Studying

Postgraduate Taught

As a new department, we are developing our PGT offering. From September 2024, HaSS Cornwall modules on Environmental Law, and Environmental Politics will be available on multiple Masters programmes in Penryn. Full HaSS-focused Masters programmes will launch in 2024/25.

View our MSc Environmental Policy and Society course

2023/24 Modules

The Politics of Knowledge and Ignorance

In our contemporary world, knowledge is increasingly commodified (knowledge economies), explicitly challenged ('fake news'/'alternative facts') and is a focus for fighting injustice (decolonising campaigns in universities). This highly interactive module provides a critical introduction to knowledge as a political phenomenon inextricably related to power. We will ask, via supported reading and discussion, what is the relationship between knowledge, evidence and truth? How is language related to knowledge/power? What forms of knowledge/ignorance support injustice? What do we need to unlearn? How are consent and knowledge related? Is knowing only about cognition? We will apply these investigations to a range of contemporary issues starting with decolonising knowledge as a subject, an aspiration and a practice in higher education. All students will come to this module with different experiential and embodied knowledges. Everyone's contribution will be respected in a critical awareness of the exclusions created by 'formal' education in the UK Higher Education sector. There is no requirement for previous learning. You will be guided and supported to develop awareness of your own knowledge positionalities and your own interests. This will lead to your assessment, an original 'knowledge project' based on a political issue that you are interested in exploring. Past projects have included epistemic injustice regarding women's health and sexual wellbeing, the moral limits to freedom of information, the knowledge politics of memorialisation, and injustice concerning indigenous knowledge of climate change.

Earth Law and Guardianship

This module introduces Masters' students to the body of law and governance for protecting, restoring, and stabilising the functional interdependency of Earth's life and life-support systems at the local, bioregional, national, and global levels. Earth law may be expressed in constitutional, statutory, common law, and customary law, as well as in treaties and other agreements both public and private. It also provides foundational principles and information on the Rights of Nature movement. It explains how legal recognition for the rights of non-humans can help local and indigenous communities protect their homelands. The module gives practical examples of how Earth Law and Rights are implemented, such as through contract law or the 'nature on the board' approach in companies. It also gives applied examples of how communities, nations, and states around the world legislate and implement their own approaches to the rights of nature.

Global Sustainability Challenges

Multiple transnational challenges face policy-makers in the 21st Century, raising questions over how they should be governed in practice. In this respect, the United Nations has set out a normative agenda for future global policy up to the year 2030 via its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed by national governments in 2012. These goals encompass the critical issues of our times, including reducing poverty, ensuring access to clean water, promoting clean energy, preserving oceans, reducing inequality and maintaining global security. Achieving them will require innovative critical thinking and novel, interdisciplinary policy solutions. The module will therefore seek to identify, discuss and evaluate emerging policy responses to these challenges at multiple institutional levels as basis for lesson-drawing. Drawing on theories of governance as an analytical lens it will: examine the context to the SDGs; provide an overview of the UN targets; introduce a range of governance theories (for example, multi-level governance, network governance, regulatory governance, collaborative governance, urban governance, polycentric governance, mixed governance, global governance); and provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of critical policy challenges to attaining the SDGs. The module will be of interest to students from many disciplines, including political science, international relations, geography, science-technology-society and can be taken by physical scientists with an interest in policy.

Climate Change Law

This module aims to provide a critical understanding of law and policy on climate change at different levels of governance, from the international framework on climate change to implementation at a regional and national level (both EU and the UK), and even local climate law. The development of the international regime on climate change, as well as the key principles and concepts, such as the evolution of the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) principle, since the end of 1980s will be analysed in the module. Additionally, it will explore key governance approaches to mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, including emissions trading systems, carbon pricing mechanisms, and climate resilience planning. In parallel, it will bring discussions about climate justice from a decolonial approach, as well as the role of climate litigation, both nationally and internationally, in holding governments and corporations accountable for their contributions to climate change, and how it differs (if any) between the Global-North and the Global-South. It will also address issues at stake in different legal areas (e.g., trade, human rights, migration, intellectual property rights) and across different sectors. For that, it will build on both the literature and examples of case law in disparate areas of the world.

Entangled Life – Radical Democracy in Theory

This is an innovative module which uses New Materialisms thinking around political/ecological complex adaptive systems to explore how our environments shape human societies and politics. Drawing on research in Appalachia (USA), it explores the ways that human community, political and economic lives are entangled with the environments that we are a part of. As we introduce new concepts, we explore what they add to our understanding of our Appalachian case study, and analyse what this means for our emerging (re) conception of ecological politics.

The module asks questions such as, 'can we understand political culture and institutions without understanding how we have been shaped by nature?' Do entangled perspectives help us to better understand rural America? Does this mean that all politics is really a politics of the environment? If so, should the environment be given political agency in decision-making processes? To do this, we address how power operates within the social political and ecological system; explore ontological questions such as how we know what we know; raise questions about time, and consider if this improves our understanding of the world around us.

Entangled Life – Radical Democracy in Practice

This is a practical module, applying the insights of its pair, Radical Democracy in Theory, to real world problems. The module centres around the preparation of a consultancy report to tackle an issue in the local community. Students will have a unique opportunity to apply exciting new developments in political theory to empirical research problems and find practical, policy solutions.

You will be commissioned by a local community organisation to work as a part of a research team drawn from your fellow students. In groups of between 2-4 students* you will use your consultancy brief to write a research proposal, conduct fieldwork, and write a report, which you will present to the local community. Your report will apply the concept of the complex adaptive assemblage to practical questions, enabling students and community to look at familiar problems in different ways.

Postgraduate Research

As a hub for interdisciplinary research and teaching across Humanities and the Social Sciences, a key part of HaSS Cornwall’s ethos is to help develop the careers of early career researchers (ECRs) and post graduate research students (PGRs) by supporting them to undertake a holistic approach to their research, develop a broad range of skills, and to pursue impactful careers.

Kensa Broadhurst, Institute of Cornish Studies

This summer, HaSS Cornwall supported PhD candidate Kensa Broadhurst to visit the Venice International University to attend a course on Linguistic Landscapes linked to the subject of her thesis on the Cornish language.
 
"I spent the last week of June at a summer school at Venice International University (VIU). VIU was founded in 1995 and is a consortium of 20 universities from around the world, including Exeter. The campus is on the island of San Servolo in the lagoon, lying between the main historic centre of Venice and the Lido. VIU was founded to create interdisciplinary academic and research programmes uniting researchers and students from across continents, specialisms, cultures, and languages.

The course I attended was called ‘Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities.’ The students ranged from final year undergraduates to PhD students, and came from all over Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Linguistic Landscape (LL) research is a relatively new field which has grown since the turn of the century. Alongside lectures on aspects of LL research and the new directions this is beginning to take such as Soundscapes and Smellscapes, we also had the opportunity to share our own research interests and links to LL and make valuable contacts with others working in the general fields of linguistics and the humanities more widely.

I’m off to VIU again in September for a PhD academy course – I can’t wait to go back! Do look at the VIU website and keep an eye out for the call for applications to the courses on offer. Applications usually have to submitted about six months before the course and there is funding support available. I would like to thank the HASS Faculty at Penryn for funding my course fees for the summer school I have just attended."

Dr Walker Zupp, Creative Writing

Dr Walker Zupp recently defended his PhD viva and completed his doctorate in Creative Writing

In Marjorie Perloff’s excellent 1996 publication, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, she described some of Thomas Bernhard’s novels as being “Wittgenstein fictions”. Seeing as she didn’t expand on this fascinating idea, Zupp dedicated his Doctorate in Creative Writing to the subject, and subsequently produced a novel of Wittgenstein Fiction - Nakadai (Montag Press, 2022) - which was picked up by a publisher. Zupp’s critical thesis focused on three contemporary Western novels that fit the description of Wittgenstein Fiction, as he developed it. Correction (1975) by Thomas Bernhard, The World As I Found It (1985) by Bruce Duffy, and Wittgenstein Jr. (2014) by Lars Iyer. The conclusions he reached about these novels, and about the genre more widely, were that Wittgenstein Fiction could constitute,

1. a genre whose use of an intellectual epic form simultaneously evades and satirizes the empirical world;
2. a creative non-fiction genre in which conflict arises from that necessary disharmony between the author’s forms of life and empirical reality;
3. or a genre which uses minimalist forms to create satires of contemporary universities and research institutions.

With all this in mind, Zupp’s Ph.D. was a significant contribution to our understanding of literature post-1945, as it defined an important selection of novels that both satirized and sought to emulate the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most compelling philosopher of the 20th Century. 

Amy Shakespeare, History

Amy Shakespeare is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD Student with the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Her supervisory team are based at the University of Exeter and Bath Spa University. Her research explores how museums in the UK can take a more proactive and anticolonial approach to repatriation (the return of ancestors and belongings) – with a focus on case studies of belongings that have returned home to North American Indigenous nations. She is also looking at the legacy of repatriation for museum practice and how and why museums interpret repatriation for the public.

Amy is a museum professional and consultant with over a decade’s worth of experience at organisations such as the National Trust, National Lottery Heritage Fund, Royal Cornwall Museum and the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. During her career she founded the international Museums Immersive Network, was shortlisted for two Women in Tech Excellence Awards, and was recognised as one of Cornwall’s 30 Under 30 in 2021. Amy was also one of the Clore Emerging Leaders in 2019. She has served on the boards of the South West Federation of Museums and Art Galleries, Kids in Museums, and is currently the Repatriation Officer for the Museum Ethnographers Group.

In February 2023, Amy was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant under their International Placement Scheme to complete a Smithsonian Research Fellowship. For three months, she was based in the Repatriation Department of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. During this time, she was supervised and mentored by their Repatriation Manager, Jackie Swift. Amy went to compare their approach to repatriation with the UK museum sector’s and to see what the UK might be able to learn. During her time there, she shadowed and supported consultations and repatriations, learning from the highly experienced team.

Amy also had the opportunity to join the White House Council on Native American Affairs Subcommittee on International Repatriation and their international partners’ meetings. Following on from her involvement in this, and encouragement from her Smithsonian Supervisor, she is now working to launch a new online resource for Indigenous Nations to help them to understand the different European countries’ contexts, laws, policies, and cultures that shape and inform their approach to repatriation. This resource aims to support the opening of global networks, sharing the information with the people who need it, so that more international repatriation can happen, and more ancestors and belongings can return home.