Course Descriptions

This course provides an opportunity to increase students’ knowledge about which levels of government formulate and deliver social policy across Canada. Course materials explore the connections between these policies and the economic and political context within which practitioners work. Comparisons of the development, implementation, and evaluation of policies both by government and the workplace situate the human services in its rapidly changing environment.

As Canadians, we all know something about the Canadian health care system. We gain much of our knowledge through personal experience, using a number of health care services through our lifetimes. It is also unlikely that our friends and family members have entirely escaped the need for health care. Knowledge can also be gained by working in the health care system, or by studying various health-related topics. Finally, most of us have read or heard media reports on development in the Canadian health care system.

This course explores the evolution of policing to the present day, with a focus on the community-based approaches to frontline operational policing that tended to dominate the late twentieth century. The shifting role of publicly funded police organizations is examined in light of relatively recent technological developments and the consequent transformation of today's social fabric. All of this has been largely driven by the increasingly transparent nature of modern Western society.

This course provides an overview and theoretical understanding of the common elements and differences that shape leadership in the public, voluntary, and private sectors and the implications of these similarities and differences for the interaction among the three sectors on public policy issues. You will have an opportunity to learn about the basic ideas and debates concerning the nature of leadership in each sector and how institutions and processes of management and governance in each sector shape the development of its leaders and their role.

This course surveys the psychological and sociological impact of computers on the people who use them. The course situates the computer in the history of mediated communication by examining such key factors in computer-mediated communication as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet. Implications of these factors for the nature of human experience with computers are then explored in selected applied units on the cellphone, augmented reality, video games, and health information. Students have ample opportunity to connect theory and actual experience through online research and discussion.

This course is designed to introduce the conceptual tools of medical anthropology. It will give students the opportunity to apply these tools to a consideration of the health status of First Nations people in Canada and of the role of medical pluralism in a culturally diverse nation state.

This course will introduce students to both theoretical and applied aspects of victimology. More specifically, the course focuses on the methods of research in victimology, the determination and utilization of crime rate data, the role of victims in crime, the treatment of victims in the criminal justice system, the psychological and social consequences of specific types of victimization (e.g., victims of sexual assault, family violence, child abuse), a critical analysis of how the needs of victims are addressed in North American society, and finally, future directions in recognizing the rights of crime victims and meeting their needs.

Health Care Law is a rapidly growing field of study in the Canadian Health Care system and health care law field. Health Care and human services professionals working in hospital settings as well as community-based care facilities should benefit from this course. This course provides an understanding of the Canadian legal system relevant to clinical practice and policy-making. The building blocks of legal analysis are essential to getting the most from this course.

This course is designed to identify those groups, and the various characteristics of those groups, that have special needs with respect to policing. Identifying and assessing these needs within the policing context will better equip police officers to protect and work within these various communities. The purpose of this course is to provide you with a broad understanding of the diverse policing needs within a community, the diversity within a community, and how policing needs change over time. As the dynamics of a community change, so do the ways in which it is policed.

This course examines issues of literacy and agency as they pertain to questions of children's relationship to texts and materials in media of many kinds: books, films, broadcast and recorded programs, CD-ROMs, computer programs, video games, Internet texts, and various toys and associated commodities. These media affect how children develop an understanding of society and of the way society chooses to tell stories and organize information. In turn, these media are affected by social arrangements and decisions.

This course is intended for students of media relations, practitioners and those with a more general or theoretical interest. It relies on theories of the mass media in order to address the role of media relations in organizations and the practice of media relations in the context of both old and new media. The course makes use of current issues and topics in order to explore the historically complex relationship between journalists and media relations practitioners.