Sociology modules

This course is the core course for the MA Critical & Creative Analysis programme. It aims to provide a detailed, intensive introduction to some of the key thinkers who have been influential on the development of cultural theory and analysis. It is necessarily selective, with an emphasis on 20th century European thought, but has its focus on the different cultural critiques and critical cultures that have emerged through different perspectives. Through lectures and group discussions, we will explore the interventions of Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Alexander, Stengers, Haraway and Serres, among others. The course will appeal to students who wish to spend time deepening their appreciation of theoretical interventions, and who enjoy discussing the implications of theoretical analysis for both sociological research and political critique.

Module convenor: Martin Savransky

This course introduces concepts you will need to study human rights, beginning with ‘social construction’.  From there we will begin to think about the political, social and cultural forms in which constructions of human rights are developed, gain credibility, and are (usually partially and often controversially) institutionalised.  In particular we will look at how human rights are constructed ‘culturally’ through processes of (generally mediated) framing.  ‘Cultural’ here encompasses the legal framing of human rights, but we will look at how human rights are constructed in a variety of forms, organisational, institutional, and artistic.

This module addresses significant issues in the contemporary organisation of urban landscapes, urban life and connections between cities as well as the interface between human and architectural fabric. Drawing on specific empirical examples in based in China, Hong Kong, the US, London and parts of mainland Europe this module examines key debates in urban sociology and research. There is a strong focus on visual apprehension of cities and ways of accessing and researching cities through photography. The following sessions have been offered in previous years: 

• A tour of 'urban theory' from the Chicago School to the present day. This sets up the conceptual basis for the session following which, although empirically focused on specific cities, illuminate different conceptual frameworks for understanding urbanism.
• Whose City? This examines debates concerned with the social production of space and rights to the city. An examination of ghetto urbanism in the US through Wacquant, Bourdieu, Bourgeois and the research through which this kind of urban knowledge is generated.
• Pastness and Urban Landscape. This examines discrepant and linear notions of time/interpretations of pastness, collective memory, and how pasts are inscribed within urban landscapes. We will draw mainly on visually-led investigation of Hong Kong and London to explore these themes.
• Post-Colonial Cities. This session examines the intersections between globalisation and colonialism in Hong Kong and in the lives of ‘skilled’ migrants from the global North. It makes extensive use of photographic narratives of Hong Kong as an iconic city landscape and the use of environmental portraiture to capture migrants’ relationships to the city.
• Globalisation, Migration and Urban Life. Drawing on visual empirical research on mosques and African churches in London this session examines the impact of recent and current migration on commerce, religion and city landscape. It sets this in broader debates about globalisation and cities developed from the previous session.
• Material Cultures and Multiple Globalisations. This session draws on some of the more ordinary trajectories of commodities and collaborations composing the global world through small trade between China/Hong Kong and Africa, and Europe and Africa. 
• Mega-Cities and Non-City Zones. This session is set in China. It examines architecture, the generic city, land speculation and the dynamics between mega-cities and economic and technical development zones through some of the lives that are lived in them.
• Urban Regeneration. This session examines the politics, debates, conceptualisation and social divisions generated and sustained in urban renewal projects. Who benefits from these projects? How do they reconstruct cities? We will draw specifically on Olympic-related redevelopments in Athens, London, and Beijing.
• Architectural and Planning Politics. This session examines ways in which political and military decisions are embedded in architecture and planning. It draws on Weizman’s Hollow Land and asks questions about whether this involves a radical re-conceptualisation of space.
• Mobilities. This session is concerned with movement and routes as well as the infrastructure and technologies of mobility such as bridges, roads, airports, stations, tunnels, trains, motor transport, and shipping. It asks critical questions about whether these approaches to space generate information about social morphology or social life more generally.

Convener: Dr Emma Jackson

This module provides an advanced understanding of the relationships between theory, concept and methods in social research. It does this by situating the methods taught and practised in the course in relation to relevant debates in epistemology and ontology and providing the sociological contexts and issues in which theory and methods are presented by specialist researchers. With a focus on research design, it provides advanced training in identifying and combining appropriate research strategies for specific social contexts and in the formulation of research aims. This course will equip you to evaluate current social research and sociological scholarship and to formulate social research for yourself. 

The advanced training provided by this course is exemplified by:


• Practical training in research design and practice
• Workshop exercises to evaluate current social research and sociological scholarship
• Methods of assessment based on demonstrated capacity to apply research skills

Throughout this course, we teach and reward students' work which shows the ability to apply a range of skills in defining a research problem, choosing an appropriate methodology and responding to critical theoretical, ethical and political issues. 

Module convenor: Les Back

*This module is open as an option to MA students from all programmes convened by the Department of Sociology

This module examines the theoretical and practical relationships between urban photography and urban ethnography focusing on city environments. Through a series of interconnected lectures and seminars, the module asks questions about the nature of ‘sociological seeing’, of the relationship between walking and urban detouring, on object-hood, ‘thing-ness’ and materiality, on how the city is both imagined and imaged, and on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Students will be expected to read widely on the subject both from sociological and visual textual sources, and to actively relate learning to image-making processes and outcomes.

This 5-week MA module focuses on ‘sociology-in-the-making’, examining the processes of social research rather than its products. It follows the ‘empirical cycle’, providing an overview of key formative moments of sociological research, from formulating research questions, to producing and analysing data, to the public presentation of results.

It pays specific attention to how sociology may be transformed in the age of visual, digital and other empirical technologies, and examines the ‘doubling of social research’: partly as a consequence of the proliferation of social research tools and practices across social life, key empirical tasks of social research now refer both to social practices ‘out there’ as well as to our own work as social researchers.

The module also examines the the techniques, objects and settings in and with which social research is performed, both in and outside the academy.

Convener: Nina Wakeford

Visual sociology has taught sociology that text is not the only medium. This module introduces you to the problems of visuality and representation in sociology, beginning with classical debates in visual sociology, but including more recent debates surrounding the notions of media and methods to discuss how sociology can represent the social. The module will introduce you to the complexity of decisions to be taken in inventive sociology once the primacy of text is relinquished.

The module has two aims: first to introduce you to key fields of visual and inventive sociology, and second to key problems of doing inventive sociology. We discuss the cooperation of sociologists with other specialists, such as photographers or videographers, the relationship between self-representations of research subjects and those of the sociologist, the problem of representing objects which are not visual or textual in nature, combining different media, and how to address specific audiences.

Convener: Nina Wakeford

Contemporary readings of urbanity stress the manifold unfolding’s of city environments. Pushing beyond geographical territories, urbanity requires us to work across different ideas of time and space and apprehend these from the perspective of ongoing process and change. Urbanities give rise to differential forms of practice – we engage cities and their infrastructures, institutions, governances, capitals and cultures in diverse and irreducible ways.  Given the dynamic relations that make up the urban and the people that inhabit and move through it, how do we begin to explore and comprehend questions of city life and our interventions in it?

This course investigates and experiments with a series of methods that can be employed to think about the urban. To engage the complex questions of the urban we require creative sociological methods through which we can observe, make sense of and analyse what we experience without fixing it in place. This course takes as its foundation artistic and sensorial innovations in the social sciences. It groups these over five weeks through themes of Observing, Listening, Assembling, Writing and Intervening. Such methodological innovations allow us to think about the urban in ways that engage multiplicitous publics, voices and forms of participation and practice. Drawing from interdisciplinary developments in visual, sonic and sensory sociologies, this course brings together theoretical literature with practical application and critical reflection.

In nearly every century over the last millennium, London has been a crucial node within the networks of commerce and cultural exchange that spanned the world. In the 21st century , London remains a site of intense activity, sat atop innumerable junctions of capital, migration, culture and commodities. As such London presents 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 London’s place within global networks of power and exchange, 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 for the city and precipitating new developments.  Accordingly, this course seeks to understand how London is 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 – the module illuminates 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 London the module aims to develop an understanding of 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.

Module Convener: Alex Rhys-Taylor

TCMII provides general training in the practice of social research and advanced understanding to the sociological issues and debates focussed on the practice of social research. Building on the knowledge and experience developed in TCMI, it provides a practical, workshop-based training in the use of a range of qualitative research methods, and in the handling and analysis of the data they generate. This course will equip you to conduct and analyse social research for yourself.

Module Convenor: Les Back

* only open as an option to MA Social Research students and MRES Sociology students

* only open as an option for students who have studied Through the Lens A

This module focuses on the relationship between urban spaces and identities. You will examine how sociological, psychological and anthropological theories of self relate to notions of culture, community, personal space and identity. The module will reference theoretical and critical sources exploring and questioning notions of selfhood and collective identity constructions such as gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, aging and other  cultural formulations, in relation to photographic image-making. You are encouraged to relate the theoretical readings, lectures and seminar discussions to ongoing visual and urban research practices, and where appropriate, to provide a critical framework for your own image-making.

Convener: Paul Halliday

This module will focus on a series of conversations with international photographers and artists whose visual projects relate to a critical examination of urban spaces. The speakers will reflect a wide range of practices, including landscape, portraiture, community, and other forms that relate to the developing field of urban photography and visual urbanism. The main aim of this module is to explore and reflect critically on how urban photographic practices speak to sociological, geographic and cultural debates about the nature of contemporary urban life.

You are encouraged to familiarise yourself with the speakers’ visual projects prior to the presentations, and to use the opportunity of discussing your work within the context of critical urbanism and sociological debate. You will select a photographer presenting during the module, or, with the agreement of the module convenor, another relevant photographer/artist, and then write a short essay reflecting on a project or wider oeuvre pertaining to that particular visual author.

Assessment: 2, 500 word essay focusing on either one of the photographer’s work in relation to core sociological and urban research issues, or select a relevant urban photographer/artist working in a related area as the subject for the module essay.

Convener: Paul Halliday

In this course, you will be expected to build on your understanding of media and materials in terms of sociological research projects by addressing a particular research theme. You will respond to a theme to create a visual, sensory or experimental object or media.

The course asks you to think about the appropriateness of different kinds of visual and sensory materials when addressing sociological questions, conducting research projects, and presenting their outcomes. It combines lectures and seminars with presentation and feedback workshops at which each student is expected to present their work-in-progress. The course has a practice-based outcome, and will finish with an exhibition/public event at which student work will be shown.

Convener: Michael Guggenheim

The Centre for Feminist Research and the Methods Lab are offering an intensive hands-on four day workshop to understand as well as enact feminist research methods. A student-centred collaborative learning environment will deliver an interactive method of learning and exchange led by specialists in the field. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary approach this module facilitates multi-methods.

Taught by feminist researchers sessions consist of lectures, field visits, small group work and peer feedback sessions. Ethnography, statistics, maps, walks, film, experiments, interviews, audio, documents, narrative, architectural encounters and exhibitions will all feature across the period of exchange. A series of case studies will offer students the opportunity to explore the developments of feminist methods, within an inter-disciplinary critical and practice-based approach. The assessment consolidates both the creative and theoretical aspects of this multi-disciplinary module.

Recent work in Animal Studies (in the social sciences and humanities) and in animal science (the biological sciences), has far-reaching implications for how we understand the shared social world of humans and animals, as well as how we investigate it. This module explores the new interdisciplinary forms of critical analysis are required to address animal/human relations in the 21st century; What new methodologies and methods are being pressed into service by recent, changing, conceptions of animals; and how the study of animals today challenges the very foundation of the sociological tradition, when it is conceived of as a human/humanist project.

This module draws on a wide range of emerging theoretical and methodological work on animals in the social sciences and humanities. It also requires students to understand some of the implications of recent developments in the animals sciences, as these have been taken up and developed especially by philosophers of science.

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?

This course is intended to take a selective route through 20th and 21st century philosophical reflections on politics & philosophies of difference. Indeed, it seeks to locate contemporary debates as part of a longer discussion.

Each year certain key themes are pursued. In 2016-7 we will explore questions of politics and difference through the entangled themes of radical pluralism, relationality, divergence, multiplicity, and becoming.

The course has been designed to critically review the continuing relevance of questions raised by our key thinkers by pairing them with other contemporary writers who either explicitly speak to that thinker or who share the key thinker’s attentions or philosophical imaginary in some way. So each week we will have two set readings, and students are encouraged to read both if possible. In this way it will be possible for students to follow a more overtly theoretical route through the course, or follow a route that stays closer to theoretical controversies as they are played out in contemporary sites or issues.

Some of the philosophers and writers covered this year include: William James, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Edouard Glissant, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Clarice Lispector, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Catherine Keller, among others. Relevant journals include: Public Culture, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Cultural Studies, Cultural Criticism, Cultural Anthropology, Critique, Diacritics, Feminist Theory, Feminist Issues, New Formations, Signs, Theory, Culture & Society, Radical Philosophy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Positions, Angelaki.

Module convenor: Martin Savransky

This option module examines the relations between gender, sexuality and media. It aims to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad range of media, and how they may be resisted, intervened in and created differently. The module considers media in an open sense, understanding it to include practices of mediation, technological processes and modes of production and consumption, as well as particular cultural forms including television, film, music, digital and social media, art and design. It attends to how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving relations with media and technologies, and with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and dis/ability.

The module is taught in a combination of lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops. As well as exploring media through different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, practice-research is embedded in the module, meaning that you will try out different practices of making and analysing media. As examples, these practices might include experimenting with creative writing, blogging, collaging, photography, video, drawing. This work will go towards a portfolio that you will build up over the term.

Course convenor: Rebecca Coleman