📖Program Curriculum
Research Methods (Semester 1)
The aim of this course is to facilitate the work you do with your Research Report supervisor. The examination for this course is the presentation of your Research Report proposal.
SOSS 7044A: Economics and Sociology of Development (Semester 1)
This course focuses on different approaches to economic growth and their implications for conceptions of development and underdevelopment, the nature of poverty and the role of the state in the development process.
SOSS 7041 (Full-time) /SOSS 7042 (Part-time) Research Report
Students must select one elective course from the list below
Electives
ARPL7044 Community Participation in Urban Governance
INTR7042A The International Political Economy of Development
This unit focuses on the international political economy of development. It examines challenges posed to developing countries by the international system. Topics include multilateral institutions (IMF, World Bank and WTO), development aid and debt relief, regional economic initiatives, and the interplay between world markets and domestic political institutions.
INTR7070A Empire and the Crisis of Civilization
This course explores the historical and contemporary understandings of ‘Empire’ in the social sciences. Drawing on critical theory this course will assess how Empire relates to territoriality, power, culture and economic accumulation. These dimensions of Empire will be located within a historicised perspective to provide a critical understanding of the relationship between Empire and contemporary capitalism.
POLS7006 Development Theories, Issues, Problems and Strategies
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the major social, economic, and political, assumptions underpinning ‘development studies’, and, most importantly, to the strategies that might best be adopted to ‘promote’ or ‘manage’ development. In this way, the ‘problem of development’ in three loosely defined and interconnected areas of social life—the market, the state, and the community— is placed into sharper relief.
POLS 7053 Political Thought: Freedom in the Decolonising Republic
SOSS7021A Labour & Development
This course analyses the role of labour in the development process both historically and in the current epoch of globalisation. A focus is placed on labour and development in Southern Africa and the Global South.
SOCL7011A Environmental Sociology: The Political Economy of Nature And Development
The course will illuminate a number of global, regional, national and local environmental issues, through a political economy and sociological lens, drawing on a wide range of theorists. The rise of a global environmental social movement will be traced, including the environmental justice movements in South Africa and elsewhere. Students will be encouraged to address a particular environmental problem as part of their written contribution to the course. This course is also relevant to students of Geography, International Relations, Politics, Town and Regional Planning, and the Natural Sciences.
SOSS7040A Advanced Research Methods
The aim of this course is to facilitate the work you do with your Research Report supervisor. The examination for this course is the presentation of your Research Report proposal. The course is practically oriented in order to achieve this, but not without critical theoretical and methodological issues and perspectives being addressed at each stage of the process in formulating a research question and preparing a research report proposal.
SOSS7044A Economics and Sociology of Development
This course focuses on different approaches to economic growth and their implications for conceptions of development and underdevelopment, the nature of poverty and the role of the state in the development process.
SOSS7082 Introduction to Migration and Displacement
This overview course reviews the dynamics of international migration — forced and otherwise — and formal and informal responses to it. Instead of developing technical skills and policy recommendations, it provides a set of interdisciplinary conceptual tools to make sense of the complex conceptual, methodological, ethical and logistical concerns surrounding human mobility. In doing so, it situates migration in Africa within global trends and broader social and political theory.
SOCL7012A Global Institutions and Economic Restructuring
This course examines the involvement of global institutions in development as a process of establishing intellectual hegemony, influencing individuals and groups; shaping ideas, discourses and debates; and affecting institutional arrangements inside and outside the state. The course focuses on global institutions that are involved in promoting development in developing societies, including South Africa.
ANTH7020 South African Ethnography
This course addresses the most significant authors, issues, debates, intellectual moments, and classic works in the discipline in this country. The idea is to expose students, as prospective anthropologists, to major works by some of our most successful and distinguished authors in the South African field. The course will take the form of a reading group. At each seminar, one student will be asked to lead in discussing the work, and that student will also produce a critical essay on the work and its place and significance in South African anthropology. Each student should plan on addressing one seminar in this way, taking responsibility for seminar leadership and writing a summary essay on the work as a whole to complete the graded assignment.
ARPL7049 Politics, Governance and the City
Theories of urban regimes, urban governance, participation, social movements and political mobilization will be presented and their relevance for cities of the South debated through different case studies. The course includes a project based on fieldwork in a local neighbourhood in Johannesburg.
INTR7005A African Human Security in an International Context
The course explores the structures, institutions and substantive issues related to Human Security, particularly in Africa.
INTR7023 African Conflict
The course unit will offer important insights into new forms of multilateral conflict prevention, which includes human rights protection and political compromise within states.
A case study approach will be adopted to deal in greater depth with conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, the Congo and West Africa. The role of the regional, sub-regional, non-state actors and recent changes in the UN and AU's conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms will be assessed and compared.
POLS7036 The State in Africa: Democratisation and Crisis
This course takes as its starting point debates about the genesis and the development of the African state.
This unit will explore the tensions which exist between those views of the state in Africa that perceive it to be inherently authoritarian and moreover disengaged from society and those arguments which support the adoption by African countries of liberal democratic constitutions derived from advanced industrial societies.
SOCL7039A Social Transition
Social Transitions is an intensive critical theory seminar. The first half of the course lays a foundation from which to think about ‘Theory’. During this time we explore four questions: Whose theory is Sociological Theory? Where is ‘the sociological imagination’ located? What is the ‘dark side’ of this imagination? Which other sociological imaginations are available to us as scholars? The second half of the course explores these relationships between theory and power through the lens of theories about 'race' in modernity.
SOCL7009A Development as Ideology and Practice
This course examines different ways in which “development” has been theorised and attempted to be attained in practice. The first half examines critiques of mainstream development. The second half engages with different theories and critiques that have emerged about development as ideology and discourse. We do so by focusing on theories and practices of industrialisation and development in several regions of the world namely, Western Europe, Southern Africa, East Asia, China & Russia and Latin America.
SOCL7036A Feminist Theory
Feminist Theory shall introduce students to key and cutting edge debates in Women's and Gender Studies and Feminist Theory and Politics today particularly from a postcolonial perspective, such as transnational feminism, governance feminism, African and Islamic feminism, to name but a few. It shall equally interrogate key concepts like Ethics, Politics and Subjectivity from a feminist perspective.
SOCL7010 Economic Sociology: Institutions, Capitalism and Markets
This course will introduce students to the main paradigms that shape modern economic policy debates and positions. Not an economics course, it will, nonetheless, provide post-graduate students in the social sciences with a solid grounding in economic and social theory in a manner that will enable effective policy advocacy and critique.
SOSS7084A HIV/AIDS, Sexual and Reproductive Health in Social Context
This course adopts a multi-disciplinary approach in exploring the social and historical context relevant to HIV/AIDS as a global pandemic. The aim of the course is to equip you with the skills and the insights to better understand the complexity of the epidemic in order to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the efforts to combat its devastating effects.
HIST 7025 The Making of Urban South Africa
The course explores the social, political and economic history of urbanisation in South Africa from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. Its central focus is the Witwatersrand, but it also examines parallel and especially divergent processes in Cape Town, Durban, East London, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.
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