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Social Challenges: Local and Global Action

When you'll study it
Semester 1
CATS points
15
ECTS points
7.5
Level
Level 7
Module lead
Maria Villares-Varela
Academic year
2025-26

Module overview

Contemporary debate in social theory includes the claim that globalising processes have created a world that is chaotic, disorganized, and difficult to control. Exacerbated by the rise of digital technology/communications and the environmental crisis, this has generated new forms of social risk, fragmentation and powerlessness which existing governance arrangements and political/social movements are ill-suited to address. Pressing debates ask: How far are these processes rooted in the national and global inequalities of the modern era? Is globalisation primarily a neo-liberal project, the main consequence of which has been to concentrate and extend pre-existing divisions? What does social action look like in this context: must it be built on traditional sources of resistance (e.g. the labour movement, social movements etc.) or is a new intersectional and post-colonial framework needed to understand it?