Example courses

• Critical Global Politics / Ngā Take Tōrangapū Matua o te Ao

  This course engages key ideas from critical theorists and their forerunners, questioning status quo assumptions about global politics. During the course we read and discuss primary texts from selected philosophers. We use their thought to examine the nature of oppression, vulnerability, emancipation, and resistance. Concrete examples reflected on include cosmopolitanism, radical democracy, popular culture, post-9/11 politics, torture, and the politics of mourning.

• Gender and Sexuality Studies: Key Thinkers and Perspectives

  This course will examine the major influences on and developments in feminist theory and gender and sexuality studies up to the present day. Among the topics considered are: gender and sexual difference and diversity, sexual politics and sexuality, the relationships between gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and class, and postmodernism and post-feminism. These topics are explored in a global and cross-cultural context, through close engagement with the writings of key thinkers in the field.

• International Relations Theory: World Order and its Critics

  This course explores how world order has been understood and contested in IR, including the roots of the contemporary international system, debates about how it currently functions and critical accounts of the marginalisation and injustice it produces. This course may also be able to be taken towards a major in POLS. See major requirements for details.

• Place, Race, Media

  This course examines how media contribute to understandings of place for individuals, groups and nations and how these mediated places are informed by discourses of race, ethnicity and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters. Case studies include historical and contemporary media from Aotearoa, Australia, Asia, the Pacific and the U.S.

• Race, Gender and Development

  This course explores people’s experiences of development in relation to race, gender and sexuality in Aotearoa New Zealand and other places in the world. We engage feminist, queer, postcolonial, Kaupapa Māori and Mana Wahine theories to help us question the workings of power within development and to consider how place makes a difference to development outcomes. Through lectures, tutorial discussions, blogs and assignments, students build capacity in how to engage diverse knowledges and to bring an intersectional analysis to development experience.

• Violence and Peacemaking

  This course explores the role of religion in promoting conflict and terror, and of the power and potential of religion for transforming conflict and building peace. We consider what historical, theological, symbolic and practical resources religious communities offer to the task of peacemaking in a violent world.