Bachelor of Arts (Deans Scholars) in Innovation and Change

at Western Sydney University - Bankstown Campus Australia

The Organisations and Work major is designed for people interested in careers in organisational development, where there is emphasis on human resource management.

Graduates have knowledge of how leadership and management of people can support organisational objectives and create organisational opportunities.

That is, graduates develop commercial acumen and appreciate the competing interests around work, aware of trends locally and internationally. Throughout the major, students are challenged to develop and demonstrate communication, cultural, and analytic skills required to be innovative and responsible team-members and leaders.

With our revamped Bachelor of Business, you’re the boss. Start your major in your first year of study. Combine business subjects with majors and electives from across the whole university for a more diverse and adaptive skill set. Mix theory with real world industry projects. Gain industry-specific accreditation from Australia’s leading institutions.

Sport Management

The Sport Management major is designed for people who seek careers in Australian and international Sport management.

Specialist units provide students with a capacity to understand and function within the increasingly dedicated context in which sport is played, organised and managed.

Students who complete this major will be equipped with the skills and knowledge to manage sport experiences pertaining to globalisation and emerging contemporary issues in sport. Graduates find career employment at all levels of government as well as within the private sector for both commercial and non-commercial organisations.

Positions include project management of facilities and events, management and coordination of leisure, sport and civic event departments, sport marketing, player management and sport public relations, elite sport development, sport and leisure programming.

The Peace and Development Studies major is concerned with methods for promoting peace, human rights and sustainability. It involves a critical analysis of inequalities of power and opportunity that lead to international and local conflict, social dislocation and environmental degradation. Students will examine the structural causes of racist and gendered violence, environmental crises, forced migration, poverty, resource conflict, and inter-generational inequity.

The inter-related network of solutions includes empowerment and self-determination, sustainable living, constructive development, peacemaking and peace building.

These require understanding of the theories and method for identifying, measuring and resolving conflict and environmental degradation. The assumptions and failings of traditional development practice are critically assessed. Students will engage social theory within an interdisciplinary and applied framework, at local, national and international levels.

The major is comprised of three fields: 1) structural inequality, social justice & human rights; 2) development and sustainability; 3) peace and humanitarian responses/actions.

Since the revival of humanist thought in the Renaissance, universities have placed studies in history and political thought at the centre of exploring what it is to be human.

At the heart of the History and Political Thought major are four compulsory units which introduce the student to the modern (since 1500) history of humanity. Although Europe is very prominent in the Major, the student will be invited to compare its history to the histories of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The Major culminates in a capstone unit in students’ final semester discussing historical theories and methods. A wide range of elective units covers European, American, Australian and Asian history and political thought and includes thematic units which range widely over time and place.

Language majors will enable you to develop an appropriate level of proficiency in a second language, which may be used for professional purposes such as teaching, interpreting and translation, business or international relations.

If you are undertaking a language major in Indonesian, you will be able to use the language in question according to its grammatical and pragmatic principles, communicate with native speakers appropriately in the spoken as well as the written mode, and demonstrate an understanding of the cultures and societies associated with the language.

The major in Sociology provides students with a thorough training in the methods, theories and select leading areas of contemporary sociology.

As well as units in which methods and theories are taught, through the social science core, students enrolled in the Sociology major will have opportunities to study a number of particular themes from a sociological perspective, including inequalities, deviance, identities, gender, religion, medicine and health care, ethnicity and migration, and the family, among other possibilities.

This criminology major offers students the opportunity to study crime and criminal justice in a critical way that particularly stresses social and cultural definitions of criminality and the reactions to it.

Areas of focus include criminal justice institutions and practices; the development of criminology as a discipline and its various strands; forms and patterns of victimisation; crime prevention strategies and debates; aspects of juvenile justice; the evolution of prisons and different forms of punishment; law enforcement and surveillance; violence, gender and crime; cultural depictions of crime and contemporary debates in criminology.

The Bachelor of Arts (Dean’s Scholars) degree is designed to develop your communication and personal skills, creativity, capacity for independent thought, adaptability to new situations, and problem-solving abilities.

Islamic studies

In this major you will engage in interdisciplinary study essential to an understanding of Islam, past and present. The area of study balances historical and modern Islamic studies and research methods. One of the keys to Islamic Studies is ‘relevance’ to contemporary Australian society, but relevance can only come from a sound comprehension of past traditions in Islamic scholarship and their socio-historical contexts.

Preparation for graduate study is also a key objective of this program, with its focus on developing critical and interdisciplinary research skills through a combination of approaches.

This combined degree is designed for students who want to combine their interest and expertise in International Relations and Asian Studies with a good understanding of basic business issues, complemented by a high level of knowledge relevant to a specific business discipline.

Graduates will have a solid grounding in the relationships of societies, cultures, languages and systems of government within the international system.

Students will develop their capacity to appreciate the historical development of relations among nation states, and analyse contemporary political, economic, social and cultural issues such as globalisation, transnationalism and migration.

Students complete a major in International Relations and Asian Studies, a minor in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish or Japanese languages, and a major in Marketing. When combined with a high level of knowledge from the specific business majors, you will be ready for the workplace of the future.

Economics

The Economics major provides a broad pluralist perspective on fundamental aspects of relationships between individuals, firms, institutions and countries. Students will learn how economies function and how public policy and the way organisations behave affect diverse social, economic and environmental problems.

Students are introduced to a wide array of competing economic theories, so that they are critically informed about the ways in which they can transform the world. A major in Economics prepares students to be active participants in addressing the wide range of problems faced by governments, social organisations and the business community in the domestic and international economies. 

We all had that one teacher who made a difference in our life. Western prepares you to be that person. This degree offers a mix of theory and real-world experience, so you emerge as a highly sought-after primary-school teacher. You will also graduate with the ability to thrive in careers outside the classroom, like working in policy, curriculum development, education and administration.