Social Change, Identity and Collective Action

Full course description

This course helps students to understand the big, structural forces that drive social and political change and conflict, and affect both how we see ourselves relative to those problems, and the repertoires of action we deploy to address them. It does this by first introducing students to some key tools from social and political philosophy – ideas concerning modernity, rationality, colonisation, group membership, social and technical change, social movements and political action – and helping them apply those intellectual tools to make sense of everyday issues and dilemmas. For example: public choice theory helps show why individual action can lead to collectively-irrational results; theories of modernisation can help explain why we persist in designing and pursuing policies that address individual behaviours and downplay collective solutions; social movement and ‘repertoire’ theories show what we can about that. Students will, at every step, be helped to link theory and strategies of action with a menu of contemporary problems from which students themselves choose:  initially, climate change; diversity policies; and privacy in a digital society.

Because the primary goal is to get students to demonstrate that they can select and apply appropriate social and political theory to make sense of a pressing contemporary challenge, the mode of assessment is an argumentative research essay. Students will be led to that point by (a) embedding conceptual analysis and research skills in the first half of the course; and (b) testing out arguments in seminars in the second half.