Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion, students will have the knowledge and skills to:

The specific learning outcomes for the course will vary depending on the topic. Please see the description below for the learning outcomes during its next offering.

Other Information

Semester 1 2018 - Cultural Approaches to International Relations

International Relations has traditionally concerned itself with ‘high’ politics: with statecraft, foreign policy, diplomacy and war. Without denying or diminishing the importance of these areas of enquiry, however, it is nevertheless also clear that there are many other objects of potential interest to the discipline. Global politics can be studied not only in the practices of transnational organisations, foreign offices, embassies and militaries, but also in travel writing, in films, in popular media, and in any number of other unexpected and often-overlooked places.

This topic seeks to explore some of these alternative sites of global-political concern, and in so doing to advocate on behalf of their importance and relevance. It combines a broad and inclusive general outlook with a more detailed focus on specific empirical case studies, ranging from comic books drawn in and about concentration camps to the shipping container. Students will therefore draw upon a wide variety of sources and stimuli: not only academic texts, but also literature, images, video, popular media, and material objects.

The course is split into six sections. These sections are not designed to be either discrete in their individuality or exhaustive in their collective totality. Students will instead find that the material covered in one week will intersect with that covered in others, creating a complex network of associations and tensions. The course as a whole will therefore raise questions as well as providing answers; it will gesture towards unexplored terrain even as it covers ground of its own. It is to be hoped that the ways in which it does so will prove both provocative and intellectually fruitful.

The topic will begin by outlining some of the reasons why IR scholars might turn to culture in order to develop or extend their understanding of global politics. Drawing on texts from IR, cultural studies and sociology, students will establish some theoretical and methodological reference-points that will inform – and be informed by – their study over the subsequent weeks.

Students will then proceed to look at four overlapping fields of cultural activity: the visual, the literary, the popular and the material. In each section, students will think about how relevant cultural objects, artefacts, texts, and/or practices might represent or reflect the international: what can these diverse sites tell us about international relations? How might one ‘read’ global politics through them? And how do they speak to existing debates and discourses within academic IR? Yet in addition to this, students will also be encouraged to consider the active role played by culture in the production, reproduction and transformation of international relations. How, then, do these objects, artefacts, texts, and/or practices act or work in the world? Do they reinforce or challenge any of the assumptions, processes or mechanisms according to which international order functions? Have they been transformative or ‘productive’ in any way? And in what ways do the cultural and the international realms overlap or speak to each other?

The course will end by considering the culture of IR itself, as an academic discipline. What might it mean to be alert to the institutional culture(s) in which we study, think and write? And how might this impact upon the work we do? To study culture, after all, requires a recognition of the ways in which we too are inevitably and inescapably embedded within it.

Learning outcomes for Cultural Approaches to International Relations

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

1. Understand some of the theoretical and methodological debates underpinning cultural approaches to International Relations
2. Appreciate the ways in which international relations can be ‘read’ through a wide range of cultural objects, texts, and practices
3. Appreciate the ways in which international relations might be produced or transformed by cultural objects, texts, and practices
4. Communicate their ideas about the above themes in class discussion as well as in the prescribed assessment exercises

Semester 2 2018 - Global Health

What happens when one guy comes down with some sort of pneumonia at a hotel in Hong Kong? Under most circumstances, not much of anything. Under the right circumstances, though, this single event leads to the worldwide outbreak of SARS. When this sort of occurrence happens, no state can act on its own. The transnational spread of disease and illness necessitates international cooperation—but that can be difficult to achieve. How and under what circumstances does the international community come together to address transnational health issues? What role should national governments, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector play? Who should pay for such activities? How have states responded to health threats throughout history? These are the questions that will guide us over the course of the semester. We will draw on a wide variety of disciplines, including political science (obviously), history, public health, economics, anthropology, and others, to try and disentangle the relationships between health, politics, and the international community. The course does not assume any prior knowledge of public health or epidemiology.

Learning outcomes for Global Health

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

Demonstrate a keen understanding of the intersections between health and international relations both historically and in the contemporary era;

Appreciate the debates over how best to conceptualize this relationship and see how different analytical frames have been used at different times and for different health issues;

Describe the various actors involved in global health governance and how those actors have evolved over time;

Communicate their understanding of these themes through participation in class and various assessment exercises.

Indicative Assessment

• Short essay, 1000 words, 20%
• Two reading reviews, 800 to 1000 words each, 20% each
• Long essay, 3000 words, 40%

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