Undergraduate Sixth Century Courses 2024-2025

This is a course about human relations with other animals.  We begin by looking at how people have thought about humans and animals have evolved and how they have been thought of as both different and similar.  Then we explore the history of relations through hunting, domestication, and social attitudes, before examining ethical and political questions about welfare, rights, conservation, and disease.  The course places a big emphasis on students debating ideas and thinking about their own relations with animals and is taught through a mixture of lectures, films, and tutorials by staff from across the University.

The course explores the meaning, challenges and opportunities of sustainability, through a multi-disciplinary approach, including elements from education, politics, international relations, sociology, philosophy and biology.  We explore competing definitions of sustainability; the impact of personal, technological and economic actions and decisions on the environment; political strategies designed to improve sustainability; the emergence of international cooperation; and the roles and responsibilities of world citizens. Global and local case studies are used to illustrate the interconnectedness of the issues involved e.g.  climate change, food systems, energy, and economic development.

This interdisciplinary course explores the role of racialised difference, ‘the global colour line,’ in the making of the modern world. We begin with an examination of racialised and non-racialised forms of hierarchies in settler colonialism, plantation slavery, and the histories of enslavement and dispossession, frequently silenced from a hegemonic modern discourse on individual rights, property, and freedom. The inquiry then turns to a consideration of the colonial roots of the global economy, the study of languages and cultures, science, techniques of government, medicine and law, and the colonial legacies that inform disciplinary knowledge of modernity. In conclusion we explore subaltern perspectives and the contribution of the formerly colonized to knowledge in the multi-racial co-constitution of the modern word.

This inter-disciplinary course explores regimes of producing and resisting racialized difference – the ‘global colour line’ - in the 21^st century. Beginning with a consideration of the historical lineages of racializing practices and their critique, the course turns to exploring concepts in contemporary debates about ethnicity and race including: ‘double consciousness’, Afropessimism, conviviality, the Black & Red Atlantic, Indigeneity, and race as the lived experience of class. Topics covered include Indigenous Rights and International Law; Race & Religion (especially the racialisation of European/Western Muslims); Race and Social Abandonment (students will be encouraged to explore the 2008 Financial Crisis, the Grenfell Fire, and the Covid19 pandemic); border crossings and the racialization of migrants and refugees; the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, the Black Lives Matter movement as well as similar movements locally.  

Science is constantly in the news, but how much do you know about how research gets to be news? How do you know you can trust what you read? If you have a great idea, do you know how to protect it and start a company? Science and Society will explain how the scientific media work and how to critically assess what you read. You will learn about scientific ethics by studying high profile cases of fraud. You will learn about intellectual property, how to protect it and how to use it from real-life entrepreneurs and those who support them.

In this course, students will learn about the mathematics which underpins our everyday lives. Each lecture will be taught by a different member of staff, some from the mathematics department, and some from other departments. Actual topics covered will depend on the staff involved, but may include Cryptography, Robotics, Probability and Special Relativity. Students will also learn how to use the computer program Mathematica.

The mystery of consciousness is one of the most exciting and challenging fields in human endeavour. Consciousness provides a truly inter-disciplinary topic with relevance across both the sciences and the humanities. This Sixth Century course aimed at level 3 and level 4 students will present cutting-edge research using a clear inter-disciplinary perspective. The course brings together the disciplines of divinity, psychology, and medicine, with a particular focus on the clinical and health-based aspects of consciousness studies. The assessment is a mixture of non-traditional (e.g. Self-reflective journal) and a traditional (essay).