Core courses

Digital Society: Theory & Substantive Issues

The course “Digital Society: Theory & Substantive Issues” is designed to complement students’ everyday knowledge of digitalization with academic understandings, mostly coming from the social sciences. The course will first provide a critical overview of the social history of digitalization, as well as of some ways in which digital technology increasingly become embedded into the “datafied” contemporary society. The course will then focus on key areas of social life that have been reconfigured by digitalization. This includes work, production and consumption, health, identity, the welfare system, personal relationships, and political and civic participation. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically evaluate the impacts of digitalization on small scale phenomena, but also analyse them in the broader context of social transformations and structures of inequality.

Practicing Research & Working with Data in the Digital Age

The course “Practicing Research and Working with Data in the Digital Age” is designed to complement the “Digital Society- Theory and Substantive Issues” course (SOCIO5103) with a skills-oriented approach. Consequently, this is the course where students encounter online data and learn how to systematically work with it, but also how to make sense of it from the standpoint of a social scientist. During this course, students will learn about the specificities of digital methodologies, but also about the ways in which they complement traditional data collection and analysis in the social sciences. The course will cover both quantitative and qualitative approaches and it will investigate how digital data can contribute to our understanding of the virtual realm, but also how it can reflect broader social phenomena.

The Living Lab

The course “The Living Lab” is designed as a synthesis of the courses “Theory and Substantive Issues in the Digital Age” and “Practicing Research and Working with Data in the Digital Age” proposed for the 1st semester. The Living Lab creates a context for reuniting technological resources and community resources for research.

In this course, students will apply both the theoretical knowledge and the practical skills they have gained in the two previous core courses. Working with supervision from the course lecturers, they will create and conduct a small pilot project, with participants from the University’s smart campus, related innovation district and Glasgow local authority organisations and community groups. Students will learn to engage with research participants and with digital technologies for their projects.