Component

MA Public Opinion and Political Behaviour
BA Media and Digital Culture options

Final Year, Component 04

SC362-6-SP and/or SC306-6-AU, LT399-6-AU or Sociology, Media or outside option(s) from list
BE947-6-FY
Democracy in Action
(30 CREDITS)
CS300-6-SP
Community Engagement: Group Projects
(15 CREDITS)

This module offers final year students a unique opportunity to work together in an interdisciplinary team on a real-world project for a local partner organisation. It enables you to use the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired during your degree to address a real-world challenge, while sharing and developing your creative, organisational and practical abilities. By doing so, this module will prepare you for entering the graduate labour market or going on to post-graduate study.

LG364-6-SP
Forensic Linguistics
(15 CREDITS)

Forensic Linguistics explores the ways in which linguistics intersects with public life. Topics include how linguistic knowledge is used in legal settings, such as analysing courtroom discourse, determining authenticity, or using linguistic analysis to determine a person's country of origin, a person's identity, or the authorship of a text. This module may also cover how linguistic discrimination effects individuals, and the legal rights granted to specific languages and language users, and how important information is communicated to minority language users.

LT399-6-AU
Video Game Theory
(15 CREDITS)

This module aims to consider the significance, history, culture and impact of video games. It fosters critical thinking by inviting students to consider issues central to the historical, theoretical and aesthetical dimensions of computer games and computer game theory. In this digital age of Web 2.0 gaming and interactive media is ubiquitous and consistently redefines our relationship to games and other external players. Gaming is constantly evolving, and as new consoles emerge other platforms and experiences of gaming become obsolete. How do we keep up with this constant change and where does this leave older games and players? Why is gaming and rule-based environments significant to culture? – chess for example dates back to the 15th century and is still widely enjoyed today, reformed in gaming apps bringing together global players to a rule-based environment played out on a screen. This module explores different historical and contemporary ideas of gaming from debates about interactive fiction and storytelling to phenomenological ideas of the game’s controller and avatar and how they extend players into virtual spaces. It will consider a range of topics including: gender, ethnicity, violence, capital, contemporary art, while turning a critical eye inwards to discussions on ludology, immersion, procedural rhetoric, cyber-individualism, embodiment, avatars and ludonarrative dissonance. Through a close consideration of video game theory, students will reflect on how gaming has evolved to become an even larger industry than that of film.

PA208-6-AU
Freud: Mind, Culture and Society
(15 CREDITS)

What do you know about depth psychology? How do psychoanalysis and analytical psychology provide new understanding of society, culture and politics? Build your knowledge about depth psychology - psychological thinking that introduces the concept of a deep unconscious. Understand Freud’s theories and their significance in social and cultural analysis.

SC301-6-FY
Rethinking Modernity
(30 CREDITS)

How do you understand contemporary society? What role do key topics like modernity, post-modernity, feminism and capitalism play? And what do contemporary theorists like Foucault and Bourdieu say? Learn why philosophical knowledge is vital for sociological understanding, while deepening your own awareness of the subject.

SC302-6-SP
Crimes of the Powerful
(15 CREDITS)

In the popular imagination and, to a large degree, in criminology itself, crime is associated with the poor and powerless. However, it is clear that the most serious and harmful crimes are actually committed by apparently legitimate states, corporations and the political economies that they support. These crimes include torture, mass murder and rape of civilians, as well as large-scale financial crimes committed and facilitated by global corporations and financial institutions, and the destruction of the planet. This module will examine these crimes of the powerful, focusing specifically on organisations, their extraordinary power in the contemporary world, and their relative immunity to sanction.

SC304-6-FY
Globalisation and Crime
(30 CREDITS)

What effect does globalisation have on crime and justice? How do we deal with global crime issues, like terrorism or illegal migration? Can we prevent large-scale crime, such as genocide? Study the changing nature of criminology, looking at contemporary developments, alongside the problem of balancing human rights with human security.

SC304-6-SP
Globalisation and Crime
(15 CREDITS)

What effect does globalisation have on crime and justice? How do we deal with global crime issues, like terrorism or illegal migration? Can we prevent large-scale crime, such as genocide? Study the changing nature of criminology, looking at contemporary developments, alongside the problem of balancing human rights with human security.

SC306-6-AU
Crime, Media and Culture
(15 CREDITS)

In this module, we want to enable you to critically assess contemporary thinking and research on the relationships between crime, media and culture. These relationships have long been the subject of intense debate and this option offers an account of crime stories in the media that is more interested in their social character: the ways they are produced, circulated and read. In doing so it will also move beyond their symbolic meaning – by emphasising the work such stories perform in the wider social order, how they alter over time, shape political processes and clarify moral boundaries.

SC308-6-SP
Race, Ethnicity and Migration
(15 CREDITS)

This module provides an introduction to theoretical, historical and contemporary debates around race, ethnicity and migration. It will engage you with substantive topics but will also practically illustrate the inner workings of research in the field through a practical ‘Getting a feel for research’ embedded in the module design. We focus on the deep implications that these notions carry for thinking about identity, culture, and social hierarchy; but also for studying ethnic tensions, prejudice and political mobilization.

SC311-6-SP
Childhood Innocence and Deviance
(15 CREDITS)

Discover how questions of childhood and youth have driven wider debates in criminology and sociology. Ask why, how, and with what, effects children and young people have been constructed as subjects with rights, relational citizens with needs, offenders to be reformed or punished, and victims to be protected. Explore children and young people’s experiences of (il)legal youth cultures, systems of youth justice, education, child protection, family intervention and other efforts to counter social exclusion.

SC326-6-AU
Psychiatry and Mental Illness
(15 CREDITS)

How has the concept of mental health been developed by psychiatrists? What role do genetic, psychological, social and cultural factors play in causing mental illness? How has mental health treatment developed? Critically examine mental illness, psychiatric thinking and practice, and mental health services, using real-life examples in your debates.

SC340-6-FY
The Current Issues in Social Science
(30 CREDITS)

This module gives students an opportunity to apply social science to address key issues facing society at the local, national and global level. For example, what is the impact of the war in Yemen or in Syria? What is the impact of Brexit? How does global warming affect us? What are the major challenges in the 21st century? This module will tackle a different theme each term to better understand how Social Science can be used to understand the big issues.

SC361-6-AU
American Society: Ethnic Encounters in the Making of the USA
(15 CREDITS)

What is it to be an American Indian today? Has the slavery legacy contributed to contemporary debates on criminal justice? What are the politics for a Latino presence? Examine social, political and economic encounters between European settlers, American Indians, African-Americans and Latinos that shaped the USA, from colonisation to today.

SC361-6-FY
American Society: Ethnic Encounters in the Making of the USA
(30 CREDITS)

What is it to be an American Indian today? Has the slavery legacy contributed to contemporary debates on criminal justice? What are the politics for a Latino presence? Examine social, political and economic encounters between European settlers, American Indians, African-Americans and Latinos that shaped the USA, from colonisation to today.

SC361-6-SP
American Society: Ethnic Encounters in the Making of the USA
(15 CREDITS)

What is it to be an American Indian today? Has the slavery legacy contributed to contemporary debates on criminal justice? What are the politics for a Latino presence? Examine social, political and economic encounters between European settlers, American Indians, African-Americans and Latinos that shaped the USA, from colonisation to today.

SC362-6-SP
Visual Cultures: the Social Meanings of Photography and Art
(15 CREDITS)

This module examines how photography and other forms of visual art provide meanings and interpretations of societies.

SC364-6-AU
Mass Media and Modern Life
(15 CREDITS)

What impact has the printed press had on our social and cultural life? What about radio, cinema, TV and recorded music? And how important is all this in the light of new technological advancements? Examine the development of our mass media culture, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

SC364-6-FY
Mass Media and Modern Life
(30 CREDITS)

What impact has the printed press had on our social and cultural life? What about radio, cinema, TV and recorded music? And how important is all this in the light of new technological advancements? Examine the development of our mass media culture, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

SC364-6-SP
Mass Media and Modern Life
(15 CREDITS)

What impact has the printed press had on our social and cultural life? What about radio, cinema, TV and recorded music? And how important is all this in the light of new technological advancements? Examine the development of our mass media culture, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

SC382-6-AU
Crime, Policy and Social Justice
(15 CREDITS)

Should criminal justice systems only manage offenders and victims? What wider role could they play in securing social justice? Explore the history of criminal justice and examine key theories within an international dimension. Find out how our current criminal justice policies are framed, funded and fought out.

SC385-6-AU
Modelling Crime and Society
(15 CREDITS)

The first term of the module begins with simple OLS regression and provides a framework for modelling strategy and variable selection. Students are then taken through extensions to the basic OLS model, with categorical predictors, interactions and non-linear terms. Next, we introduce models for categorical outcomes: binary logistic and multinomial logit. The term concludes with a discussion of practical topics in data analysis - how to deal with complex sample designs, weighting and non-response adjustments.

SC385-6-FY
Modelling Crime and Society
(30 CREDITS)

The first term of the module begins with simple OLS regression and provides a framework for modelling strategy and variable selection. Students are then taken through extensions to the basic OLS model, with categorical predictors, interactions and non-linear terms. Next, we introduce models for categorical outcomes: binary logistic and multinomial logit. The term concludes with a discussion of practical topics in data analysis - how to deal with complex sample designs, weighting and non-response adjustments.

SC387-6-AU
The Age of Trauma
(15 CREDITS)

What is ‘trauma’ and how is its history connected to that of war in the modern age? How have stories of trauma become a feature of contemporary society, and why? This module traces the history of trauma in the age of ‘total war’, from the two World Wars, through the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan conflicts, to the present, linking the history and sociology of medicine to the cultural and social history of modern warfare.

SC387-6-FY
The Age of Trauma
(30 CREDITS)

What is ‘trauma’ and how is its history connected to that of war in the modern age? How have stories of trauma become a feature of contemporary society, and why? This module traces the history of trauma in the age of ‘total war’, from the two World Wars, through the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan conflicts, to the present, linking the history and sociology of medicine to the cultural and social history of modern warfare.

SC387-6-SP
The Age of Trauma
(15 CREDITS)

What is ‘trauma’ and how is its history connected to that of war in the modern age? How have stories of trauma become a feature of contemporary society, and why? This module traces the history of trauma in the age of ‘total war’, from the two World Wars, through the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan conflicts, to the present, linking the history and sociology of medicine to the cultural and social history of modern warfare.

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