Unit name | Culture, Postmodernity and Religion |
---|---|
Unit code | SOCIM2113 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | M/7 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Dr. Flanagan |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies |
Faculty | Faculty of Social Sciences and Law |
This unit considers issues of character, identity and spirituality that have emerged from debates on religion, culture and postmodernity. These issues give rise to concerns with virtue ethics and morality and relate to debates on reflexivity that increasingly shape sociological understandings. A particular concern of the unit is to understand how these moral matters relate to visual culture, to acts of seeing and spectacle. Indicative ContentDefinitions of culture and postmodernity; issues of self, identity, ethics and virtue; the place of religion in sociology and in the postmodern world; metaphors of the sacred; visual culture, visibility, invisibility and its relation to virtue, vice and evil; Bauman, Bourdieu, Simmel.
Aims:
The main method of teaching will be weekly face-to-face seminar sessions which will involve a combination of lecturing, group discussion and student presentations.
The assessment will relate directly to one of more of the learning outcomes specified above in 15 and will be an extended essay of 4000 words (or equivalent) showing an in-depth understanding and integration of key aspects of the unit.