BA (Hons) Politics and Philosophy Bachelor's degree at the University of Sheffield

As the first part of three key modules taken throughout your degree, Political Analysis 1 will introduce you to the study of politics as an academic discipline. You will discover different ways to research the dynamics of different political worlds and acquire the foundational knowledge and skills needed to build, test and evaluate rigorous accounts of political problems. Throughout the module, you will learn through a combination of lectures and seminars. You will also undertake independent stu

During this module, you will be introduced to political theory as a distinctive way of thinking about politics. You will engage with some of the most influential and renowned thinkers from the history of Western political thought, critically analysing questions of power, justice and legitimacy. Through the study of seminal texts, you will be challenged to evaluate historical responses to political questions and thereby start doing political theory for yourself. You will also develop a deeper und

Philosophical writing is a skill that you, the student, must hone early on in order to succeed in your degree. It is also a transferable skill that will serve you in your post-academic career. Philosophical writing combines the general virtues of clarity, organisation, focus and style found in other academic writing with particular philosophical virtues; namely, the ability to expose the implicit assumptions of analysed texts and to make explicit the logical structure of one's own and other peop

This module introduces students to some core questions in ethics, political philosophy, and social philosophy. We ask questions such as: What is a good life for you? What is a morally good life? Does being virtuous matter? What kind of moral consideration do we owe to non-human animals and the environment? Turning to political philosophy, we consider how societies should be organised if they are to realise values such as freedom, equality, and community. How should we understand these values? An

From climate change to biodiversity loss, humans have fundamentally transformed the planet. Patterns of resource consumption have had catastrophic effects but are difficult to change: humankind has become dependent on the very activities that are causing these dramatic transformations. Far from being automatic or inevitable, these transformations are deeply political. This module will help you make sense of planetary change by assessing different political causes and consequences whilst being in

Comparative politics is the systematic study and comparison of the diverse political systems in the world. Throughout the module you will examine the utility of the comparative approach to politics, focusing particularly on types of political regimes (democracies, dictatorships, and electoral authoritarian), and their implications for fascinating outcomes such as development (why some countries are more affluent than others), and conflict (why some countries are more prone to civil war than othe

Through historical and contemporary case studies, students will study how our world today has been shaped by historical events, many of which continue to inform current relations. We will discover how discourses around race, ethnicity, gender and class construct realities today, determining who rules and who is ruled, who lives and who dies. The module will give students a theoretical toolkit, including approaches from the majority world, enabling them to appreciate power and the political signi

This module serves as an introduction to International Relations as a discipline. Throughout this module you will engage in key international relations concepts and discussions, including migration, climate change, poverty and global inequalities, sexual violence and armed conflict. As an introductory module, you have the opportunity to develop the tools needed to understand, analyse and reflect on in-depth theoretical and empirical international relations which shall continue to support you thr

Global political economy (GPE) is a field of study that investigates the interaction between political and economic forces in contemporary and historical capitalism. You will consider key mainstream and critical theories. You will be introduced to major processes of trade, production and exploitation, sketching the power relations of the global economy by using examples of contemporary production in different industries. You will also consider how the political economy of race, class and gender

You will be introduced to the key concepts and debates that have shaped British politics with an emphasis on history, institutions and culture. Each lecture will focus on a specific element of British politics, with subsequent and linked seminars providing an opportunity to deepen this knowledge by looking at critical case studies or official reviews. This module provides key employability skills and practice based knowledge through a focus on the theory and practice of political decision-making

This module aims to interrogate the role of gender and sex in shaping world politics. To do this, it asks how notions of masculinity and femininity shape our institutions, how gender might influence the political problems we prioritise and whose voices are taken seriously in developing responses to these problems. Students will answer these questions through the study of the politicisation of sex, the relationship between gender and violence, how current practices of gender are shaped by colonia

This module is an introduction to a range of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. In the first half of the module we consider questions such as: How should we understand knowledge? What implications does cognitive and cultural diversity have for our understanding of knowledge? Should we privilege some points of view? Should we trust others? Can we wrong them if we don't? And what should we say about disagreement? In the second half of the module we ask questions such