MA Ecology, Culture & Society

Amidst runaway climate change, mass extinction, and radical ecological transformations, we're living through profoundly unsettling times. What conceptual resources and proposals does classical and contemporary social theory offer us to think through these changing climates? This module will introduce students to key contemporary debates and theoretical interventions in the broad fields of environmental humanities and socio-ecological studies.

Drawing on key authors and debates in philosophy, environmental history, literary studies, animal studies, social and cultural theory, and postcolonial and indigenous studies, the module will critically appraise key theoretical concepts and debates on questions of global climate change, the “Anthropocene”, extinction, environmental justice, more-than-human politics, and decolonial and indigenous practices.

It will do so by considering the scientific evidence on climate change and other events of ecological devastation, and by developing an expanded understanding of “ecology” that connects our changing climates to wider issues of culture, politics, society and technology. Asking how we can develop new modes of thought that can address and transform our changing climates, this module will explore what theories, concepts, and perspectives we may need to begin the task of thinking ecologically today. In so doing, it will provide students with key critical, analytical and transferable skills with which to understand, analyse and respond to contemporary global socio-ecological challenges.

How can ecological perspectives be developed without an understanding of animals, and of the forces that shape animal-human relations? In recent decades, significant work in Animal Studies (in the social sciences and humanities) and in the animal sciences (for example in biology, psychology, neuroscience and ethology) have fundamentally transformed conceptions of animals. Researchers have illustrated that language, tool use, the inheritance of culture, etc. are no longer legitimate markers of a human/animal divide and, moreover, are investigating topics from which animals have traditionally been excluded: animal cognition, rationality, awareness of time and of death, emotions, intentionality, justice.

These developments demand a reassessment of how evolutionary, ecological, social, and individual relations between humans and animals are conceived of in philosophy and science, and how they are shared, ethically and politically, in practice. What are their implications for understandings of domestication? Of animal political subjectivity? Of animal labour? Is it even possible, today, to think in terms of 'species’? And what finally are the practical consequences for social science research with (or indeed excluding) animals? The module draws on a wide disciplinary range of emerging theoretical and methodological work on animals. Together, this scholarship takes debates about humans and animals far beyond any preoccupation with the effects of humans on animals.

In what ways is ecology entangled with cultural and cosmological differences? How might we cultivate arts of living and dying well with others on an ecologically troubled planet? This module will introduce you to key questions, perspectives and debates on the relationships between ecology, philosophy and cultural difference: it asks what it means to ecologise our modes of thought, and to pluralise our ecological imaginations, in ways that may teach us something about how to live and die well with others in changing climates. Weaving together philosophy, ecological humanities, cultural anthropology, animal studies, social and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies, the module will critically appraise key theoretical debates on questions of global climate change, cultural and religious difference, ecological pluralism, more-than-human politics, and the decolonisation of environmental thought. It will do so by exploring a range of conceptual issues and situated case-studies from across the Global South and North that challenge our most basic assumptions, question our values, and raise profound philosophical and ecological questions about the relations between humans and other-than-humans, knowledge and faith, concepts and stories, nature and culture, as well as living and dying. Asking how other collectives can transform our own ecologies of thinking and living, this module will explore what concepts, stories, and sensibilities we may need to foster plural ways of inhabiting the Earth today.

This series of workshops accompanies students' placement in an organisation or grassroots activist network. We will discuss students' diaries in the context of broader debates about ecology on the one hand, and about professional practice, organizations and activism on the other hand. A placement in an organization whose work can be related to ecological issues or practical involvement in a grassroots campaign is an entry requirement of this module.

While viral and bacterial communicable infections are political in the sense that their socio-ecological consequences have much to do with the regulatory modes of governance, including conceptions of the individual and notions of rights and responsibilities, they are also small ‘p’ political due to the participatory and plural possibilities of bodies engaged in microbial negotiation. You'll be required to interrogate the assumptions underpinning natural science conceptions of infection, treatment and prevention by asking: What can infection teach us about infectious thought, modes of classificatory thinking, the relationship between the natural and social sciences and conceptions of the body?

Drawing on critical social science studies of global and national policies and programmes, historical narratives including those of bubonic plague along with contemporary patient/activist responses to modes of treatment and prevention, you'll have the opportunity to become proficient in different styles of sociological analysis relevant to notions of health and disease. The programme of study will include experimentation with an imagined infection ‘outbreak’ in order to critically evaluate the challenges and possibilities of different modes of intervention.

In this module, you'll be expected to build on your growing understanding of media and materials in terms of sociological research projects by addressing a common course theme. You'll be encouraged to think about the appropriateness of different kinds of visual and sensory materials when addressing sociological questions, conducting research projects, and presenting their outcomes in relation to this theme in an exhibition, which takes place in the last week of term.

We'll explore the theme “above and below”, which is both understood as a prime metaphorical logic of organising societies (“upper class”, “social ladder”, “the global north and south”, “looking down on someone”, imagining God and Angels as being above etc.) as well as a crucial practice of organizing society, i.e. being buried, dwelling in bunkers, boring holes for tunnels, the practice of archaeology, oceanography, extraction mining, mountaineering, diving, flying, drones, living in penthouses and skyscrapers and so on. And we also want to ask how these metaphorical organising principles relate to the actual practices and what happens if we subvert them. What if God were imagined to exist down below, and living underground were considered a luxury?  

This course begins with presentations of the topic “above and below” in relation to sociological and historical debates as well as issues of representation. In your own experiments, you might begin by posing the question: what does it mean to attempt to represent issues of above and below? What might escape or exceed different visual or sensory forms? Which media is best suited to your initial explorations?

In every century over the last millennium, Cities have been a crucial node within the networks of commerce and cultural exchange that spanned the world. In the 21st century, Cities remain a site of intense activity, sat atop innumerable junctions of capital, migration, culture and commodities. As such Cities such as London present the ideal focal point for developing an understanding of the pressing questions facing cities today and into the future. However, while it is important to understand the long history of, for example, London’s place within global networks of exchange and power, it is also impossible to ignore the extent to which, in recent years, forces that shape the contemporary city are visibly shifting. That is, the roads that meet at the city’s junction are arriving from new destinations, carrying new opportunities and risks. Accordingly, this course seeks to understand how cities such as London are being re-made amidst the re-wiring of global circuitry.  

Focusing on specific examples – drawn from the Centre for Urban and Community Research’s activity across London and beyond – you'll explore the impact of new technologies, markets, mutations in governing ideologies, novel patterns of mobility and new technologies of surveillance on the city and its inhabitants. Beyond understanding how these developments impact on the city, the module aims to develop an understanding of cities such as London through its relatedness to other urban locations, situating London’s connectedness to elsewhere as integral to the ways in which the city is being re-made. As much as this is a module about rethinking the city, it is also about rethinking cities around the world, each increasingly interconnected with the rest, but with its own particularities bequeathed by ecology, culture and history. 

One of the most intractable debates in human rights is the relationship between claims of universalism, and the diversity of cultures and cultural values around the globe. At the same time, it is often around issues of gender and sexuality that the conflict between culture and rights seems to be most aggressively asserted. Why is this the case?

This module examines the points at which debates about gender, culture and rights intersect, and situates these debates in historical, social and political contexts. How do legacies of imperialism and anti-imperialism impact on this issue? What role do contemporary geopolitics play? How is culture deployed, when and by whom? What are the assumptions underlying the rights discourses that facilitate this opposition? Are rights truly universal? Is gender? Is culture fixed? And how do constructions of gender and culture interact with other social, political, and economic factors?

Contemporary sociological thinking emerges from a rich and complex history of attempts to understand the patterns and dynamics of social life. This module will invite you to consider particular moments and relations within this history as an introduction to the sociological imagination today. We will consider key trajectories to show how current debates both continue and challenge lines of thought that have engaged sociologists. We will see how core theoretical questions of social reproduction, inequalities, subjectivity, truth, knowledge and belief systems and more have remained within the scope of sociology’s explorations while new developments have created the richness of themes and approaches that now live under the umbrella of the discipline. 

Thinking Sociologically will enable you to study core themes of sociology in-depth at an advanced level and encourage you to develop your faculties for thinking critically and sociologically.  You'll learn through close reading and discussion of key writings, and written assessment involving close textual analysis.  The module will be team-taught, with lecturers taking two weeks each to discuss particular sociological themes as represented in a classical and a related contemporary text.  The texts will be treated in-depth in seminar discussion and assessed by detailed comparison in written work.

This course explores key debates concerning politics, identity and law.  How does law construct 'identity'? What is the relationship between legal and social identity?  What are the different critical approaches to law and identity?  How do we understand the politics of law and justice?  This course explores these questions by examining key theories of identity and law, from critical race feminism to deconstruction.  These theoretical debates are explored through contemporary case studies, such as sexual assauly; refugee rights; human rights; terrorism and international crimes.