MRPE Elective Course Options
Fall 2024
| Course Code | Course Title & Outline | Department |
| ANT 9232A | Anthropology in the Virtual World (Virtual) | Anthropology |
| GEO 9107A | Environment and Health | Geography |
| GEO 9113A | Geographical Data and Analysis | Geography |
| GEO 9116A | Indigenous Health | Geography |
| GEO 9118A | Policy Formation and Futures | Geography |
| HIS 9806A | Understanding Archives | History |
| HIS 9844A | Indigenous History | History |
| POL 9520A | Public Policy and Governance | Political Science |
| POL 9595A | Experimental Design | Political Science |
| PSY 9621A | Work Attitudes and Behaviour | Psychology |
| PSY 9734A | Romantic Relationship Development | Psychology |
| SOC 9258A | Inequality Over the Life Course | Sociology |
Winter 2025
| Course Code | Course Title & Outline | Department |
| ANT 9215B | Discourse and Society | Anthropology |
| ANT 9233B | Faces and Phases of Nations and Nationalisms | Anthropology |
| GEO 9110B | Introduction to GIS | Geography |
| GEO 9115B | Urban Social Cultural Geography | Geography |
| GEO 9120B | Energy and Environmental Justice | Geography |
| POL 9524B | Urban Political Economy | Political Science |
| PSY 9552B | Regression and Factor Aanalsysi | Psychology |
| PSY 9612B | Personal Selection | Psychology |
| PSY 9632B | Systematic and Scoping Review Methods | Psychology |
| SOC 9007B | Advanced Statistics | Sociology |
Courses are subject to change, dependent on the core course schedule.
All courses require department and instructor approval. Please contact Leha Huffman at mrpe@uwo.ca for further information on enrollment procedures and scheduled dates and times.
Course Descriptions
Fall 2024
ANT9232A - Anthropology in the Virtual World (Virtual)
As our worlds and lives become increasingly shaped by virtual interactions and connections, anthropological research has shifted to incorporate the virtual world and community. In this course, students will explore the theory and practice of virtual anthropology and the opportunities and challenges that might be encountered as we conduct ethnographic research in virtual worlds. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to craft their own virtual ethnography research projects and develop valuable online research skills. To align with the research topic, this course will be held online and we will discuss the benefits and drawbacks of virtual technologies for education.
GEO 9107A - Environment and Health
The conceptual frameworks for environmental health research and policy analysis. Appraisal of methods of deriving and substantiating evidence in environment and health research. Approaches to environmental health policy formulation and the uses of evidence in the environmental health policy arena.
GEO 9113A - Geographical Data and Analysis
This course will expose students to modern techniques for processing and analyzing geospatial data using computational and statistical methods. We will explore ideas related to ‘big data’, ‘machine learning’, ‘data mining’, and ‘data science’. Students will develop skills in computer programming, data handling, statistics, and geographical data analysis.
In this seminar-based course, we will critically examine key determinants of Indigenous health, including basic concepts, theories, methods and ethical issues outlined in the contemporary indigenous health literature.
GEO 9118A - Policy Formation and Futures
This course is an advanced seminar on policy formation and policy futures. There is long-standing interest in policy development beginning with agents and influencers, adoption and development, implementation and outcomes and to some extent policy evaluation. This course takes a critical and analytical approach to understanding and analyzing policy formation and futures focused in particular on public policy.
HIS 9806A - Understanding Archives: The Management of Primary Sources in the Digital Age
This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamentals of professional archival work. Class sessions will primarily be lecture driven, but combine discussion, practical exercises, and demonstrations. Students will gain a solid grounding in the history of the profession, an understanding of basic archival terminology, principles, theory, as well as an appreciation of current practices and how digital technologies have impacted both archival management and public programming.
HIS 9844A - Indigenous History
This course considers new directions in the historical study of Indigenous peoples and recognizes the ways in which the academic discipline of history can impact contemporary issues such as the recognition or denial of Indigenous national identities.
POL 9520A - Public Policy and Goverance
TBA
POL 9595A - Experimental Design
Social scientists seek to describe, explain, and predict social phenomena. Increasingly, scholars are using experiments to better understand mechanisms and investigate causal claims underlying human behaviour. Political scientists have established a strong foundation of survey experiments, field experiments, and a growing number of lab experiments to test questions regarding vote choice, group attitudes, public opinion, and policy preferences. Students in this course will: (1) be introduced to and evaluate survey, lab, and field experiments, understanding tradeoffs between internal and external validity; (2) devise an experiment to test a question of interest to their research; (3) learn about and engage with open science practices, including creating pre-analysis plans, registered reports, and transparent data/code; and (4) critically engage experimental work from ethical, democratic, and inclusive perspectives.
PSY 9621A - Work Attitudes and Behaviour
TBA
PSY 9734A - Romantic Relationship Development
TBA
SOC 9258A - Inequality Over the Life Course
This class is designed to introduce you to the Life Course Perspective as a lens for viewing and understanding social inequality. A Life Course Perspective focuses on the intersection of individual lives, social structure and inequality, and social change. It emphasizes inequalities in experiences across individual lives and the way those patterns are shaped by broader social inequalities, history and change. This approach can be combined with other theoretical frames and applied to a wide range of substantive questions related to health, work, family, education, migration, political attitudes, and criminal careers and course readings provide some examples of these applications. A main goal of this course is to apply aspects of a Life Course Perspective to your own substantive interests to gain greater understanding of social inequality.
Winter 2025
ANT 9215B - Discourse and Society
Discourse analysis provides empirical grounding for explanations and interpretations of culture, society and social behaviour. Attention to discourse (language in use as talk or text) reveals the diversity of perspectives within cultural and social groups, reminding us to be critical of generalizations we make, while deepening our understanding of issues. In this course, we will explore how discourse is shaped by many things including the world as we know it, the structures of language itself, socio-political relations, prior discourses, the limitations and possibilities of the medium, and various interactional goals. Examples of discourse features include: discourse markers, slang, stance, style, framing, register, genre, language choice, and reported speech.
ANT 9233B - Faces and Phases of Nations and Nationalisms
From its liberationist anti-colonial moment, to its ugly racist and fascist face, nationalism - the ideological motor of the ‘nation’ and nation-state has multiple faces and phases. Most scholars agree that the genesis of national consciousness and the concept of the ‘nation’ are attributed to the two momentous revolutions of the 18th century: The North American colonies’ rebellion against Great Britain leading to the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and the French Revolution (1789) – the latter having literally beheaded Absolutism in the figure of Louis the XVI. These momentous events fomented the meaning of the ‘nation’ as a social unit, or in Anderson’s famous expression, imagined community, a unity among equal and free citizens with authority to invest sovereignty in the state – the ‘nation-state’ – thereby obscuring class struggles and other social fissures in society.
GEO 9110B - Introduction to GIS
Introduction to fundamental concepts, techniques and applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This is an entry-level course for students who wish to apply GIS to their own research. Students gain hands-on experience using the ArcGIS software and develop problem-solving skills.
GEO 9115B - Urban Social Cultural Geography
An examination of classical and contemporary literature on the social and cultural processes and practices underlying the forms, designs and social practices of urban built environments.
GEO 9120B - Energy and Environmental Justice
This seminar course explores environmental and social impacts of energy production, equity issues related to energy access, and political and economic forces shaping energy decisions. Theories of justice drawn from philosophy, political ecology and social movements are applied to Canadian and international cases. While energy is the course theme, the underlying questions apply to many areas of environment, development and health: How are ‘national’ interests defined and weighed against ‘local’ interests? What is the relationship between economic gain and quality of life? How can political decisions account for the needs of future generations? And how can we mediate between diverse values and priorities in society?
POL 9524B - Urban Political Economy
What is political power? Who has it? How is it acquired? How is its use enabled or constrained? How are political and economic power inter-related? This course takes up these foundational questions in the urban context. We will survey classic and contemporary theories of urban political economy. The first half of the course examines perspectives on the acquisition and exercise of power in the city. The second half considers the power of the city—in an increasingly borderless world, is there such a thing as an autonomous local politics, or must urban political economy be understood only in relation to broader forces? How do the institutional layering and fragmentation that characterize urban governance shape the exercise of political power? As these ideas have developed in relation to one another through time, the flow is chronological.
PSY 9552B - Regression and Factor Analysis
This course covers various regression-based procedures that fall within the general linear model as well as an introduction to generalized linear model methods such as logistic, multinomial, ordinal and poisson regression. Within multiple linear regression, we cover moderation and non-experimental design in depth including concepts of causality and methods of statistical control. We consider limitations of traditional mediation designs and improved methods. The course includes demonstrations of the parallels between regression methods and both ANOVA and ANCOVA, and also introducesmultilevel modeling. Also covered are factor analytic methods including exploratory and confirmatory approaches in the context of test construction and validation. The course work consists entirely of lab assignments that provide hands-on training in generating hypotheses and designs, conducting power analyses and analyzing data, interpreting and reporting results. Demonstrations are provided using various software (e.g., R, Jamovi, JASP, Mplus, and SPSS).
PSY 9612B - Personal Selection
TBA
PSY 9632B - Systematic and Scoping Review Methods
This course will prepare students to understand review methods and use systematic and scoping reviews to identify and synthesize available literature involving a given topic. Students will progress through the steps for conducting a review in a workshop-based environment focused on planning and implementing a review of their own; ranging from research question formulation to article screening and coding.
SOC 9007B - Advanced Statistics
In this course we will cover the most common statistical techniques in the practice of sociology - linear regression, logistic regression, and survival analysis (event history analysis). We will discuss the uses of these techniques and the assumptions that we make when using them. Throughout the course, we will discuss how to develop an answerable research question, how to choose the best modeling strategy for that question, and how to interpret the results of quantitative analysis in light of relevant hypotheses. There will also be an applied portion of the class held in the computer lab, where we will talk through basic issues that come up when working with data, such as missing data; saving data, code, and output; and making tables. The last portion of the course will focus on writing about multivariate analysis - communicating questions, methods, and results clearly.
