Doctor of Philosophy - Arts

This subject focuses on the common challenges of designing a research project at PhD level. These include framing research questions in the context of the existing research literature, selecting and developing an appropriate and refined research strategy, and clarifying the stages of a research project. These are all elements required at Confirmation, and the intensive is intended to accelerate students’ preparation toward that goal. The subject will be collaboratively taught to reflect the diversity of approaches to research across the many disciplines in the faculty.

The subject, conducted as six fortnightly seminars, introduces commencing graduate students to various tools and traditions of reading, writing, researching and thinking about the past. The subject will touch on a range of key methodological approaches in historiography over the past half century. Its intention is to focus students' attention on issues to do with researching and communicating knowledge of the past and on discussion of the broader role and claims of historical scholarship. We will consider changing modes of historical writing and publication, as well as the place of the PhD itself in historical training.

This fortnightly workshop will be structured around six key thematic categories that shape research in the text-based humanities: text; reading; author; archive; context; value. These themes will be engaged as the vital building blocks of a research project in literary or performance studies. The workshop will engage these categories through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual positions that inform critical engagement with literature, theatre and other forms of textual practice. It will encourage students to reflect upon their own social, cultural and intellectual positioning as researchers and writers, and in relation to the projects they are beginning to define. Students will examine a range of historical debates on the nature and practice of research in the text-based humanities. They will also engage with current debates about the role of the humanities, in general, and literature, more specifically, in contemporary culture and society.

This subject aims to enable students to deepen and broaden their understanding of core and, whether perennial, resurgent or cutting-edge, contemporary concepts in the social sciences. The emphasis is on relating this to students' development of their own and their peers' doctoral theses.

This subject will introduce students to methodologies of researching images and to current issues in the research of images. The subject will be taught through active discussion and joint class readings of extracts from recent significant publications within or cognate to disciplines that work with images. These texts may be drawn from art history, cinema, critical theory or cultural studies. The subject will introduce students to the range of new developments in the scholarship of visual art and culture, cinema and new media. The subject will include workshops led by visiting scholars and invited specialists who will lead discussions about their own recent scholarship. Regular student-prepared reading reports and allotted class presentations will result in the acquisition of literature review skills, advanced seminar presentation and participation skills, and in cross-disciplinary knowledge about disciplinary shifts in the research of images. Students will be assessed on the basis of effective précis, bibliographic, textual and evaluative skills. Students will choose topics based on the proximity to their own research and as well based on their exploration of cross-disciplinary content beyond their home discipline.

This subject introduces students to cutting edge research in four core areas of philosophy: (1) practical philosophy; (2) metaphysics and epistemology; (3) logic, philosophy of language and mind; (4) the history of philosophy. In most sessions, the seminar will be organized around work presented by a visiting philosopher, and will prepare students for participation in the philosophy discipline colloquium.

This workshop series will examine media culture(s), focusing on how the social sciences and Humanities deal with culture, including cultural production, forms and practices, across the axes of time and space, and incorporating both the virtual and the material dimensions. Together we will examine uneasy tensions in the hermeneutics of culture; from the expanded terrains of mediated, transnational culture, as discussed by different theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first century, such as Raymond Williams, David Harvey, and Theodor Adorno. The range of topics covered during the semester will be framed from the micro- to the macro-level perspective and back, and may include concepts of the everyday, the functions of technology, and the effects of global communication networks and so on.

Those students electing to take the Researching Politics and Policy workshop will become familiar with the latest developments – the 'cutting edge' – in major branches of political science and policy theory. The underlying objective is for each student to be better prepared to select the most appropriate theoretical framework for their particular project.

This subject introduces a range of fundamental theories of the nature of language and approaches to the analysis of its structure and use. The way we will do this is to critically examine 6 sets of readings representing current issues, debates or opposing points of view; to make explicit their theoretical backgrounds and assumptions, how this affects the course of their arguments, and what counts as ‘evidence’. Many of these sets of articles represent a conflict between ‘emic’ (abstract, ‘insider’ knowledge) and ‘etic’ (observable, measurable) approaches; an opposition which is pervasive across linguistics and applied linguistics. We will examine readings by important thinkers in the field including Chomsky, Blommaert, Selinker, Pinker & Prince. All materials will be made available through LMS. Students are encouraged to begin reading early.

This subject introduces PhD candidates to a range of art theories and art historical methodologies that remain available and relevant from the past, but that have been updated and critiqued in more recent times. It is also concerned with newer perspectives and trends. The subject will also introduce students to topics in the broader history of ideas or critical theory. Where possible, the class may feature in-class conversations with guest experts who will present an overview of their research experience and methodological shifts. Proposed texts will include selections from the works of major art theorists and historians, including Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sigmund Freud, Michael Fried, Martin Heidegger, Laura Mulvey, Meyer Schapiro, Alois Riegl and Aby Warburg.

The course will be taught by Professor Jeanette Hoorn and Mr Hugh Belsey in situ at the National Gallery of Victoria. We will focus upon the eighteenth century collection of British painting held by the gallery. With the emergence of science and the development of a complex market in the cities of England and Europe came a new culture of sensibility that came to influence all levels of social interaction. The culture of sensibility, conveyed through both the arts and sciences, placed a new emphasis on understanding the senses and how both the body and the natural world interacted. In this course, we will read the culture of sensibility through some of the best eighteenth century British paintings in the world that are housed in Melbourne's collection focussing in particular, on the materiality of paint on canvas and how it creates meaning for the viewer. We will teach directly in front of the painting in the gallery in which each work of art is housed asking students to join in with the discussion and to present their perceptions of how the works under examination contributed to and shaped this very exciting revolutionary eighteenth century culture.

This subject will be taught by a Visiting Scholar in an area of their expertise. It will provide graduate-level engagement with contemporary work in the student's own or cognate disciplines. A subject description and any preliminary reading will be available by the beginning of the academic year in which the subject is to be taught.

2018: "The Archaeology of Religion and Belief from Mesopotamia to Classical Greece and Rome"

Coordinator: Prof Chris Gosden (Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford)

New views are emerging of ancient religion, which allow for a much wider range of belief systems and practices, not just focusing on official temple or polis practices. These include modes of informal religious practice in the home, fields or small shrines, magical practices and magical specialists. As well as widening the scope of practices considered religious, there is much evidence of influence and mixing between cultures across the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. This course will consider new theories and approaches to religion, as well as re-evaluating empirical evidence. The archaeology of religion is seeing something of a renaissance, as it allows us to rethink models of reality, cause and effect and forms of power as these played out in the ancient world.

One of the most important battles in social science theory has been that between “sociocentrism” and “methodological individualism.” Do people act as they do because they are highly motivated individuals, or is the old excuse that “society made me do it” a catch-all explanation? Anthropologists and others in the social sciences have, over the past two decades, moved towards a “militant middle ground” in which the key concept is “practice”. These questions are important for our daily lives as well as for the development of anthropology and other social sciences; we will explore the concepts of practice, agency, function, and structure, and examine how these terms have been used and what kinds of advances and limitations they represent. In addition to “classic” anthropological texts, we will read some ethnographic illustrations of the key issues, using materials from many parts of the world (including Europe, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa) and from a variety of intellectual traditions. We will ask why particular theoretical “takes” may have achieved scholarly popularity at specific times – in other words, how current political ideas affect the development of social theory. This subject will thus tackle some of the most fundamental issues in social theory, doing so from a specifically anthropological standpoint, and with a view to illuminating possible approaches to contemporary social problems.

Melancholy is an affliction associated with fear and fertility, madness and genius, manic creativity and aphasic stupor. A "sacred disease", from its original diagnosis in antiquity, melancholy has been characterised throughout history by its deep ambiguity and by the breadth of its influence over a range of expressions of thought and art. This subject will explore the different meanings of melancholy, from antiquity to the present day, in four major creative fields: literature, film, music and visual art. Taught by internationally published and recognised experts on the topic, this subject will involve students in rigorous discussion and analysis of core written, visual and music texts. Participation in the subject will engage students in preparatory reading, an expert-guided floor talk at the National Gallery of Victoria, a film screening and a music master class. Student familiarity with one or more of the four fields is desirable but by no means essential.

This subject will cover the following topics:

1) Writing evidence: How does one write about the acquisition and accumulation of data? What are social and cultural realities? How crucial are notions of subjectivity, experience, enmeshment and perspective in making the social and the cultural different from the ‘natural’ or the ‘physical’? Are there differences between social and cultural realities and can they be approached in the same way? How does one write about the different modes of relating to the world as a researcher and what are their ramifications on what one produces as accounts of reality?

2) Writing analysis: How does one write an analysis of one’s research experience? What does it mean to be rigorous when writing about data? What do explaining, deducing, providing proof, exemplifying mean as writing strategies in a PhD context.

3) Writing Theory: How and why should one read theory? How does one integrate it in one’s work? Evaluating the usefulness of a theoretical perspective? How to make theory speak to social and cultural realities and vice versa. What does critiquing means? How to think with a multiplicity of theories. How to develop one’s own theories.

Action Research (AR) combines the new scholarship of active engagement with social research methods to generate collaborative inquiries, commitment and action. This interdisciplinary graduate course introduces the ways in which researchers and the community and/or industry members collaborate to study actual problems, with the aim to solve them to improve one’s welfare. The major goal is to provide doctoral students with an understanding of useful theories, strategies of AR, an appreciation of advantages and limitations of this research strategy, and skills necessary for conducting AR projects. Towards the end of the course, students will be expected to design an AR project on a topic relevant to them. Previous students’ projects have included cultural heritage management, human resource strategy, museum exhibit creation and youth theatre.  The primary course format will reflect the participatory commitment to co-teaching and co-learning. Experts and practitioners will join in the discussions to broaden idea generation.

One of them invented the modern novel, the other reinvented drama. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and Cervantes was buried that same day. Co-taught by the School of Languages and Linguistics (SOLL) and the School of Culture and Communication (SCC), this subject focuses on the significative coincidences, comparative significance and reception of selected canonical works of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. Particular emphasis will be put on the existing confluence among both authors such as in the case of Cardenio, The Tempest and Persiles. This subject will approach Cervantes´ and Shakespeare´s texts in the context of the practices of canon formation, the importance of lost plays, as well as identity formation, and the limits of metafiction.

Networks come in many shapes and sizes, from social media linking friends together virtually, to transnational agreements between governments. Networks all consist of a set of nodes (people, organizations, governments) that are connected by a set of ties (formal and informal relationships of different kinds), and they have more or less clear boundaries. This intensive course aims to introduce students to network concepts and analytical techniques. It covers why students might study networks, how to identify various types of networks (social networks, inter-organizational networks, and governance networks), different methods for collecting network data (text, interview, survey, or web-based) and various techniques for analysing these data.

This subject examines explores the origins and influence of “Orientalism” as a discourse from the publication of Edward Said’s influential book of this name in 1977 through to contemporary times, and in historical perspective.  Topics include the barbarian in ancient Greek and Chinese thought, Hegel’s “Orient”, Anglicists vs Orientalists, the Subaltern Studies school, Orientalism and Sinologism, and counter-Orientalisms.  Students will have an opportunity to explore the discourse and its theorization through case studies in history, creative literature, film, or philosophy, depending on their disciplinary area.

This subject will introduce students to the current state of the discipline of Cultural Studies. Students will be oriented in relation to the major theoretical traditions, methodological approaches, empirical and political pre-occupations, and national traditions in Cultural Studies. We will do this by considering particular contemporary configurations of Cultural Studies in relation to specific research problems. Students will develop both a synoptic sense of the shape of Cultural Studies now and focused expertise which will enable them to engage with some of the most significant contemporary problems from cultural competency and equity to cultural sustainability.

What theoretical and conceptual frameworks emerge when we stage conversations between the scholarship on publics and public cultures and the so-called “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities? How do affective publics implicate discourses of belonging, citizenship, and minoritarian identity? How do the discursive, the performative, and the material generate affective publics? To what extent have postcolonial theorists, critical race theorists, and femiqueer scholars destabilized our thinking on publics and affect? And, most importantly, what happens when we diverge from Eurocentric theories to engage affective publics in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East?
Following a seminar format, this subject will be of particular interest to doctoral students interested in cultural and screen studies, performance, literature, anthropology, sociology, and political theory. Some of the scholarship with which we will engage includes work by: Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Arjun Appadurai, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Charles Hirshkind, Saba Mahmood, Brian Larkin, and Rustom Bharucha.

Ethnography — the descriptive and long-term study of peoples and their communities — is one of the most challenging, and rewarding, approaches to media research. This elective will help students interested in ethnography to engage with the key conceptual and practical issues found when using it as a method in media and cultural research. Students will be introduced to the history of the approach, from early anthropological studies to contemporary practices in film production ethnography and digital ethnography. They will confront key conceptual issues along the way, engage with central texts, and establish the basic tools to start building ethnography into their own research plans. Particular focus will given to how ethnography can be integrated with other research methods, so as to create strong and well-rounded research projects.

This subject is designed to introduce graduate students to a sequence of key women's texts across major historical periods. The set readings, which are all considered ‘seminal’ in feminist literary studies, span a number of different genres: polemic, memoir, epistolary non-fiction, the essay and the novel. Combining theoretical approaches with cultural history and careful close reading, the course is designed to trace continuity and change in the arguments and imaginaries of some of Britain's most influential women writers from the Enlightenment through to the early twentieth century. 

In the last two decades there has been a culinary turn in popular culture and representations of food, cooking and their cultural meanings are ubiquitous. We will explore the ways food impacts upon identities in the modern era. This elective focuses in particular on the complex social and intercultural interactions that take place around food in the context of the movement of people, such as in migration or international conflict. Drawing on theories from the interdisciplinary field of food studies, this elective will appeal to students researching in areas such as cultural studies (including literature, film, television, and consumer cultures), anthropology, sociology, geography, political science and language studies.

The case study has proved of enduring interest to all Western societies, particularly in relation to questions of subjectivity and the sexed self. This elective interrogates how case studies have been used by psychiatrists, sexologists, psychoanalysts, lawyers, and writers to communicate their findings both within the specialist circles of their academic disciplines, and beyond, to wider publics. At the same time, it questions how case studies have been taken up by a range of audiences to refute and dispute academic knowledge, especially by the LGBT community (and its historical predecessors) and contemplates what it means for sexed subjects not to be represented in the case study regime in a given time and place. As such, this elective engages with case studies as sites of interdisciplinary negotiation, transnational exchange and influence, exploring the effects of forces such as war, migration, and internationalisation.

The subject offers a critical approach to the study of gender and sexuality through the exploration of a range of conceptual and methodological approaches central to the study of gender and sexuality, such as: intersectionality, situated knowledge, indigenous knowledge, media and representation, queering categories of difference, and affective methodologies. This subject is structured around six thematic fortnightly workshops that are formed around contemporary debates in the fields of gender and sexuality.

The subject is designed for students who wish to deepen their existing knowledge of gender theories as well as for those who are interested in exploring how engaging with gender theories and methods might open up their projects in unexpected and useful ways. The subject will include guest lectures by gender studies specialists.

The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) workshop will provide an introduction to the GIS program. The elective will be taught by a leading international GIS scholar with a group of domestic and international researchers gathered for an academic workshop; PhD students will be able to participate in the workshop as an elective in the coursework program. GIS is a computing system that stores and analyses spatial and geographical data. This includes mapping data to provide graphical images of patterns. Using the GIS industry standard software, ESRI’s ArcGIS and ArcGIS online, this workshop will show how to conduct geospatial analysis of demographic, health and political issues (regional conflict, political participation, voting patterns, etc.) to improve future policies in these areas. Using both desktop and online GIS applications, the workshop will cover: principles of cartography, how to find and use demographic, health and political data in GIS, introduction to geospatial analysis methods, applied mapping skills using GIS software.

These seminars will examine some of the principal features of the Australian political system, their genesis and effects, and the ways that students of Australian political history have engaged with them. The topics include the origins of democracy in Australia, the forms of state activity, the nature and consequences of the federal compact, political parties and political participation, transformative moments in Australian political history and impediments to change, and movements of protest and dissent. The seminars are intended to provide participants with an historical context for research in Australian politics and an understanding of the different schools of interpretation.

This subject will be taught by a Visiting Scholar in an area of their expertise. It will provide graduate-level engagement with contemporary work in the student's own or cognate disciplines. A subject description and any preliminary reading will be available by the beginning of the academic year in which the subject is to be taught.

In the past decade the field of environmental history has seen great analytical and conceptual developments across all topics. This subject will examine recent major works in environmental history to assess the state of the field and to illuminate contemporary environmental issues and questions. In particular, we will read in some major monographs concerning topics including global environments and commodities, environmental management, climate (including climate change), technologies and environmental control, state-building, and environmental narratives and discourses. We will discuss the difficulties and tensions of research that straddles many spatial and temporal scales and human and non-human actors. Although focussed on the work of historians, this course will also actively consider the interdisciplinary frameworks in which these works sit and the concepts with which they engage, particularly noting work in geography, anthropology, and the emerging environmental humanities.

This course will present current methods for recording, transcribing, and interlinearising primary language records. It will focus on data management and archiving of primary and derived records and will also cover some simple methods for converting textual material into different formats using regular expressions.

This elective will cover advanced topics in applied linguistics, with the focus to vary each year. Possible topics to be covered include (but are not limited to): validity in language testing, feedback in second language writing, interlanguage pragmatics, socialization and identity, narrative enquiry, conversation analysis of second language data, measuring interlanguage development, multi-faceted Rasch modelling.

This elective will cover advanced topics in descriptive and theoretical linguistics, with the focus to vary each year. Possible topics to be covered include (but are not limited to): language documentation, grammatical analysis, experimental phonetics, morphosyntactic theory, information structure, language acquisition.

Advanced skill development in laboratory-based phonetics or in syntactic theory will be provided for those students who require these specialised skills for their thesis work. Advanced Linguistic Analysis A and B will be taken consecutively over one semester. These subjects are designed to ensure that students have the necessary skill set in advanced phonetics or advanced syntax to enable them to define their thesis topic in line with contemporary theoretical literature.

Advanced skill development in laboratory-based phonetics or in syntactic theory will be provided for those students who require these specialised skills for their thesis work. Advanced Linguistic Analysis A and B will be taken consecutively over one semester. These subjects are designed to ensure that students have the necessary skill set in advanced phonetics or advanced syntax to enable them to define their thesis topic in line with contemporary theoretical literature.

This skills-led course is taught in computer labs. Students will learn how to collect website and social media data using both screen-scraping techniques and through APIs. The course is designed for non-programmers; no coding skills will be required. Once collected, students will learn how to clean and then analyse the data using two methods: content analysis and social network analysis. Finally, the course will introduce students to data visualisation techniques.

Translation is a fundamental tool for academic research. The dissemination and exchange of knowledge across cultures is often made possible through translation. Current academic scholarship tends to accept translations uncritically, disregarding the highly varied and in some cases conflicting translative practices. This subject explores such practices and the theories underpinning them by looking at the modern and contemporary thinkers (Montaigne, Foucault, and Derrida to mention a few) who addressed the ethical, cultural and political implications behind current academic uses of translation. At the end of this subject students will acquire a more critical and nuanced understanding of the transmission and reception of cultural texts.

In this 12-hour seminar series students will read and discuss writing that explores complex ideas and issues in personal, engaging, and creative ways. These seminars will examine the rhetorical, narrative, and poetic strategies of the personal essay as a contribution to public intellectual discourse, as well as the kinds of occasions that give rise to the essay (personal crises, social issues, shifts in societal sensibility, ethical dilemmas). Some essayists we might read: Montaigne, Zadie Smith, M. J. Hyland, Helen Garner, Annie Dillard, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace. Possible text: Best Australian Essays 2016 (Black Inc). Most reading material will be available electronically. Students will draft and workshop their own creative writing during the seminar sessions. This subject is relevant to humanities researchers directly, but could be useful to science and social science researchers who wish to explore and extend their prose techniques.

When it comes to contemporary concepts of governance and public policy in the Greco-Roman world, democracy, the legacy of Ancient Greece and Rome can hardly be underestimated. However, the relevance of this heritage is often a matter of the ‘well known but little understood’. This subject therefore endeavours to familiarize students with six key themes in Greco-Roman public policy. First, we will scrutinize the iconic polities of Sparta and Athens, including their more sinister sides, complemented with a look at economic and labour management in Classical Greece. Second, we will investigate the constitution of the Roman Republic (also in relation to such modern republics as the USA), electioneering, and public land management in the Roman Republic.

The explosion of research in the digital humanities and social sciences has created exciting opportunities for scholars but also poses important new questions. PhD students now need to know not only how to use digital resources in their work, but how to critique and evaluate those resources. This subject will examine what constitutes a digital archive; will provide discussion of the theory of archives; will include a variety of perspectives (academic, library, industry) on the uses of e-resources; and will offer a case studies approach to understanding the field.

This subject introduces students to central contemporary methodological approaches to philosophy, such as: apriori reasoning and analyticity, experimental philosophy, the phenomenological method, and feminist epistemology. 

This subject will be taught by a Visiting Scholar in an area of their expertise. It will provide graduate-level engagement with contemporary work in the student's own or cognate disciplines. A subject description and any preliminary reading will be available by the beginning of the academic year in which the subject is to be taught.

In 2017, in this subject we will work through material from Ted Sider’s Logic for Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2010), a graduate level text in logic applied to philosophical questions. Successful completion of the course of study would involve covering core techniques and tools in the proof theory and model theory of classical first order-predicate logic, normal modal logic, counterfactuals and two-dimensional modal logic.

This subject will acquaint new research students with cutting edge, forthcoming research in practical ethics, broadly construed. Practical ethics involves ethical theory applied to practical topics. Representative examples include collective responsibility for climate change; the scope of human rights; individual responsibility for institutional racism; duties to give to international charities helping poor people. The subject will be structured around regular visits from scholars presenting material in the advanced stages of preparation for publication. Enrolled students will be able to read this material before the meetings and have opportunities to engage directly with the visiting scholars. The subject does not require a background in Philosophy, and will be of interest to anyone perplexed by the moral issues that frequently arise in our daily life. It will give students critical tools that generalize to thinking about a wide range of ethical problems.

This PhD elective will introduce critical approaches to the construction and analysis of social policy with particular focus on the developing world, but with relevance to the developed world. The dominant, linear approach to policy as a sequence of ‘design, planning, implementation, and evaluation’ will be critiqued for its failure to recognise the socio-cultural contexts, values and ideologies within which policies are embedded. We will explore the worldviews and assumptions of policy makers, the discursive construction of policy ‘subjects’ through policy labels and language, policy technologies of enumerating, categorising and describing populations and the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity and religion contribute to the success or failure of policies. Case studies using ethnographic and interpretive approaches will be used to throw light on the nature of policy-making and programmes in key social issues: for example, the meanings, measurement and experience of poverty; the construction of ‘indigenous’ peoples and of the ‘household’; the role of ‘local knowledge’ in health policies.

This subject will focus on some of the major developments in film and screen theory since the turn of the last century. It will critically evaluate some of the key theoretical models that have impacted on the study of cinema and related screen media. The subject will examine the historical development of major theories, including: ideology, psychoanalysis and spectatorship; semiotics, intertextuality and postmodernism; formalism, structuralism and post-structuralism; sense and affect theory; temporality and spatiality; and film history and media archaeology. Major film theorists to be studied may include: the early writers on film (Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Hugo Munsterberg, Maya Deren); the first and second wave of theorists associated with the emergence of film studies at university (Christian Metz, Jean Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey, Jean Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Christine Gledhill, Teresa de Lauretis, Stephen Heath); and some of the next generation of film scholars who followed (Mary Anne Doane, D.N.Rodowick, Miriam Hansen, Noel Carroll, Giulana Bruno, Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, Tom Gunning). Interdisciplinarity is at the core of screen theory and, as such, this subject will also examine the work of critical theorists who impacted on developments in screen theory, including Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Juri Lotman, Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze. This subject will appeal particularly to Screen Studies students who are interested in understanding and exploring some of the main writings and ideas in contemporary and past screen theories, and considering their practical application to the analysis of film and related screen media forms.

This elective offers students the opportunity to read and discuss the primary texts of key social theorists. In addition to developing an understanding of the work of foundational scholars, such as Marx, Freud, and Foucault, we will also examine questions of interpretation. Through analysing contemporary readings of these influential thinkers we will explore how genealogies of ideas are enlivened, critiqued, misread, and transformed in social theory.

This course will introduce students to quantitative methods (large-N) as they apply to social science research. Topics covered will include descriptive statistics, correlation, significance testing, multiple regression and experimental methods. This course will discuss causal inference in relation to these techniques and analyse some of the assumptions on which large-N quantitative research techniques such as regression are based on. This subject will include ‘hands-on’ work by all students using SPSS using existing large-N data sources such as the World Values Survey.

The focus of this subject is to engage students in the process of making strategic and appropriate research design choices from the range of qualitative research methods suitable for social science research. The subject will move between gaining practical experience with a variety of core qualitative data collection techniques, and understanding the sampling and recruitment strategies that frame data collection. An emphasis will be placed on the choice of data analysis techniques to adopt in relation to a research question. The elective will be most suited to those who have had some previous experience with qualitative research. Essential techniques such as semi-structured interviewing, and focus group composition will be supplemented with experience of conducting content analysis, thematic analysis, and rich media analysis techniques.