This course engages with the social and public policy challenges facing states and citizens across the world.

It introduces students to core issues, concepts, actors and debates shaping our understanding of social and public policy, its drivers and impacts. It outlines the questions raised by efforts to ensure a healthy, educated and productive population, to protect those without other means of support, and to reduce inequalities of e.g. gender, class, and ethnicity. It discusses diverse policy approaches to these issues, their ideological underpinnings, and the varying configurations of actors involved in the policy process - the state, the market, civil society, the family, and international organisations. 

The course explores applications to a range of policy domains, such as education, urbanisation, health, family, social care, migration, inequality and redistribution, and to varied country contexts. The course is informed by an international and comparative approach that considers both rich and poor country contexts and international dimensions and locates these within a historical understanding of both national and global processes.

Photo | Collage of the "Upside Down World' near the Peacock Theatre | Sunil Kumar