Undergraduate - Area of study Politics

Politics is a broad discipline that tends to overlap with all the other major humanities and social science disciplines. It is an excellent discipline for learning about the interrelationships in the human world, and for acquiring a diverse range of interpretive, analytic and synthetic (especially conceptual) skills. The discipline is engaged in critical debates about resource allocation, decision-making, social behaviour and political action, the management or resolution of conflict, power struggles, ideologies and political movements, and the nature of the government and the state, including relations between states. The study of politics is ultimately concerned with important questions about the nature of power and authority, with the relationship between theory and practice, and with trying to understand the nature of social existence and the conditions needed for establishing more desirable forms of human community.

Politics at Monash aims to offer students an understanding of many aspects of the contemporary world, coupled with a solid intellectual grounding in the key debates, texts and traditions of inquiry in which the discipline is immersed. The politics program at Monash specialises in three broad areas:

• politics and governance: Australia and the world
• international relations and global politics
• political theory and philosophy.

Students may specialise in one or more of these areas, but are encouraged to choose their units so as to explore the different approaches to political studies.

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the major, students will be able to:

• recognise, interpret and analyse theoretical and ideological perspectives on politics with regard to key elements of power and public institutions, freedom and transformation, closed and open political systems
• critically discuss and evaluate outlooks on key political debates concerning power, freedom and political change at global, regional, national and local levels
• critically relate political theories and ideas to major contemporary issues of human rights, political violence, value conflict and cultural difference, and to a range of political institutions and processes including leadership contest, political parties, interest groups and social movements
• analyse and constructively criticise a scholarly article or book and put it in an appropriate theoretical and empirical context
• communicate orally and in writing in ways appropriate for an academic community and a general audience
• demonstrate creativity and self-learning through research-based analytical writing assessments
• synthesise skills of creativity, team work, critical thinking, self-learning and analytical writing through differentiated assessment tasks of individual or group oral presentations using multimedia resources and a research-based written essay or report.