Social Challenges: Local and Global Action

Learning Outcomes

Learning Outcomes

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Understand debates about how specific issues come to be regarded as global social challenges
• Explain the role of supranational institutions, national governments, NGOs, and social movements in responding to these issues and the differences in their respective responses
• Distinguish between arguments about the impact of globalisation on social divisions and risks and assess their relative merits
• Propose a feasible social action or intervention designed to address the impact of one of the global social challenges considered in the module at a global, national or local level.
• Use their understanding of these debates to identify, analyse and assess the current global response to a range of contemporary global issues
• Appreciate how global social power relations affect the way these issues are understood and responded to

1/ Global Social Challenges and Actions

This session will consider the processes by which certain issues come to be regarded as globally challenging. It will assess if and how this process is affected by global power relations, past and present, and consider the institutions and actors involved. It will focus on the following questions. Why are some issues regarded as globally challenging? What is global about them, and why are they considered problematic? How do understandings of these challenges differ at a local, national and global level? How have these differences affected global responses to these issues?

2/ Migration, identities and belonging

International migration is one of the critical processes of social change and globalization. People are coming and going to a more significant number of countries than ever before, which sets the contemporary moment apart from the labour migration flows which characterized the twentieth century. This has involved extensive movement within the Global South as well as between it and the Global North. In this session, we use core (social) theoretical perspectives, spanning disciplines such as economics, geography, and sociology, to grasp the drivers of mobility and discuss the links between mobility and social change. Why do people move? Are structural factors or the agency of individuals shaping migration processes? How have scholars theorized migrations? What is the link between internal and international migration? Can migration lead to social change? How have scholars theorised differential identities and processes of belonging in countries of destination?

3/ Environmental crisis

We now know that burning fossil fuels for power and development – from large-scale industrialization and industrial agriculture to urbanization and expanded consumption – has transformed the underlying conditions for all life on Earth. The modern energy system is deeply integrated into our social systems. For decades, the benefits of these systems appeared to outweigh the costs of the polluting carbon they emit, but in recent years the cumulative toll of greenhouse gases, together with other human actions, has begun to destabilize ecological systems that sustain human societies. How do the legacies of colonialism and racial capitalism contribute to the environmental crisis? What are the cultural meanings of global warming, and how do these differ between climate deniers and climate activists? Why has environmental justice evolved into climate justice ?

4/ Artificial intelligence

Digital technologies are heralding a new ‘data age’ in which traces of human activity are recorded at a scale and pace previously unimaginable. In this algorithmic society, processes and decisions that were once undertaken by humans are now conducted by algorithms, designed by human modellers or derived from machine learning. What are the implications of machine agency for conceptualising algorithmic society? What are the notions of ‘datafiction’ and ‘connectivity’? What theoretical concepts are available for sociologists in this context? How/do algorithmic systems raise questions of ‘risk’ and how it is understood in society? Might AI ‘hard wire’ in Eurocentric conceptualisations of what knowledge is and/or which aspects of it are useful?

5/ Work, precarity and social marginalisation

There has been a transformation in how work and labour is organised at global, national and local levels over recent decades. The reshaping of traditional job markets and the emergence of new modes of production and consumption can be seen in the expanding knowledge economy, the evolution of digital technologies, the growth of platform and ‘gig’ work and the ongoing drive to automation. These processes have given rise to new configurations of labour inequality, insecurity and vulnerability, as forms of labour relations previously characteristic of the global south have become widespread in the global north. What are the implications of these changes for worker protections and organisation and the ways worker rights are enacted? How might traditional ideas about worker resistance and new notions of fair work help us to explore these changes? How are worklessness and the workless being repositioned in the context of welfare state retrenchment?

6/ Political extremism

The expression of views well beyond the erstwhile political mainstream, and the mobilisation of groups and organisations associated with these opinions, has grown markedly in the last decade or so. Some of these mobilisations have related to traditional left/right economic debates but political extremism has also grown in relation to issues of religion, gender, race/ethnicity etc. This session will consider the various explanations for these developments, particularly as they relate to the issues discussed in sessions 2-5. It will consider particularly the links between the various forms of extremism; how and why do they vary, both between each other, and as they are made manifest in different local, national and international locations?

7/ Global and local social movements and social action

In this session we will examine the range of organisations involved in social change, such as governmental and non-governmental organisations, voluntary organisations, social movement organisations and charitable organisations. We will consider how these movements and organisations are located in their historical and spatial context, why people join such organisations and how they are financed. The main questions we will consider are: Under what conditions do such organisations emerge and proliferate? What determines the type of action these movements take? What effect does social action have at a local, national and global level?

8/ Reporting back on topic portfolios and preparing the case study and policy brief

9/ Guest speaker – a local, national or international social actor involved in an organisation engaged with the social challenges covered in the module

10/ Reflection on module’s critical themes and debates and final assignment Q and A

Sessions will provide a general framework on the theories/debates on each topic followed by a discussion led by the students on the week’s theme based on the readings. The second part of the of the session will be arranged around a particular case geographical case study, external speaker, or specific reading for an in-depth discussion on the challenge and related action at local, national and/or global levels. External speakers will include, where possible, professionals working in an allied field of employment. Alumni will be investigated as source of speakers for such sessions.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.