Bachelor of Social Work

at Carleton University Canada

Carleton’s innovative philosophy programs offer courses ranging over the history of philosophy, ethics and social/political philosophy, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics and epistemology. Starting in first year, you will have the opportunity to take a seminar class (of 30 students) that challenges you to develop your skills in reading philosophical texts and making philosophical arguments. In second year, you will take two courses that are offered just for philosophy majors, ensuring that you have the skills you need to do your best. In fourth year, you will study in seminar classes where the professors share with you, at your level, the new knowledge that they are helping to create.

The Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (EURUS) offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the study of Europe, Russia and Eurasia. You will be able to build a program according to your specific interests, combining subjects such as history, politics, economics, language and culture. You will examine issues such as international security, nationalism and ethnic conflict, crime and corruption, the effects of globalization, migration and multiculturalism, environmental and social policy, democratization and civil society, collective memory and national identity, market reform and European integration. In your third or fourth year, you may choose to take part in an academic exchange in a European country or in Russia and/or co-op employment. In addition to the core academic program, the Institute hosts a number of special lectures by high-profile experts, foreign visitors and embassy personnel throughout the year. An internship program is available to qualified fourth-year students.

Carleton’s Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies offers a program that engages students in critically understanding the key issues of feminist scholarship and their relationship to our lived experience. Students have the opportunity to engage in activist activities, study gender in courses across disciplines, and do a practicum placement with feminist groups from inside and outside the Carleton community. Central to our program is the consideration of how gender intersects with race, class, ethnicity, age, ability and sexuality. Students explore the practices and processes that impact on women’s and men’s lives in historical, socio-economic, cultural and political contexts.

With more media outlets than ever before and misinformation swirling around us, it’s essential to develop a discerning eye. The B.CoMS program will give you the tools you need to cut through the clutter. As you build a solid academic foundation, you will learn to recognize, analyze and respond to ongoing patterns and transformations in the media and communications environment.

Students in the Computational and Applied Mathematics and Statistics program will acquire the knowledge and skills needed to pursue careers involving the design of computers and computer networks as well as the application of computers in solving critical problems in business, government and science. For example, you might find yourself developing new ways to protect information from both improper access and corruption during transmission, helping managers in business and government to allocate resources optimally, or using computer networks to study traffic flow and optimal routing.

Where better to study politics than the nation’s capital? Our location in Ottawa provides you with numerous chances to see politics not only nationally but internationally. You will examine such topics of study as international relations, transitions to democracy, parties and elections, globalization and social movements, and the culture and ideas of politics.

International or local exchanges are an exciting possibility during your third year, and you may also choose to undertake an internship of your choosing, with permission of the undergraduate supervisor. In fourth year, an internship with the Washington Center is an option for consideration.

Economics may be a specialized area of knowledge, but it is relevant to almost every aspect of our lives. At its core, it is the study of reasoned choice in the context of scarce resources and competing interests. The need to make such choices pervades the day-to-day lives of all of us—as individuals and in society as a whole.

In Carleton’s Bachelor of Economics (BEcon), you will study the operation of market-based economies, examining the causes of economic growth, inflation, unemployment and international trade. Students who wish to focus their studies in particular areas may choose to complete one or two of the eight available concentrations:

• Computational Analysis
• Development
• Economic Theory (recommended for students intending to pursue graduate studies in economics)
• Economic Data Science
• Financial Economics
• International Political Economy
• Mathematics and Quantitative Economics
• Natural Resources, Environment, and Economy

Anthropologists study human beings, globally and cross-culturally, and recognise that each way of life is but one possibility among many. In a pluralistic world, where people from different places and backgrounds frequently interact, anthropology is an important tool for helping us understand each other and the rapid changes going on around us. Anthropology offers the potential to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a person, to question what passes as “normal” or “natural”, and to examine the world we inhabit as interconnected by environmental, political, economic, cultural and social forces.

While anthropologists have traditionally studied in small scale, non-Western societies, today we apply our participatory research methods and a combination of humanistic and social scientific perspectives to all kinds of situations: if people do it, you can study it as an anthropologist.

Carleton’s anthropology program specializes in socio-cultural anthropology, which is the study of contemporary societies and cultures through direct engagement, participant-observation and other qualitative methods. Our faculty work in various contexts and communities in Alaska, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Thailand, the Andes, and Sub-Saharan Africa, among others. Our faculty specialize in a range of topics including:

• The study of Indigenous people’s lives in context (e.g. indigenous-state relations; governance & colonialism; language; urban indigenous communities).
• Environmental issues (e.g. human-environmental relations; subsistence politics; the Anthropocene; climate change; natural resources)
• Transnational & global issues (e.g. transnational adoption; development; migration; diaspora; sex tourism)
• Race, ethnicity, and nationalism (e.g. ethno-history; ethno-politics)
• Selfhood, personhood, subjectivity, identity, psychiatric anthropology, and phenomenology;
• Genders and sexualities (e.g. motherhood; reproductive health; gendered childhood; feminist theories/methodologies).
• Political economy (e.g. global capitalisms; processes of commodification; capitalist and non-capitalist societies)

Neuroscience is a new, exciting, and rapidly expanding scientific discipline that aims to understand how physical processes in our brains underlie complex functions such as movement, sensation, memory, emotion, consciousness and thought. Faculty and students in Neuroscience are particularly interested in how diseases that affect the brain lead to mental health problems, with the focus of our research including depression, Parkinson’s disease, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease and concussion. Our research, like our academic programs, integrates information from many disciplines including medicine, molecular biology, psychology, immunology, genetics, chemistry and epidemiology.

Historians of art and architecture study visual communication. In Carleton’s Art History program, we study the great monuments of Western culture—painting, sculpture and buildings—but we also study Asian and other non-Western art, North American Indigenous art, photography, printmaking and popular culture as well as the institutions of art itself: museums, galleries and exhibitions.

Our material ranges from the prehistoric to the present day. Our students come away from the program with direct experience of collections of art here in the National Capital Region and a historical framework for understanding imagery, as well as an awareness of the multiple possibilities for interpreting art, architecture and other visual phenomena.

Specifically, we examine how representations work. We analyze the products of the human imagination and the visual expressions of different societies. Such analyses produce a historical awareness as well as an understanding of modes of expression in different cultures. This knowledge provides students with the intellectual tools that allow them to function as informed and thoughtful individuals in and increasingly visual and globalized society.