Macquarie University

Strategic Thinkers - PICX851

This unit provides a capstone experience through the critical survey of key texts in the multidisciplinary field of security studies. The unit is not lecture-based, but is conducted as a reading-intensive seminar. Students will read a selection of classic texts and, through a series of review essays, glean, apply, critique, and compare insights from those texts as they relate both to the academic discipline of security studies and to real-world security questions. The readings will develop the intellectual history of the field, allowing for an examination of shifting conceptual frameworks and research traditions, and for a comparison of alternative methodological approaches. And they will highlight important substantive questions that matter for security policy and practice. In particular, students will be encouraged to undertake a critical examination of the assumptions that underlie important debates and issues in the field today. Students are required to read three or four full texts over the course of the unit.

All enrolment queries should be directed to Open Universities Australia (OUA): see www.open.edu.au