This module is designed to help you start preparing for your Independent Dissertation Project in Year 3, which is a supervised research project on a topic of your choice.

Through the interactive workshops, you will work towards identifying your topic choice, research questions, theoretical framework and methodology as you develop your dissertation research proposal. Each week, these skills based sessions will focus on a particular aspect of the research proposal (e.g. writing research questions, selecting appropriate methods to investigate these, identifying ethical considerations etc). This module will also feature guest speakers including, for example, some of your future supervisors and current dissertation students who will discuss how they came to research their topic areas, the kinds of dissertations students are completing or have completed in these areas in the past and advice they would like to pass on.

This module is designed around active learning – helping you to develop skills to do your own research.

Lectures address cross-cutting methodological debates as well as established methods (such as interviewing, discourse analysis, ethnography and quantitative surveys). Most of your time, however, is spent in seminars where you will try out methods such as interviewing, analysing media texts, and doing observation on campus.

There are ample opportunities for feedback as you develop ideas for your project-based final assessment, and build diverse skills to support your final year dissertation.

This module introduces the development of social theory from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century to contemporary debates about the character of knowing. This module will introduce important models developed by classical social theorists (and especially Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel) for analysing modern societies and considers how they have been adapted, updated, or displaced by recent social theories. It explores how these theories have been shaped by social and political change in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century Europe. Particular stress is placed on relating theories to contemporary social life. You will critically consider different current understandings of the role of social theory as privileged knowledge, tool of social control, ideology, and discourse. You will explore critically the theme of everyday life in modernity.

This module offers the opportunity to learn skills in reading, analysing, comparing, and critically evaluating major social theories of the rise of modern societies.

This module explores the question of how information and communications technologies, in their multiple forms, figure in our everyday lives. The aim of the module is to develop an appreciation for the range of experiences affected by digital media, including the progressive expansion of life online, and the increasingly intimate relations between life online and off. We’ll explore global divisions of digital labour; hactivism. The module will consider the new possibilities that the changing social infrastructure of digital technologies afford, while also learning to look at the rhetorics and practices of the virtual with a questioning and critical eye. Throughout the course we’ll be attentive to issues of gender, race and other marks of sameness and difference as they operate among humans, and between humans and machines.

Contemporary women’s and men’s lives are vastly different from previous generations, yet there are certain patterns of inequality, gender difference, and normative sexuality that continue to be reproduced. This course explores and interrogates the workings of gender and sexuality in contemporary society by considering a range of sociological and feminist explanations. The focus is on multiple formations of gender, sexuality, identity and embodiment. The course will analyse power relations among women (differentiated by class, ‘race’, ethnicity, sexuality and nationality) as well as between men and women. The course is taught in workshop format and involves lively debate and lectures and analysis of readings, films, images and news and popular media. In term 2 you complete and present a group project based on independent research.

The course is divided into 4 thematic sections.

1. Formations of Gender(s) and Sexualities , including emphasis on the social construction of bodies and identities and introducing key debates and the work of feminist and queer theorists.
2. Intersectionalities 1, is a series of lectures/workshops about how gender and sexuality are performed within and through everyday spaces and materials of difference and inequality, for example technology, childbirth and medicine.
3. Intersectionalities 2, considers how gender and sexuality intersect with other identity categories, such as class and religious identity.
4. Citizenship, considering contemporary feminist and queer approaches to, for example, marriage, intimacy practices and the military.

You will have the opportunity to: 1) learn skills in reading, analysing, and critically evaluating theories of gender difference and inequality; 2) to practice formulating your own sociological questions about gender and sexuality; 3) develop your skills in group work and oral presentation.

The media are hugely influential in shaping, reflecting and challenging gendered power relations. Feminist theorists have been attentive to the ways in which our lives are mediated, suggesting that we construct and perform our identities in relation to media representations of gender, sexuality and the body.

This module focusses on these issues, exploring some of the key cultural, social and political questions surrounding gender, sexuality and the media. The module draws on key concepts to explore how gender works across a wide range of media platforms. Specific media studied include film, advertising, fashion media and celebrity culture, politics, television genres such as reality television and soap opera, and gaming and digital media.

Family and intimate relationships form a crucial part of everyday social life. We are born into family and intimate relationships. We establish, maintain and dissolve family and intimate bonds over the life course. We navigate our changing relationship with parents, siblings, and relatives. We establish, maintain and re-establish intimate ties with partners and perhaps children.

But what are ‘families’? What makes intimate relationships ‘intimate’? How do people date, marry, separate, divorce, and re-partner? How do people ‘do’ families and intimacy in the everyday vicissitudes of match-making, romance, conflicts, care, money, domestic labour, and power? Why do people practise families and intimacy as they do? How do broader social, economic, political and cultural institutions configure our ‘private’ lives? How do the ways in which we relate to family members and intimate others shape the societies in which we live?

In an increasingly interconnected world, family and intimate relationships — personal and private as they are — are increasingly shaped by social forces operating on a global scale. The changing forms and practices of families and intimacy also help shape social trends as grandeur as globalisation.

In this module, we explore theoretical and empirical issues pertaining to the resilience and transformation of family and intimate relationships in a global context.

Everyday life is often described as bombarding us with images, and contemporary culture is therefore frequently understood as a visual culture.

• What do such statements actually mean?
• How far is our culture a visual culture?
• What role do media play in a visual culture?
• How is vision linked to practices – including representation, the gaze and embodiment – of power and inequality?
• In what ways might these practices be challenged or resisted? Does vision only involve seeing, or is visual culture multi-sensory?

This module will introduce theories and practices that have addressed these questions. Examples of topics studied include:

• The relationship between vision and knowledge
• The gaze and power (eg the gaze as gendered and raced)
• Media, representation and identity
• Technologies of vision
• Material practices of vision
• Vision as multi-sensory.

On this module you will have the opportunity to gain a critical understanding of recent and ongoing themes in Media and Cultural Studies and Sociology on the topic of vision and visuality, media and culture, develop different reading and writing skills and participate in lively discussions and analytical exercises.

This module focuses on racism and racial formations in the world today in both historical and contemporary perspectives. We will consider how ideas of race are historically constructed and look at how racism takes on different forms. Topics may include: the slave trade, colonialism and imperialism; ‘everyday racism’; structural racism; the social construction of ‘whiteness’; anti-racists politics and movements. The aim of the course is for you to gain an overview of various sociological approaches to explaining ‘race’, but also to gain an understanding of how such theories make a difference in the world today.

In this module we explore the challenges facing young people in the UK today; particularly those raised in conditions of socio-economic disadvantage. Students are encouraged to think critically about the reasons young people are referred to, or seek help from agencies that offer support and safeguarding services.

Topics include contextual social work and trauma informed approaches to working with young people, adolescent mental health, offending behaviour, drug and alcohol use and the exploitation of young people. Central to this course are young people’s perspectives, as well as insights from social workers currently in practice.

This module introduces a range of debates about the social and cultural status and impact of advertising.

From a sociological perspective it explores:

• Advertising in the nineteenth century
• The practices of contemporary advertising agencies
• Advertising controversies
• Advertising regulation
• Methods of textual analysis for advertisements
• Gender and advertising
• Challenges to advertising and the subversion of advertisements
• Sociological accounts of branding and ‘promotional culture’

Students on this module will gain a critical understanding of sociological and cultural perspectives on advertising, methods of analysing advertising, and the role of advertising and discourses of consumerism in shaping identities.

Television remains one of the most pervasive and prevalent communication mediums. It shapes how we perceive and make sense of the nation, and offers representational frameworks through which a sense of identity and community can be constructed. Television has its critics - who consider it vulgar, mundane, stupefying, 'chewing gum for the eyes' - yet despite consistent predictions of its decline, television appears to have weathered the storm of fragmentation and digitalisation and remains a crucial media site that shapes national values and debate. This module introduces students to the field of television studies, its empirical and theoretical tools and the critical perspectives that help us explore and evaluate the recent history of television and explore its possible futures.

This module provides an opportunity to bring together knowledge and skills you have developed into an 8,000 word dissertation that you complete in your final year. You will have the opportunity to undertake an independent piece of research (under supervision) and to apply your general understanding of the research process to real world examples that are of particular interest to you. There is the option of conducting your dissertation as part of a placement with an appropriate organisation or group.

You will plan, present and design a dissertation proposal in tutorial groups, with a detailed, step-by-step web-based guide available for extra support. This will help you develop an idea for a research project, work out what is possible, which methods to use, and begin to plan it. You will have opportunities to get feedback from other students and your supervisor during regular meetings. After carrying out your own data collection and analysis, you will then write it up as a dissertation.

In the 21st century, environmental crises are being urgently addressed by social sciences as much as they are by the physical sciences. However, these crises are still largely framed as human problems, with human solutions, notably with an emphasis on conservation and biodiversity focusses on the cultural and environmental impacts of extinction for humans. This module introduces students to the idea of “more-than-human” theory that centres animals as agents and subjects in social research - and in society more broadly. Animals have always been a part of society; as companions, workers, food, and entertainment.

This module explores core socio-environmental ideas and analyses the ways in which social thought can be productively extended through the inclusion of animals within it. The module provides a critique of human-animal relations in society and offers students the opportunity to reflect and consider how they might be different, drawing on case studies from across time and geographies. This module showcases core sociological ideas and recasts them through the lens of the animal. In doing so, it encourages students to expand and further their sociological imaginations to understand and critique the relationship between animals, environment, and society. Using more familiar ideas, such as capitalism, power, labour, and decolonisation, this module situates animals as part of a web of relations, not disconnected from human conceptions of society, but embedded within them.

While the social sciences haven’t always recognised animals’ place both as part of society, and in shaping it, there has been a surge of interest across sociology and cognate disciplines in animals. Animals have become important and radical subjects in research, expanding the boundaries of what and who counts in the sociological imagination. Yet, they are less often included in the teaching of sociology. This module will bring novel and innovative ideas from critical animal studies and sociology to part two students with the core learning aim of understanding how animals are not just part of society, but actors that produce social, political, and cultural relations.

Each week, the module then takes a species or animal as its starting point into a sociological idea. Indicative topics include animals and social issues, animals and the environment, and animals and power. The module extends methods teaching with the inclusion of local or campus-based field trips.

• What counts as a disaster?
• Is it still reasonable to speak of ‘natural’ or human-made’ disasters?
• Do disasters have a beginning, middle and end?
• Is it possible to make disaster-proof systems?

This module uses case studies of disasters (technical and social) to explore these questions and what sociology can teach us about them.

How do we make sense of the various understanding of being a fan nowadays? How has the experience of being part of a media audience transformed over the decades in different parts of the world? In what ways do fan culture and audience community manifest social transformations in both the local and global scale?

This module aims to provide you with a critical understanding of fandom and audiences in a global and transnational context. You will first be introduced to the contested concepts and typologies of ‘audience’ and ‘fan’ and the cultural hierarchy of knowledge underneath theses definitions. The module will focus on four dimensions – participation, pleasure, performance, and power – by investigating fan culture and audience communities of a wide range of transmedia texts (television, music, film, and other media) in a global perspective. You will analyse the multi-layered dynamics between individual fan, fan community, audience participation, media texts, and the industry through sociological and interdisciplinary lenses, for example, cultural studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies.

This module investigates gender inequalities within society through a focus on historical and contemporary debates in feminist theory and activism. The module has an `intersectional` focus that means we will consider gender inequalities as bound up with other forms of discrimination and marginalisation, particularly racial and ethnic inequalities, disability and social class.

The module will challenge you to think about `what feminism means today` through a consideration of key aspects of feminist thought and activism from the late 1960s onwards. We will consider the continued relevance of the idea of ‘The Personal is Political’ and ‘consciousness raising’. We will overview feminist approaches to social research and explore feminist interventions in practices of gender inequality, for example inequalities in paid and unpaid work, childcare and women’s health. You will complete an intergenerational interview research project on ‘women, work and social change’ through which you will analyse and reflect upon your experience of the research process.

We will also take the feminist manifesto as a central document which expresses lived experiences of gender inequalities and collective desire for social change. Through some practices of inequalities, such as art, beauty contests, capitalism and patriarchy, we will explore the contemporary resonance of ideas such as black feminisms, art activism, the occupy movement and backlash.

By the end of the module you will have been given the opportunity to become familiar with some of the key debates within feminism today. We aim for you to be able to make connections between feminist theory and forms of feminist practice. The module engages you in debate, original research and feminist activism through analysis of varied media including academic texts, advertising, art, film, news media and social media.

Does food work as a cultural medium, through which we communicate and exchange meaning? What is considered edible in different contexts and at different points in history? What is ‘food poverty’ and how has it been constructed and represented in public and political debate? Why does the idea of the ‘family meal’ have cultural and moral significance? How is fast-food transforming cuisine and culture and our wider social world?

Food is so much more than ‘just’ fuel for the body - it is deeply symbolic, shaped by historical, social and cultural forces, our access to it marked economics and geography, and the ways that we shop for, prepare and eat stamped with our biography, ethnicity, social class and region. Curiosity about food cultures and the social meanings and significance of food have been foundational to cultural studies, sociology, anthropology and across the arts and social sciences. The recent explosion of food media demonstrates how food and eating works as a central medium through which we construct and communicate identity and create connections with others.

In particular the moral significance of food has sharpened in a climate of inequality where some experience food poverty and some pursue gastronomic pleasures as a marker of social mobility, consumer competence and (of course) good taste. We might argue, along with many scholars and researchers working in ‘critical food studies’, that how we prepare and eat food works to both summon memories and fasten us to heritage. We might also consider how food works to organise (in)justice and (in)equality, and the range of activist interventions and projects which seek to re-imagine more equitable and sustainable food systems.

Topics we will explore in this module might include:

• Good to eat/good to think with
• Foodie Culture
• Food Studio
• Industrial Food Complex
• Food (in)Equalities and Food (in)Justice
• Time and Technoscience
• Eating Well and Future Food

Fieldtrips may be part of the module, depending on availability of sites and partner guides - these will be guided visits to ‘food sites’ which will illuminate some of the topics we explore in the classroom

Belonging to a nation is widely seen to be as natural as belonging to a family or a home. This module will explore how such assumptions about national belonging come about by introducing students to a range of theoretical approaches and debates.

You will explore how notions of belonging are socially constructed, how the nation is defined, who belongs and who doesn’t. The module addresses these notions by examining what everyday practices, discourses and representations reveal about the ways people think about, and inhabit, the nation. The module also pays particular attention to nation formation in relation to debates about multiculturalism, diversity and migration and asks: What are the impacts of migration and multiculturalism on definitions of the nation? How is multiculturalism defined and perceived?

Although focus will be on the example of Britain, the issues raised will be of interest to all students concerned with the effects of nationalisms and ideas of belonging and entitlement, which many countries of the contemporary world are presently debating in the context of the 'Age of migration' (Castles and Miller 1998).

This module introduces and explores the writings of a number of key twentieth-century social and cultural theorists, and radical thinkers offering perceptive and provocative critiques of some of the many ills of modern western capitalist society, such as alienation, reification and domination; environmental exploitation, pollution and the destruction of nature; media supersaturation, cultural commodification and ideological manipulation; technocracy, instrumentalism and ‘scientism’; violence, genocide and the perpetual threat of nuclear extermination.

This module provides an opportunity for you to engage with perspectives in the social sciences that interrogate our common and comfortable assumptions about the supposedly benign and beneficent character of contemporary capitalism, scientific development, technological innovation, and affluent consumer lifestyles. In so doing, the very concepts of historical enlightenment, progress and civilisation are called into question.

This module considers not only how to interpret the world in various ways, but also how to change it.

This module will provide a critical survey of the literature on the far right and its main theories and debates, as well as discussing how major sociological theories and concepts can apply to the topic such as; an overview of movement types and sub-types; an overview of the main concepts (far-right, fascism, populism, racism, white supremacy); and a historical and comparative analysis of the far right in different contexts in Europe, North America and the Global South.

Specific topics and issues which the module will cover include: far right electoral parties and policy; the concept of the lone actor digital/online far right activism and radicalisation; the relationship between the far right and the mainstream; populism and the white working class left behind media representation and platforming; far-right street protest; far right subcultures and ecosystems; the role of historical racism and fascism on our understanding of the far right; the relationship between systemic racism and right-wing extremism; terrorism and racist violence; and counter-extremism, counter-terrorism and criminal justice approaches to dealing with the far right. The module will also examine anti-racist, anti-fascist, decolonial and intersectional approaches to understanding and opposing the far right, and how they differ from and challenge conventional state security and prevention approaches.

This module will explore how the politically powerful and the politically radical use the internet to consolidate and revolutionise the distribution of power around the globe.

Like many communication platforms before it, the internet is mobilised by the politically and economically powerful as well as those seeking radical change. However, unlike other platforms, it has created an almost universally accessible platform for public dialogue. Pro-democracy revolutionaries, freedom hackers, feminist mediasmiths, anti-capitalists, data leakers, and others use the internet to organise their social movements. Conversely, those opposed to the liberal project, such as authoritarians and extremist groups, also use the affordances of the internet to distribute their message and rally their supporters.

This module examines these issues and investigates the implications of “big data” control by governments and corporations. The module looks also at the understanding social networkers and other content uploaders have of this “big data” control along with the consequences that it comes with.

This module addresses contemporary debates in sociology and cinema by focusing on a single film each week. Its overall aim is to employ cinema for the purpose of social diagnosis.

The module engages with cinema as a social fact, before linking together cinema (producing images of the social) and sociality (socialisation of the image) for analysis.

This module analyses the relationship between society and terror, taking point of departure in the discussion of 9/11 and the political responses it has provoked. The module focuses on how different forms of terror are related to the changing nature of society and how terror can be theorized from a sociological point of view. It also explores how the study of terror can contribute to the discipline of sociology. An example of concepts covered are: terror, the war against terrorism, dispositif, nihilism, flow, consumerism, post-politics, politics of security.

This is a course about social welfare in Britain, its past, present and futures. At a time when the machinery of the welfare state is being reformed in very profound ways, and the future of key elements of the welfare state (such as elder care and the NHS) hang in the balance, the questions of what welfare is, what it is for, who it is for, and how it should be funded and delivered have never been more urgent.

This course will examine the social and political debates which shaped the birth of the British welfare state and trace its subsequent development over more than sixty years. We will explore how the British welfare state was imagined by its original architects as a cradle to grave safety-net for citizens - a welfare commons of shared risks which would ameliorate the excesses of economic and social hardship in the post-war period. We will consider how the welfare state was funded and whether it created a new kind of social contract between citizens and government, and also consider the ways in which the welfare state was a moral and disciplinary project, grounded in distinctions between deserving and underserving people.