BA (Hons) Politics

This module introduces you to the comparative approach to politics and government, in addition to building a foundation understanding of the politics and governance of four key members of the European Union: the UK, Germany, Italy and France. The first half of the module is focused on the UK and also considers the EU as an institution, while the second half concentrates on the other three countries at the module’s core. You will not only build an essential foundation for studying the politics of the UK/EU polity in which we live but will also develop their skills in comparative methods.

This module is designed to introduce you to some of the fundamental concepts, theories and ideologies that influence our understanding and evaluation of the political world. The module explores key political concepts such as legitimacy, democracy, liberty, equality and justice by introducing some of the ideas of major political thinkers such as Hobbes, Bentham, Locke, Kant, Marx, J.S. Mill, Rawls and Nozick. The module also introduces students to major political ideologies including liberalism, socialism, conservatism and anarchism.

In this module, subtitled ‘Everything is a Text’, you will consider the value of different types of texts and ways of imparting knowledge and ideas. You will reflect upon your identities as learners and future professionals in the world, considering a range of contexts: the academic/educational context, personal settings and the eco-systems that you live and work in. These reflections will be used to inform your practices as academic learners.

You will explore academic literacies, different ways of knowing and consider what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge. You will engage with critical thinking, making arguments and establishing criteria to defend intellectual positions and these skills will be acknowledged as social practices that produce and reinforce meaning and frameworks of understanding and knowledge.

Furthermore, you will engage with a wide range of academic and non-academic material, individuals and environments in order to contribute to discussions regarding attitudes and assumptions about ideas and experience, including within labour markets, cultural hegemonies, distributions of power and the relationship between the individual and society. In this way, the social interactions, relationships and contexts that underpin academic literacies in higher education will be made explicit.

You will discuss these ideas with students and tutors from the different subjects at Goldsmiths, and learn to be part of the wider university community. You will also be able to submit an assignment which could be a written, graphically designed, audio, video, or negotiated project. You will get to choose the assessment that best shows what you can do.

This module, subtitled ‘Researching Our World & Lives’, builds on the conceptual and contextual foundations of Identity, Agency and Environment 1.

You will learn how to conduct academic research and will be offered the opportunity to broaden and deepen your understanding of the relationship between your own interests, skills, values, career and non-career aspirations, the concepts, theories and contexts of your discipline, and the world.

You will reflect upon your identities as researchers, and learn how the research skills you’ve acquired both within your studies and the world more generally can be related to problem-solving in a wide range of contexts. You will consider your agency as researchers, what you can and cannot research, the ethical issues involved, and think reflexively about your position as a researcher in a range of environments and eco-systems.

Formal conventions of academic research and writing will be integrated into your individualised contexts and goals, enabling the expression of ideas and perspectives that may challenge the status quo. The module will encourage creativity, activism, decision-making and the formation of judgements leading to action-planning in relation to research topics and types of evidence, and professional planning.

You will learn to critique your own subject disciplines. Interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge will ensure that assessment and learning practices provide you with the opportunity to develop new lines of thinking and knowing, within formative collaborative learning and research communities.

This module introduces you to the study of world politics, emphasising that there are different and competing perspectives on how to approach the subject. In the first term, it introduces you to the three dominant paradigms (Realism, Pluralism and Structuralism) that defined the discipline of International Relations (IR) throughout the 20th Century. It situates those paradigms in the historical context in which they were developed and critically examines both their contribution to our understanding of world politics and their theoretical and empirical shortcomings. The first term ends by highlighting the challenges posed to these traditional ways of studying international relations by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War order.

In the second term, the module identifies the contours of the post-Cold War international environment. In particular, it explores claims that contemporary world politics are defined by processes of globalisation. Specific topics addressed include: the nature of American power and the challenge of the BRICs; the prevalence of 'New Wars'; global poverty and inequality; nationalist and ethnic conflict; human rights; intervention and humanitarian crises; refugees and migration; and terrorism and the war on terror.

These themes are explored in order to evaluate i. how the contemporary globalised world differs from previous world orders and ii. whether traditional ways of thinking about world politics, such as the three paradigms, can still account for and explain global processes and outcomes.

This module gives you an introduction to some of the key questions of contemporary political economy, and offers some critical and cultural approaches to the major policy problems of today.

You'll explore the failure of elites to respond to recent crises, such as the financial crisis and environmental crises, and offers some ways of analyzing where power lies, the role of experts in contemporary economic policy, and how the notion of ‘neoliberalism’ helps us to understand the current state of political economy.

This module aims to provide you with an understanding of the importance of colonialism and imperialism, and resistance to these, in the shaping of our world. It treats ‘culture’, including forms of ‘art’, as central to politics. It begins by considering non-Western forms of politics, civilization and culture prior to colonial domination. The rest of the module explores the forms of political, cultural, aesthetic and ideological interaction, and change, engendered in the module of the colonial encounter. A related aim of the module is to introduce students to a range of types of reading material and sources, beyond the conventional first year text book.

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.