Undergraduate Course: Contemporary Issues in Sociology (SCIL10080)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This rapid response sociology course will deal with the latest social issues, focusing on current or recent events and analyzing them via a range of sociological approaches. |
| Course description |
The substantive content of the course will change each year depending on topical issues and will be taught by specialists in that field from amongst permanent and postdoctoral staff. For example, in the year of a general election the course could centre around political engagement and disengagement as a sociological issue. What is provided here is a framework within which different issues can be taught each year, thus maintaining a coherent learning experience via which students can be familiarized with key concepts and arguments within the discipline. This framework is likely to include considerations of why the issue is important from a sociological perspective, what classical sociology can contribute to understanding it and the historical context in which this issue has emerged. The course may also examine diverse manifestations of and responses to the issue in different societies, its different impact on different social groups and its relationship to forms of social inequality. The sociological framework of the course will allow examination of the extent to which the issue upholds social order or produces social conflict and how it is affected by processes of globalization. The course will encourage reflection on how sociology can assist in critically assessing the alternative options for addressing this issue. Such a framework is indicative, and will potentially need to be adapted depending on the specific issue being covered. The specific topic for the following year will be announced at latest by the end of semester 2 of the previous year and communicated by email (a title and blurb) to all honours students in the school.
2024-25 topic detail: Media, AI and Memory
This course enables students to use interdisciplinary social science insights to explore the changing relationships between media, the past and the future. This includes the ways in which the past is made relevant in the present, to effect relations of power, identity, and inequality.
It addresses how media and technologies in the AI era shape (and are used to shape) individual, group, collective, and societal remembering and forgetting. Key course themes include: digital transformations, nostalgia, archives, records, testimony, museums, activism, generations, war and conflict, commemoration, memorialisation, journalism, autobiography, distortions, images, digital afterlife, erasure, forgetting and obsolescence.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have at least 2 social science courses (such as Sociology, Politics, Social Policy, Social Anthropology, etc) at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 36 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 20,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
25% short essay
75% long essay |
| Feedback |
All students will receive formative feedback on essay outlines for short and long essays and through a short essay (1500 words, worth 25%). |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate interdisciplinary knowledge and a critical understanding of the key theories, concepts and approaches to the study of media, AI and memory.
- Apply knowledge, skills and understanding in applying a range of techniques of enquiry to the study of media, AI and memory.
- Identify, conceptualise and define new and abstract problems and issues related to the relationship between media and memory.
- Communicate information about contemporary issues in the social sciences to informed audiences.
- Exercise autonomy and initiative in written work.
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Reading List
Indicative readings:
- Wang, Q. and Hoskins, A. (Eds.) (2024) The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Garde-Hansen, J. (2011) Media and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- Ghezzi, A Guimarães P A and Vesni¿-Alujevi¿ , L. (Eds) (2014) The ethics of memory in a digital age: interrogating the right to be forgotten. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Hoskins, A. (Ed.) (2018) Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. New York: Routledge.
- Hoskins A. (2024) AI and memory. Memory, Mind & Media, https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.16
- Kneese, T. (2023) Death glitch: How techno-solutionism fails us in this life and beyond. Yale: Yale University Press.
- Öhman, C. (2024) The afterlife of data. What happens to your information when you die and why you should care. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Prescott, A. and Wiggins, A. (Eds.) (2023) Archives: Power, Truth and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Rieff, D. (2016) In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies. Yale: Yale University Press.
- Van Dijck, J. (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Other resources:
Documentaries:
- Erase and Forget (2017) Dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman
- Eternal You (2024) Dirs. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck
Journals:
- Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media
- SAGE Journal of Memory Studies |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Contemporary issues,rapid-response sociology,current social life,digital memory studies,emergent AI |
Contacts
| Course organiser | |
Course secretary | Mr Ewen Miller
Tel: (0131 6)50 3925
Email: Ewen.Miller@ed.ac.uk |
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