MA Global Urban Sociology

This module combines theory and anthropological case studies to help students develop a critical knowledge of approaches to address contemporary global challenges such as poverty and economic exclusion, migration/refugees, gender inequality, climate change, informality, child labour, health and illness, infrastructure and corporate expansion. It seeks to deepen students’ awareness and understanding of how people around the world apprehend and deal with the pressing social and environmental challenges they face, and the range of concepts and practices enacted to deliver sustainable futures, including international development, corporate social responsibility (CSR), financial inclusion, and social enterprise, entrepreneurship, and innovation. The module invites students to grapple with the contested and culturally-situated nature of these paradigms, and how they are underpinned by forms of economic and political power.

What is migration? Is this the “age of migration”? What is Diaspora and what challenges do diasporic communities bring to modern political constructions such as the nation-state, national “imagined” communities, citizenship and their associated metaphysics of sedentarism? This course will explore these issues by critically engaging with the ways in which migration and diaspora have been understood historically and in modern and contemporary times. Different theories, approaches, and disciplinary angles will be introduced and discussed. We will also consider what de-colonising approaches to migration and diaspora might look like. By drawing on established and less charted bodies of work on migration studies, diaspora and identity, transnationalism, postcolonial and de-colonial studies the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the emergence of diasporas, the reformulation of 'home' and the simultaneous instability and reinforcement of nation-states.

In this module we explore the complex and often paradoxical relationship between place, mobilities and food. We critically interrogate claims made about food system 'delocalisation', 'deskilling' and 'gastro-anomie'. We examine food markets, street foods and restaurants as sites of both cultural production and labour exploitation, of social interaction, cosmopolitanism and open debate, and of social control, surveillance and spatial cleansing. We explore contemporary forms of ethical food activism, including in the digital realm, and consider the complex role of food in migration.