Unit information: Global Bristol in 2019/20

Unit name	Global Bristol
Unit code	SPAI10008
Credit points	20
Level of study	C/4
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. John McTague
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

Description including Unit Aims

This unit builds on the academic capacities developed in ‘An Introduction to Study in the Social Sciences’, developing these further through group and individual work aimed at uncovering the global in the local lived experiences of students. The unit will introduce an additional level of empirical breadth and historical engagement, while allowing students to situate their intellectual development in their own lived experience, and those of communities beyond the University. There will be opportunities for students to discuss the utility of the social science skillset in linking these levels of analysis, and the value of this in subsequent academic and professional life. The unit aims to facilitate students’ development as self-directed learners, while providing them with a range of key qualitative and quantitative research skills relevant to study across the social sciences. These skills would normally include:research-related skills such as identifying a topic for research, developing research questions; research design-related skills such as selecting an appropriate methodology; practical skills related to gathering data, managing time; teamwork-related skills such as developing a work plan and distributing a workload, analytical skills relating to evaluation of data, writing-up and making an argument.

Students will be asked to collaborate with others in identifying a suitable subject for a group research project, and will have opportunities to reflect on their progress in executing this work in seminars; the unit is thus intended to help students to gain an understanding of the importance that is placed on participation and mutual responsibility for learning at degree level.

The unit will also include sessions introducing participants to key debates in the theory of social science, and developing their facility for critical, reflexive thinking. Topics may vary from year to year but are likely to include sessions on the objectives of academic enquiry, why theorising social science matters, the relationship between power and knowledge, debates relating to the possibility of objectivity and neutrality, and via consideration of the global in the local, core debates concerning universality and specificity.

Intended Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. demonstrate the ability to work effectively as part of a group;
2. take responsibility for an individual area of work;
3. demonstrate a range of intellectual and practical skills (e.g. in identifying research questions, selecting a methodology, gathering and processing and interpreting information and data, reading critically, developing work-plans, constructing arguments) integral to academic enquiry in the social sciences;
4. articulate an awareness of the connections between the local and the global, and of why different ways of theorising about such connections matters – by extension, why social science is important beyond the academy;
5. demonstrate an awareness of how the skills developed on the course might be useful in subsequent study or work;
6. articulate how their skills in research have developed across the course.

Teaching Information

1 x 2 hour seminar per week

Assessment Information

1 x 20 minute Group Presentation (25%) [ILOs 1-4]

1 x 1500-word Report on Collaborative Research (50%) [ILOs 1-4]

1 x 1500-word Learning Diary (25%) [ILOs 5-6]

Students will complete three summative pieces of assessment, demonstrating their engagement with a collaborative research project running throughout the term, and reflecting on what they have learnt. This will involve involve a contribution to a group presentation, a written report on the element of their collaborative research for which they are responsible of up to 1500 words, and a selection from their personal learning diary of up to 1500 words. The learning diary may also include discussion of the reasoning behind the selection of the excerpts and sections the student has chosen to submit.

These tasks are intended to help students to develop and demonstrate their skills in team-work alongside their analytical skills in individual written work, and to enhance their facility with key social science research skills in support of their transition to higher education. While the precise nature and weighting of the tasks outlined above may vary from year to year, they will revolve around asking students to demonstrate their awareness of the way in which global relations are constitutive of and constituted by local social relations and to reflect upon how the skills they are developing may be useful to them beyond the course.

Reading and References

Elbow, Peter, (1981) Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, Oxford, Oxford University Press

Blaxter, Loraine, (2010) How to Research, London, Open University Press

Jones, Pip (2007) Satan’s Kingdom: Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Past & Present, Oxford

Dresser, M (2016) Women and the City: Bristol 1373 – 2000, Redcliffe Press, Bristol