Year 1, Component 04

Get valuable real-life experience of the unique holdings at Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA) and contribute to their dissemination at the University. Learn about artworks in ESCALA and how they can be activated in object-based learning sessions with diverse publics.

This module will explore how conflicts over 'heritage' rights are, today more than ever, influencing critical debates over the definition of world, national, and local heritage, as well as universal, community, and individual rights. It will also examine the impact that tensions between communities and universal versus local values have on the management of heritage, and how these tensions might be resolved to allow sustainable growth. We will ask: What is heritage? Who defines it? Who should control its management and preservation? How is the notion of 'heritage' used to unite or otherwise divide communities? What are some of the consequences of the ways different groups appropriate and utilise heritage? Is there a universal right to free access, expression, and preservation of heritage, and if so, how is it expressed? What are the impacts of globalisation on heritage issues? This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

Explore issues ranging from environmental disasters to corporate greed and from executive pay to ethical bottled water. You discover the relationship between management and corporations on the one hand, and society and nature on the other, engaging in debates around ecological sustainability, governance and corporate ethics and responsibility.

This policy-oriented module probes the role and limits of government interventions in the microeconomic management of developed economies. In so doing, the analysis emphasises: (i) examination of the most common market failures and evaluation of options available for government to address them; and (ii) the factors that determine the choice and design of economic and regulatory policies to address these market failures given governments' political objectives. The module then goes on to explore the emergence of government failures and the reasons why the interactions between economics and politics impose constraints on the design of public policies, thereby enabling you to appreciate the associated policy issues and trade-offs.

Study one of the most important contemporary societal and political issues that require urgent policy action: climate change. You consider the state of the natural environment and growing concerns related to the climate crisis. You will also explore environmental and climate policies, regarding how they shape and are shaped by individual attitudes, social movements, institutions, parties and international diplomacy.

This module explores key elements of international environmental politics, the actors, means of cooperation, and its consequences. A lot of emphasis is given to the role of international environmental institutions as major actors of international environmental politics. In addition, we will explore climate change and some of its major consequences in international relations, namely, conflict and migration. The module also offers the opportunity to students to learn how to write a policy brief and a policy report. Such transferrable skills are highly demanded in the job market.

On this module, you approach writing about the natural world through a series of three-week units on subjects such as trees, marshes, coasts, and birds. Each unit will begin with a focus on the local – the wild east of Essex and Suffolk – before moving outwards to larger perspectives. Several of the units will involve field trips led by the writers being studied, which will include such figures as Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

A new genre of literature has been emerging: moving between fiction, history, traveller's tales, and memoir, it explores the spirit of place. This tradition of “psychogeography” has been most vividly taken up and given a new contemporary twist by writers in the eastern stretches of England, in the work of writers such as Ronald Blythe, W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair. This module is concerned with writing on the landscape of this region – the ways the wilder reaches of Essex and Suffolk have been depicted – and allows you to develop your critical and creative writing about place. This module usually involves a walking tour around Colchester where we will have the chance to explore these literary landscapes and experience these worlds for ourselves. Students will incur travel costs of approximately £2.50 for this trip.

This module examines the concepts, theories and models of corporate responsibility and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and their implications and challenges for business law and practice. It examines the role of CSR in as a business strategy and public governance tool in the context of the social and environmental impacts of business activities that suggest interesting dimensions to the role of business in society. In this module you will examine the debates and doctrines of CSR in domestic and transnational environments.The module reflects some degrees of comparative analysis and interdisciplinarity and case study exercises will also enable you to explore the approaches of different disciplines to CSR, including law, management, politics, philosophy, ethics and international relations. You will have an opportunity to discover the strengths and weaknesses of taking global, contextual and comparative approaches to CSR. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

This module will critically assess current research, policies and practices related to current global security challenges, including those relating to human rights, climate change, migration, health, terrorism and the cybersphere.

How has colonialism created human rights problems, now and in the past? And what part did mandates for free markets, industrialism and state sovereignty play? Study thinkers like Cesaire, Fanon, Arendt, Agamben and Taussig. Discuss specific international situations like Palestine, forced removal of Aboriginal children and the war on terror. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.