PhD Elective Modules

Two 6.25 point modules must be completed during the first year of candidature (full-time.) The modules are designed to encompass the diversity of disciplines across the Faculty. More information about PhD coursework.

• Abjection, Horror and Taboo
• Advanced Qualitative Methods
• Advanced Quantitaive Methods
• Applied Digital Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• Consumption and Greed in Historical Perspective
• Contemporary Cultural Studies
• Contemporary Poetry
• Conversation Analysis
• Conversing, Reading, Writing
• Current Debates in Linguistic and Language Research
• Critical Ways of Seeing: Sexing Theory and Research
• Kant

• Knowledge and the Postcolonial World
• Law and Language
• Memory, Identity, Biography, Narrative
• Narrative Theory
• Risk, Social Inclusion and the Life Course
• State of the Art
• Structure and Agency in Everyday Life
• The Art and Practice of the Essay: from Montaigne to Foster Wallace
• The Cosmopolitan Imaginary
• The History of Emotions
• Advanced Linguistic Analysis A & B

Abjection, Horror and Taboo

Coordinator: Barbara Creed
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, four 3-hour seminars in July

All societies explore the abject through their culture, particularly through forms such as film, painting, literature and myth. This subject will examine the representation of the abject in cultural texts in order to understand how a society creates and maintains borders between that which is acceptable and that which is taboo. This subject will explore both the horror and attraction of the taboo. The concept of the border, or liminality, is essential to an understanding of the history and nature of culture in contemporary society and the importance of the text in all of its forms – classical and popular.

Advanced Qualitative Methods

Coordinator: John Fitzgerald
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, May

The focus of this subject is to engage students in the process of making strategic and appropriate research design choices from the range of qualitative research methods suitable for social science research. The subject will move between gaining practical experience with a variety of core qualitative research methods, with understanding the deeper conceptual issues that frame the type of data collection, data analysis and interpretive writing positions to adopt in relation to a research question. Essential techniques such as semi-structured interviewing, and focus group composition will be supplemented with experience of conducting content analysis, thematic analysis, and rich media analysis techniques.

Advanced Quantitative Methods

Coordinator: Aaron Martin
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, August

This course will introduce students to quantitative methods (large-N) as they apply to social science research. Topics covered will include descriptive statistics, correlation, significance testing, multiple regression and experimental methods. This course will discuss causal inference in relation to these techniques and analyse some of the assumptions on which large-N quantitative research techniques such as regression are based on. This subject will include 'hands-on' work by all students using SPSS using existing large-N data sources such as the World Values Survey.

Applied Digital Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Coordinators: Michael Arnold and Andrew May
Teaching mode: Two 2-hour seminars and 8 hours of workshops in semester 2

This subject alerts students to the range of electronic methods available to scholars for document and data capture, collaboration and communication, data analysis, publishing and dissemination, data structure and enhancement, practice-led research, and research strategy and project management. On completion, students will be equipped with a range of practical digital methods as they apply to their thesis (e.g. qualitative analysis of unstructured text using NVivo, use of digital archives and databases, semiotic analysis of text, metadata for describing research material), and also be able to critically assess the potential of digital methods and tools as they apply more broadly to their discipline.

Consumption and Greed in Historical Perspective

Coordinator: Catherine Kovesi
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour seminars during semester 2

A key feature of contemporary western culture is a ceaseless, complex and ambivalent discourse about materialism, consumption and luxury. This subject deals with a burgeoning multidisciplinary area, that of consumption studies, which interrogates these discourses from their origins in the fifteenth century to the present day. Students will be introduced to key thinkers on these issues including Theodore Veblen, John Brewer and Frank Trentmann.

Contemporary Cultural Studies

Coordinators: Audrey Yue, Fran Martin and Chris Healy
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour fortnightly seminars during semester 2

Students undertaking this subject will be introduced to cutting edge research in contemporary cultural studies. The module has two core aims. First, students will be led through some of the broad questions of central concern in contemporary cultural theory around cultural power and agency; cultural technologies and histories; cultural location and practice; and cultural sustainability and citizenship. Second, students will explore some recent examples of outstanding cultural research that through methodological, theoretical or conceptual innovation opens up new and generative understandings of a range of specific cultural sites, texts and practices. This subject is suitable for students undertaking research projects in Cultural Studies and related disciplines including Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, Media and Communications, Sociology and Anthropology.

Contemporary Poetry

Coordinator: Andrew Motion (recent British poet Laureate; Professor of Creative Writing, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, Four 3-hour seminars, early August

This intensive is aimed at creative writers and those with interests in literary studies. It will examine the poetics of contemporary poetry from Britain, USA, Ireland, and other English-speaking nations. Students can negotiate an assessment task equivalent to 2,500 words. This might take the form of a seminar presentation and submission of a written paper; an essay; a selection of original poetry, with a brief discussion of aims and influences (750 word discussion, 6 pages of poetry); or another form agreed upon between student and subject coordinator.

Conversation Analysis

Coordinator: Lesley Stirling
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, early September

This subject covers theoretical and practical aspects of Conversation Analysis, an approach to the analysis of spoken interactive discourse with roots in Sociology and an increasing impact in linguistics and language studies. Topics will include the CA paradigm, evidence in CA, "pure" and "applied" CA, and analytic strategies for spoken discourse data. In addition to CA as a theoretical approach, students will also gain hands-on experience in the analysis of discourse data through data sessions.

Conversing, Reading, Writing

Coordinators: Lewis Mayo and Michael Ewing
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour fortnightly seminars during semester 2

Much of the most innovative theorising about society and culture produced in the last century or so has focused on the central place of language-related practices in the constitution of human reality. Conversing – the exchange between speakers – forms one of the central objects of social analysis; examining the structures and meanings of conversations is one of the key activities that anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, philosophers and historians undertake, and "fieldwork" consists primarily of observing and engaging in conversation. Writing and reading – in which the producer and recipient of the message are not present to each other – form the other key language activities that constitute social practice. This subject explores - from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives - the practical business of conversing, reading and writing as the core acts involved in conducting research in the humanities and social sciences. While there will be a focus on the Asia-Pacific region, students will be encouraged to explore issues from a variety of social and historical contexts relevant to their research.

Current Debates in Linguistic and Language Research

Coordinator: Barbara Kelly
Teaching mode: Semester 1

This elective engages with key contemporary debates in the linguistic literature, focussing on specific developments in linguistic theory and considering their impact on the development of the discipline. Drawing where possible on the research of visiting scholars, the subject will provide an opportunity to work in detail on some of the latest developments in linguistic research and debate, and students will have an opportunity to contextualise their PhD research within these debates where appropriate.

Critical Ways of Seeing: Sexing Theory and Research

Coordinators: Millsom Henry-Waring, Sheila Jeffreys, Kalissa Alexeyeff and Maree Pardy
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour weekly seminars in the second half of semester 2

This subject challenges students to think about their research through the lens of sex, gender and sexuality. It is designed for students who wish to deepen their existing knowledge of feminist and gender theory, as well as those who are undertaking apparently non-gender projects and who are willing to discover how sex and gender might open up their projects in unexpected and useful ways. By adopting a framework that situates the sex/gender/power nexus as an analytic lens onto the students' fields of study or particular thesis projects, students will be able to assess how their question/research problem is sexed and gendered; or what the sexed/power dimensions of it are; and how a feminist analysis, gender lens, or sexuality paradigm, might reorient or re-read their projects. The subject will be taught through key texts that adopt critical theoretical and empirical approaches to sex, gender and sexuality.

Kant

Coordinator: Colin Marshall
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour weekly seminars in the second half of semester 1

Immanuel Kant is, arguably, the most influential philosopher in the European tradition since Aristotle. This subject will examine the core parts of Kant's mature philosophical system, with an eye towards understanding his claim that he had to 'deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.' We will begin with his transcendental idealism and his critique of previous metaphysical systems. This will set the stage for examining Kant's ethics and philosophy of religion. Our final sessions will concern Kant's political philosophy and his aesthetics.

Knowledge and the Postcolonial World

Coordinator: Helen Verran
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour fortnightly seminars during semester 1

It is not only cross-cultural studies that benefit from considering postcolonial methods. Anyone researching contemporary cultural and social phenomena needs tools to contend with the radical ontological pluralism of contemporary life. What are postcolonial methods of social and cultural analysis? And what and how might they learn from non-Western knowledge traditions? This subject considers how engagement with the workings of actual 'other' knowledge traditions can contribute in postcolonial theorising. We will explore the experience of 'epistemic disconcertment' to develop methodological insights.

Law and Language

Coordinator: Marianne Constable (Professor of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley)
Teaching mode: Intensive mode: mid-year

This subject explores how law and language are bound up with one another and how words bind us. Understanding law as practical and social, we will examine law as a series of speech acts, among which claiming and responding are key. Claims made in the name of the law – whether on behalf of or contesting official rule – raise issues of justice. Although such claims may be – and some would argue always are – spoken strategically, hypocritically, prudentially, even unfairly, they lead us to think about how justice is said – and unsaid – in speech acts made in the name of the law. We will examine how speech – not God or a higher law – binds our law to justice. We will study a range of material of and about law, as well as work on language by authors such as J.L. Austin, Foucault, Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Memory, Identity, Biography, Narrative

Coordinator: John Murphy
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour weekly seminars in the second half of semester 1

Identity depends on memory, and yet memory is not simply a recording machine. Memory can be re-shaped in the telling, so that both personal and collective identities are also formed through public narratives and through history telling. This subject explores cross-disciplinary theoretical research investigating memory in areas such as history, philosophy, cultural studies and neuro-sciences, starting with the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre. It deals with the connections between memory and personal identity, and the implications for genres such as autobiography, biography and oral history. In turn, the interconnections between private memory and more public narratives about the past have implications for biography, history and other genres.

Narrative Theory

Coordinator: John Frow
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour weekly seminars in the second half of semester 2

The subject will explore contemporary theories of narrative through readings of a set of short narrative texts. It will focus on questions of temporal organisation, narrative voice, the layering of enunciative and enunciated levels, the character system, spatial structure, and the social functions of storytelling. It will explore both literary and non-literary texts, and will examine the forms of organisation specific to different media, including literary texts, oral storytelling, news media, and film.

Risk, Social Inclusion and the Life Course

Coordinators: Jens Zinn and Dan Woodman
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour weekly seminars in the second half of semester 2

The life course in Australia is being reshaped. People are staying longer in education, marrying and having children later, working to later in life and living longer. They are also more mobile, have different socio-cultural roots or live cross-national lives. The responsibility for managing the new and old risks and uncertainties that these changes bring is increasingly being shifted on to individuals and families while social institutions have difficulties to keep up with changes on a national and global level. This subject will provide students with state of the art knowledge of 'life course' research and how it can help researchers better understand and respond to current social challenges. It will be particularly relevant for students whose research engages with social policy, youth, adulthood and family formation, aging, changing gender relations, work/life-balance, and biographical planning in a globalising world.

State of the Art

Coordinator: Anthony White
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour seminars in second half of semester 2

This subject, which investigates the current state of advanced research literature in one area of specialization within art history, will survey and critically evaluate recent methodological innovations and research discoveries in the discipline. The subject will include special topics from the subject coordinator's own research area and may include guest classes from other resident or visiting scholars. Students will gain an in-depth knowledge of recent scholarship in an area of art history, as well as skills that include literature review preparation, advanced seminar presentation skills, and in-depth disciplinary knowledge within art history, that will equip them for further research within the discipline and also provide the basis for comparative cross-disciplinary research for students enrolled in the subject whose home discipline is outside Art History.

Structure and Agency in Everyday Life

Coordinator: Michael Herzfeld (Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University)
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, 2-hour seminars over 6 days in semester 2

One of the most important battles in social science theory has been that between "sociocentrism" and "methodological individualism." Do people act as they do because they are highly motivated individuals, or is the old excuse that "society made me do it" a catch-all explanation? Anthropologists and others in the social sciences have, over the past two decades, moved towards a "militant middle ground" in which the key concept is "practice." These questions are important for our daily lives as well as for the development of anthropology and other social sciences; we will explore the concepts of practice, agency, function, and structure, and examine how these terms have been used and what kinds of advances and limitations they represent. In addition to "classic" anthropological texts, we will read some ethnographic illustrations of the key issues, using materials from many parts of the world (including Europe, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa) and from a variety of intellectual traditions. We will ask why particular theoretical "takes" may have achieved scholarly popularity at specific times – in other words, how current political ideas affect the development of social theory. This subject will thus tackle some of the most fundamental issues in social theory, doing so from a specifically anthropological standpoint, and with a view to illuminating possible approaches to contemporary social problems.

The Art and Practice of the Essay: from Montaigne to Foster Wallace

Coordinator: Tony Birch
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour seminars, September-October

This 12-hour series of seminars will examine the tradition of writers who have explored complex ideas and issues in personal, engaging, and creative ways. These seminars will examine rhetorical, narrative, and poetic strategies of the personal essay as a contribution to public intellectual discourse, as well as the kinds of occasions that give rise to the essay (personal crises, social issues, shifts in sensibility in a society, ethical dilemmas). Some essayists we might read: Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, A.D. Hope, Annie Dillard, Kate Jennings, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace. Possible texts: Best Australian Essays: a ten year collection (black Inc 2011), The New New Journalism (Vintage 2005).

The Cosmopolitan Imaginary

Coordinator: Nikos Papastergiadis
Teaching mode: Six 2-hour fortnightly seminars during semester 1

This subject will examine both classical and contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism. It will involve a close reading of key texts from Stoic philosophy, Immanuel Kant and a selection of key contemporary political and cultural theorists such as Anthony Appiah, Ulrich Beck and Gerard Delanty. It will then examine a range of artistic and cultural practices which are both locally grounded and globally oriented. The aim of the subject is to consider the possible relationship between the theoretical investigations into cosmopolitan ideals and contemporary artistic practices that articulate a cosmopolitan consciousness. In broad terms this subject will focus on the aesthetic concept of the imaginary and its relation to the normative concepts that define moral relations and universal political structures within the dominant theories on cosmopolitanism.

The History of Emotions

Coordinators: Stephanie Trigg, Sarah Randles and Stephanie Downes
Teaching mode: Intensive mode, 3-4 days during semester 2

This elective draws on the research being conducted in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions. Students will be introduced to current research topics and methodologies in the interdisciplinary history of emotions, with a special focus on Europe in 1100-1800 and the role of the emotions in studying historical and cultural change, but with the possibility, depending on student interest, of extending more broadly into the study of emotions and modernity, especially in Australian history, literature and culture.

Advanced Linguistic Analysis A & B

Coordinator: Brett Baker
Teaching mode: As required on a case-by-case basis during semester 2

Advanced skill development in laboratory-based phonetics or in syntactic theory will be provided for those students who require these specialised skills for their thesis work. Advanced Linguistic Analysis A and B will be taken consecutively over one semester. These subjects are designed to ensure that students have the necessary skill set in advanced phonetics or advanced syntax to enable them to define their thesis topic in line with contemporary theoretical literature.