After taking this course, students will be able to understand and to use ideas and methods connected with the social construction of reality. They will be expected to achieve a critical competence in assessing the light its analysis throws on global and transnational behaviour.

This course is designed to familiarise students with conceptual tools relating to the sociology of knowledge that they need for studying topics such as global and transnational sociology. The course begins by examining varied respects in which human beings have observed connections between different cultures and the ways in which their inhabitants see the world; it then traces developments in the analysis of language and meaning that have led to specific understandings of social construction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  In later stages of the course, students will be encouraged to collect and analyse examples from their own reading and experience.

Lectures + field trip to a museum (to be confirmed).

Max 16 students. Students will be accepted to the course in the following order:

1. degree students of the MDP Global and Transnational Sociology

2. degree students of the other Global Society programmes (MDP in in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research, MDP in Public Choice, MDP in Comparative Social Policy and Welfare, MDP in Gender Studies)

3. other degree students of UTA

4. exchange students