BASS Social Anthropology and Sociology

This course offers an introduction to demography, i.e., to the field of population studies and deals with the social, cultural, and economic factors that influence populations and demographic measures. Students learn to critically reflect on data and data sources and put population development into context.  

The course covers the basic population processes of fertility, mortality, and migration, and more specific ones such as population growth, the world population, consequences of population aging and family change. Important societal issues related to population development, population structure, and population policy are studied both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. The course covers different demographic theories and debates surrounding population development.  

• Introduce to the basic questions, research topics, and concepts in demography  
• Give an overview of the basic population processes of mortality, fertility, and migration  
• Discuss in more detail some core population questions and demographic issues (i.e. population ageing, population growth, global inequality etc.)  
• Give students the opportunity to research into demographic questions  
• Develop critical thinking skills with focus on data reliability and measurements  

At the end of the course students will be able to:  

• Describe and explain basic demographic terms  
• Provide an overview of main issues of population developments  
• Compare different demographic perspectives as they appear in the literature  
• Provide an overview of global population developments in historical and contemporary perspectives and discuss main forces behind these developments  
• Compare demographic data across countries and critically reflect on their appropriateness  
• Identify and discuss causes and consequences of population issues (i.e. ageing etc.)  
• Provide an overview of population policies and analyse different approaches to population issues that exist internationally  

Lectures and seminars.  

Total study hours: 200 hours split between lectures, seminars, self-study and preparation for classes, coursework and examinations.  

Full written feedback is provided for both the group presentations and the essays.  

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a  
student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers. We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Blackboard; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.  

Gould, W. T. S. Population and Development. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2015. 

Weeks, John. 2012. An Introduction to Population. Eleventh (or any other) edition.  

International Edition. Belmont CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.  

Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 2012. A Concise History of World Population. Fifth (or any other) edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.