This module provides a comprehensive introduction to key trends and debates in the sociological study of childhood. It offers students an opportunity to...

This module provides a comprehensive introduction to key trends and debates in the sociological study of childhood. It offers students an opportunity to explore cutting edge research on the diversity of children’s lives across time and place. Drawing on the work of leading scholars in the field, the module will prompt consideration of the contradictions and continuities in ways children are positioned in different contexts. This will enable exploration of adult-child power relations, unequal childhoods, and the intersections of local and global childhoods, children’s rights, and children’s contributions to their social, political and economic worlds. Students will examine a variety of representations of childhood (e.g. in film, advertisements, policy) and their social and political implications. The module will encourage reflection on the significance of sociological understandings of childhood for research, professional practice, and policy.

MODULE OUTLINE

This module further develops a range of transferable professional and clinical skills, knowledge, values and attitudes relevant to speech and...

COURSE OUTLINE

This module addresses a range of transferable professional and clinical skills, knowledge, values and attitudes relevant to speech and language...

The aims of this module are to give the student an understanding of the motives of Russian foreign policy, the forces that shape it, the instruments it uses...

The aims of this module are to give the student an understanding of the motives of Russian foreign policy, the forces that shape it, the instruments it uses and its impact on the world. The module begins by outlining the foreign policy of the USSR up to 1991 and then moves on to examine the foreign policy of the new Russian state as it has developed under Presidents Boris El’tsin, Vladimir Putin, Dmitrii Medvedev and Putin again. We shall consider the interrelationship between increasing domestic authoritarianism and international politics. We shall investigate how Russia, faced with NATO and EU enlargement and American unilateralism, sought to use its new wealth to re-assert itself as a great power, first of all in the former Soviet Union as illustrated by the August 2008 conflict in Georgia; whether the international economic crisis encouraged a re-appraisal; and why Putin has been willing to sacrifice good relations with Western countries in order to annex the Crimea and build the planned ‘Eurasian Union’. Additionally, the module aims to develop the presentational skills of the student, through the assimilation and analysis of the available literature (which is now quite substantial) and the requirements to offer seminar presentations and write essays; and to prepare the student for careers where knowledge of Russian foreign policy will be an asset. The module will draw on a number of disciplines, in particular Political Science, History and Economics.