Sociology with Foundation BA Honours

This module introduces contemporary political questions in the global context. Current political issues such as statelessness, politics of underdevelopment, power and inequality, and climate change will be discussed and analysed. The idea of nations and nationhood features prominently in the module, as do the issues related to faith, religion and ideological belief. The module is designed to introduce concepts and themes such as democracy, power and politics, inequality, global society, human rights and states, territories and statelessness.

This module introduces you to the key academic, professional, and personal skills essential for success at university. It encourages good practices in writing, presentation, and time management, while also fostering reflection to help you build confidence as you transition to higher education. Open to all students enrolled in courses delivered through Westminster Foundation Pathways, the module provides a creative and supportive environment where you can reflect on and develop their academic and professional journey. You'll work with specialist facilitators who play a crucial role in guiding your academic and professional development.

With a focus on managing academic choices in a higher education setting, the module emphasises the importance of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), using methodologies that prioritise equality, diversity, and inclusion. Through these lenses, you'll explore topics that prepare you to address real-world challenges as highlighted in the SDGs in a socially conscious, inclusive, and responsible manner.

This module introduces you to the relationship between crime and society, equipping you with foundational knowledge of key criminological concepts and debates. By examining crime from multiple perspectives, you'll develop skills in thinking critically about its definition, measurement, and impact on individuals and communities. The module highlights the roles of media, policing, youth justice, and the criminal justice system as a whole in shaping perceptions and responses to crime. Additionally, you'll investigate the intersections of crime with social factors such as gender, race, and victimisation. Through lectures, seminars, and independent study, this module promotes critical thinking, research skills, and an understanding of the broader societal implications of crime, preparing you for further study in related fields of social sciences, humanities and law.

Critical thinking is fundamental to our ability to progress in an increasingly complex and changing world. It is an essential skill across a range of academic and practice-based disciplines.

This module helps you understand the importance and function of critical thinking both at university and beyond. By working in partnership with academic staff and peers, you will explore how critical thinking aligns with disciplinary practices, shapes scholarly knowledge, and addresses inequalities. Through problem-posing education and anti-racist practices, you will engage with real-world problems, fostering the ability to create a more just and sustainable world.

This module explores law as a question of power – asking what law, power and authority are, where you are located, how you operate, and how you change. The questions are raised through a particular focus on law and politics, the sociology of law and the history of legal ideas. The module’s assessments serve to build the research and writing skills needed to succeed in higher education and beyond, and encourage you to develop and express your own diverse viewpoints on key issues relating to social justice, (in)equality and sustainability.

This module introduces you to some current topics in the study of society, with a focus on key debates in sociology such as gender, race, class, the family and crime. The module prepares you to engage with the methods of teaching and learning at the university level. The multidisciplinary nature of the module enables you to form a more critical and analytical approach to issues which are relevant to your life experience.

This module provides a critical vocabulary for exploring and understanding the relationship between the self and society. It introduces classic and contemporary accounts of identity and critically explores sociological accounts of identity and its formation.

London Explored takes the city as a context to explore the urban sociology literature and to undertake a research project on London which culminates in an individual project proposal. You will choose a topic of interest and write an individual literature review, and then formulate a research question and develop a quantitative research project proposal which explores your research question.

Researching Society is an introduction to doing sociology. Taking research on London as a focus, you learn how to formulate sociological questions and how to identify what kinds of research methods are appropriate for answering them. The module also introduces the academic skills essential to degree level learning, such as sourcing and retrieving information, referencing and academic writing, and assists in supporting your transition to HE.

Social media provides us with an accessible and up-to-date point of departure for an exploration of contemporary culture and society. The module introduces key concepts in digital sociology and provides you with tools to analyse a variety of cultural texts and practices. Grounded in students’ own use of social media, we reflect on some of the significant ways in which technology shapes, and is shaped by, everyday life in the 21st century.

This module is an introduction to how classical sociological theory has explained social structures and divisions in society. The work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber is introduced to explain the transition from traditional to modern society. Drawing on key features of contemporary society the module also questions and critiques the classical theorists’ applicability to 21st century global society.

This module provides an introduction to gender and sexuality studies via feminist, queer and intersectional social thought. The first part of the module sets out the interconnections between sex, gender and sexuality, critiques of essentialism and ethnocentrism, and questions of privilege and inequality. The rest of the module explores a range of contemporary topics in gender, sexuality and LGBTQ studies including gender-based and sexual violence, masculinities, bodies and cultural representations.

This module provides an introduction to contemporary debates in the sociology of race. Each week is organised around a key concept, challenging ‘common sense’ ideas about racial difference, ethnicity and culture. Exploring the significance of race in the organisation of social and cultural life, this module assumes no prior knowledge of the topic, and provides an excellent foundation for the further study of race at levels 5 and 6. This module includes an external visit such as a walking tour of ‘black London’ led by a professional tour guide.

This module explores the development of social theorising in the 20th century, continuities and discontinuities in social theorising and how core concepts of classical theory have been reworked in response to changing times. Theories include the Frankfurt School, Marxism, feminism and postcolonial critiques. Module outcomes include becoming a critical and creative thinker, a literate and effective communicator, global in outlook and social awareness.

In this module, students will develop their understanding of a range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. We pay particular attention to practical and ethical issues involved in designing and conducting research, and how to choose the most appropriate methodological approach to answer different types of research questions. The module adopts a critical approach to research methodology, focusing on how sociological and criminological research can help us understand and challenge power and inequality, and how we can develop collaborative and respectful relationships with research participants.

This module provides work-based learning (WBL), requiring you to prepare for employment through evaluating skills, producing a CV and LinkedIn profile, undertaking WBL activities and reflecting on the skills gained with reference to the wider structure of the labour market and graduate employment.

This module explores how childhood and youth are understood and experienced in contemporary societies. Critical perspectives on childhood development, risk, family relationships, digital lives, youth culture, identity and place, and generational justice will be examined. The module has a strong policy focus and will be of particular interest to those planning a future working with children or young people.

This module examines contemporary issues in education practice and policy. Through study of the sociology of education literature and of English education policy, you'll examine the inequalities of the English neoliberal school system, through the lenses of social class, gender, race, (dis)ability, sexuality and beyond. You'll also examine assessment and accountability (including school inspection), early years education, school discipline, mental health and wellbeing, and alternative and home education. We include a guest session with a secondary school teacher, in the context of a week looking at teachers' experiences.

Emotions are not just a private matter. This module explores the centrality of emotions to interpersonal and social life such as love, shame and anger. It examines theories which challenge our assumptions that emotions are solely psychological cognitive states. It will offer alternative models which make the case that emotions emerge out of the social relations in which you are experienced, and are thus tied to social inequalities of gender, class and race. The module includes a reflective assessment, in the form of an individual interactive ‘interview’, which addresses how the sociology of emotions can be used to transform professional practice for psychology, counselling and sociology.

This module focuses on the study of food, taste and consumption. Based primarily in sociological thinking, it will explore how the experience of taste is not limited to our own sensual likes and dislikes, but deeply embedded in class, history, patterns of migration, tourism and culture. It will also focus on the ‘experience economy’ of the dining and eating scene in London - from fine dining to fusion ‘global’ cuisine and the rise of farmers’ markets and food festivals.

The strong link between globalisation and the media has brought about some of the most fundamental social, political and economic changes across the globe. This module assesses how globalisation facilitates the instant exchange of information and the news, and asks questions about the expanded reach of multinational corporations through greater information connectivity, global advertising strategies, and integration of economic activity across borders.

This module provides a critical introduction to the sociology of leisure. It examines the ways leisure is embedded in existing forms of inequality and the ways our leisure activities can both resist and reinforce existing discourses of work, time, public space, and identity. Drawing upon recent scholarship in urban studies, cultural studies and sociology, the module asks how you might critically evaluate and understand leisure and, in doing so, challenge normative notions of pleasure.

This module takes recent and established research in urban sociology and urban policy to examine the themes of belonging, community, and diversity in the contemporary city. The ways cities are represented, lived, imagined, planned and researched will be critically examined in light of wider sociological debates about identity, diversity, and globalisation. Using London as a focus, the module examines a range of contemporary debates including gentrification, the right to the city, public space, and the spatialisation of inequality.

This module is an exploration in contemporary social theory. It introduces poststructuralist perspectives, and engages with an eclectic range of sociological theories and debates that provide new and exciting ways of thinking about life in the 21st century. You are shown how theories can be used to explore, explain and understand contemporary social issues, problems or concerns.

The dissertation is about doing sociology. Students select a topic of their choice for in-depth research, which normally relates to their experience or something of interest in a module. Students showcase the knowledge and skills gained throughout their degree in setting their own question, operationalising key concepts in a coherent research framework, conducting, analysing and critically evaluating their research.

The module examines family diversity, family practices and intimate relationships, drawing on contemporary sociological work in family studies and in childhood studies. It uses cross-cultural perspectives to explore transformations in family structures, love and intimacy, parenting, childhood, and queer families, and it examines family policy and how this shapes and is shaped by the ways we live together.

Education shapes pupil identities through the structure, policies, curriculum, culture and psycho-social dynamics of schooling. Using gender as the lens, and an intersectional analysis to evaluate other differences, eg class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and disability, this module examines identity work at school. You'll employ autobiographical methods to evaluate how you negotiated their educational identities at school.

As humans our experience of the world is fundamentally embodied; lived in, through and as bodies. This module explores how those bodies are ‘made’ culturally, and how some are imbued with power while others are sites of oppression.

The module highlights the centrality of gender, race, class and sexuality in feminist and sociological debates about the body and identity, and focuses on critiques of the Western mind/body dualism.

Further topics covered on the module include medicalisation, de/colonised bodies, reproduction, body modification, health, fat bodies, transgender embodiment and disability.

This module examines the processes of the production and dissemination of news in contemporary societies. The main focus is on assessing the consequences of the concentration of media ownership and whether new media offers a viable alternative to monopolised media production. Based on case studies, the module analyses how news is produced, both linguistically and institutionally, the politics of citizenship and the need for a rigorous public realm.

This module introduces students to key theoretical perspectives in political sociology and media studies of relevance to the study of activism, protest and social movements. Exploring a range of historical and contemporary examples from around the world, it examines how different theoretical frameworks have been used to understand social movements and their significance for modern and contemporary societies.

The module pays special attention to the relationship between social movements and media, including the significance of new communications technologies.

Classical sociologists anticipated the decline of religion whereas contemporary theorists identify 'desecularisation' or religious revivalism occurring in the 21st century. This module takes a global perspective, introducing students to the theories and methods of the sociology of religion, examining the definitions, social origins, historical and contemporary significance of religion at individual, institutional and societal levels.

Critically engaged with ongoing debates and designed to illuminate and validate your personal experiences, this module explores the cultural politics of race. From the issue of representation in the media and cultural industries to controversies about ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘colourism’ to debates about racism and digital technology, this module considers the production and contestation of racial meanings in contemporary culture.