Postgraduate Course: Exclusion and Inequality (Online) (EFIE11454)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
| Course type | Online Distance Learning |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | *Programme Core Course: Data, Inequality and Society (MSc)*
Please Note:
This course is only available to students enrolled on the Data, Inequality and Society (MSc) degree programme.
Where do social, political, cultural, and economic exclusions and inequalities come from, and what are their effects? This course explores these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, examining intersecting fields of inequality and integrating different forms of data and knowledge. We will use evidence and varied analytical approaches to interrogate exclusions and inequalities relating to, amongst others, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, geography, and citizenship. The aim of the course is to develop a conceptual toolbox that students will be able to mobilise when looking at different cases of exclusion and inequality, both new and old. Students will gain skills and knowledge to think through complex societal challenges at multiple scales, drawing on their awareness of structural/historical and relational/experiential perspectives to do so. |
| Course description |
The course is structured around the examination of multiple sites of exclusion and inequality as a means of grounding and deepening the learning. The exact thematic areas are to be determined every year, but in previous years they have included 'health', 'resource flows', 'built infrastructure', and 'labour'. Students will work in groups connected to these thematic areas, with each group exploring a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on exclusion and inequality in their area.
The first part of the course centres around a set of sessions, with the number of sessions depending on the number of student groups (see above). Each session will start with a short interactive lecture followed by a student group presentation and a plenary discussion. After the sessions, the students will collectively explore how different dynamics of exclusion interact to produce broader forms of societal inequality.
In the second part, new groups will be created to bring together members who have been working on different sites of exclusion. They will be asked to reflect and present on inequalities adopting a different lens: discipline, time, or space. Students will be encouraged to pay attention to the structure of their thinking and the utility/limitations of the conceptual approaches they mobilise toward the issue. Mini-lectures will introduce these lenses, and, as with the first part of the course, a shared programme space will be used to record the main reflections and ideas. It will form a digital 'conceptual toolbox' that students will draw on in the rest of their programme of study.
Through the course, each student will engage with a unique but overlapping combination of readings and datasets, reflecting their focus on the different sites of exclusion and inequality and different lenses of analysis. The readings and datasets will be made available ahead of the start of the academic year.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Online Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute will teach this course in a way that enables online and on-campus students to study together. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities. Students should note that their interactions may be recorded and live-streamed. There will, however, be options to control whether or not your video and audio are enabled.
You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Academic year 2026/27, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 6,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 4,
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 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
The course will be assessed by means of the following components:
1) Group Presentation (30%)
The presentation will involve a team analysis of a given theme, using course material and data gathered by the group. Group mark will be assessed based on ability to integrate across and think critically about course readings and other material, quality of application to given theme, presentation skills, and teamwork skills.
2) Individual Reflective Essay (70%)
Individual reflective output applying the course's insights and conceptual toolkit to the student's programme Project. 2500-3000 words. |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment(s) will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
Live light-touch formative feedback will be given during online contributions and during group work during the teaching activity sessions.
In both the online contribution and presentation feedback, focus will be on students' ability to identify the patterns and features of processes of inequality and inclusion, thereby contributing to the building of the skills assessed in the final assignment. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a critical awareness and extensive knowledge of key concepts and debates surrounding multiple facets of inequality in society.
- Evidence an in-depth understanding of the power relationships, socio-structural features, and lived experiences that underpin inequality and exclusion in micro and macro contexts, and how these intersect.
- Identify how different forms of data represent different aspects of inequality, the ways in which data is harnessed to portray inequality in particular ways, and the role of data in deepening or challenging inequalities.
- Mobilise a critical conceptual toolkit to analyse systematically any societal question or challenge.
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Reading List
Aaronson, D., D. Hartley, & B. Mazumder. 2017. 'The effects of the 1930s HOLC 'Redlining' maps'. Working Paper No. 2017-12, Federal Reserve bank of Chicago.
Atkinson, T. 2015. Inequality: what can be done? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Alvaredo, F., Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E. and Zucman, G. eds., 2018. World inequality report 2018. Belknap Press.
Banerjee, A.V., & Duflo, E. 2007. The economic lives of the poor. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 21(1): 141.
Bay, A.H. and Pedersen, A.W. 2006. The limits of social solidarity: Basic income, immigration and the legitimacy of the universal welfare state. Acta Sociologica 49(4), 419-436.
Benjamin, R. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. New York: Wiley.
Beteille, A. 2003. Poverty and inequality. Economic and Political Weekly 4455-4463.
Browne, S. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Buolamwini, J. & T. Gebru. 2018. 'Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification'. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 18: 1-15. https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18abuolamwini18a.pdf.
Crenshaw, K. 1989. 'Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics'. University of Chicago Legal Forum 8: 139-167.
Crenshaw, K. 2019. On Intersectionality: Essential Writings. New York: New Press.
Dean, H. and L. Platt, eds. 2016. Social Advantage and Disadvantage. Oxford: OUP.
Dolan, C., M. Johnstone-Louis, & L. Scott. 2012. Shampoo, saris and SIM cards: seeking entrepreneurial futures at the bottom of the pyramid. Gender & Development, 20(1): 33-47.
Eubanks, V. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Farrell, M. 2016. Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Federici, S. 2004. Caliban and the Witch Women: The Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York. Autonomedia.
Gangadharan, S.P. 2012. 'Digital inclusion and data profiling'. First Monday 17(5).
Gangadharan, S.P, V. Eubanks, & S. Barocas. 2014. Data and Discrimination: Collected Essays. Washington, DC: Open Technology.
Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York. Melville Publishing
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK, 2021.
Hickel, J. 2017. The Divide: A Brief Guild to Global Inequality and its Solutions. London: William Heinemann.
Hurley, M. & J. Adebayo. 2017. 'Credit scoring in the era of big data'. Yale Journal of Law and Technology 18(1): 148-276.
Johnson, J.M. 2018. 'Markup bodies: Black [life] studies and slavery [death] studies at the digital crossroads'. Social Text 34(4): 57-79.
Karim, L. 2011. Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. University of Minnesota Press.
Koch, I. 2017. Towards an anthropology of global inequalities and their local manifestations. Social Anthropology 26(2): 253-268.
Mattern, S. 2015. 'Mission control: A history of the urban dashboard'. Places Journal, March.
Melamed, J. 2015. 'Racial capitalism'. Critical Ethnic Studies 1(1): 76-85.
Milanovic, B. 2016. Global Inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morduch, J. 1999. The microfinance promise. Journal of economic literature 37(4): 1569-1614.
Mosse, D. 2010. A Relational Approach to Durable Poverty, Inequality and Power. Journal of Development Studies 46(7): 1156-1178.
Noble, S.U. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.
O'Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Broadway Books.
Perez, C.C. 2019. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. New York: Random House.
Piketty, T. 2013. Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Piketty, T., 2020. Capital and ideology. Harvard University Press.
Platt, L., 2019. Understanding inequalities: Stratification and difference. John Wiley & Sons.
Robinson, C. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rosanvallon, P., 2013. The society of equals. Harvard University Press.
Sandel, Michael J. The tyranny of merit: What's become of the common good?. Penguin UK, 2020.
Shakya, Y. B., & K. N. Rankin. 2008. The politics of subversion in development practice: an exploration of microfinance in Nepal and Vietnam. Journal of Development Studies 44(8), 1214-1235.
Shukla, N, ed. 2016. The Good Immigrant. Unbound.
Simon, P. 2012. 'Collecting ethnic statistics in Europe: A review'. Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(9): 1366-1391.
Spade, D. & R. Rohlfs. 2016. 'Legal equality, gay numbers and the (after?)math of eugenics'. Scholar & Feminist Online 13(2).
Wright, E.O. 2009. Understanding class. New Left Review, Nov-Dec. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Exclusion,Inequality,Society,Social Science Theory |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Ian Russell
Tel:
Email: irussell@exseed.ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Mr David Murphy
Tel:
Email: dmurphy7@ed.ac.uk |
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