social anthropology, which is also referred to as cultural anthropology or ethnology. This course has a theoretical and an applied dimension. In the theoretical portion it introduces classical and modern examples of anthropological theory ranging from B. Malinoswki and C. Levi-Strauss to C. Geertz and J. Diamond. The applied portion uses a variety of examples and field studies ranging from geographically closer regions such as Northern Ireland, the Basque country, and South Tyrol, to more "exotic" regions and examples.

This course explores the ambiguous connections between population dynamics and climate change. After a lecture-based acquisition of basic knowledge in the field of demography, the course studies the link between climate change and population dynamics in an interactive way by discussing scientific articles. It discusses which demographic dynamics linked to fertility, mortality, and migration impact environmental changes. Hereby, the course considers questions such as how far climate change can be explained by population growth; whether demographic pressure helps adapting more quickly to climate change; and which regions are the most responsible for climate change, in economic and demographic terms. A particular focus is determining which populations are most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation. Based on this fundamental knowledge, it discusses possible actions to dramatically reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and further deterioration of the environment as well as to protect the most exposed and vulnerable populations. It tackles climate-change related education, access to reproductive health care and family planning, gender equality in education and economic participation, investments in public health care services and technical improvements. This allow students to answer questions about what policies should be recommended to alleviate climate change, in the light of population growth and population aging, and which best-practice examples exist that help mitigating the effects of climate change for the most vulnerable.

This course examines the key concepts and current debates in criminology. It covers basic issues such as the definition, measurement and explanations of crime, societal reactions to crime, criminological theories, the role of research and the influence of criminology on public policy.