Australia

This course examines the principles and practices of sustainable urban development and the legacy of design at multiple spatial and temporal scales. This course will provide an understanding of the interacting physical processes between urbanization and the local environment as well as issues in global sustainability such as certification of materials and utility of urban land use types. 

This course examines the applications of ecological concepts for the conservation and management of natural and human-altered ecosystems. In particular, it identifies the implications of global and local changes for ecosystems, communities and individual species, especially within the Australian environment. It examines approaches to management and conservation of terrestrial resources and ecosystems, the control of pest species, and restoration of modified habitats.

This course examines environmental issues with the aid of economic theory. Topics include sustainability of economies; pollution as an externality; approaches to dealing with pollution in different countries; methods of valuing the environment and environmental damage; effect on future generations; environmental amenity as a public good; and the environment and economic development.

This course examines geology, paleontology and Earth’s systems. It covers plate tectonics, the formation of rocks and minerals, the evolution of the atmosphere, and the origin of the hydrosphere. Students will gain knowledge about the evolution of life and what the fossil record tells us about past climates and ecosystems. The course will provide a basis in advanced measurement techniques using ground-, aircraft-, and satellite-based systems. Students will also learn how to use their understanding of geological processes to investigate and manage environmental issues. A comprehensive understanding of Earth’s processes is critical for the development of sustainable societies, protecting our ecosystems, sourcing materials for modern technologies, and economic growth.

This course, relying on economic frameworks, explores historical and contemporary Indigenous populations and these peoples’ participation in and marginalization from the contemporary Australian economy and society. Incorporating First Peoples ' diverse perspectives, we consider contemporary First Nations’ and other Indigenous peoples’ economic activities in an historical context. Students have the opportunity to develop insight into First Nations perspectives on economic development, wellbeing and prosperity. We explore First Peoples' innovative responses to contemporary challenges borne of the ongoing impacts of colonization and systemic bias. Topics change each year, and include the continuities of First Peoples’ practices in resource management and communal sustenance; innovative engagements with the settler and global economy; demographic and population change; land, water and sea rights; human capital development; income and wealth; participation in the labor market; and, entrepreneurship. 

This course examines the city of Rome itself, its turbulent history, its empire and its vibrant culture. 

This course examines the history of philosophy across several traditions, as well as contemporary research, to explore questions such as, what is the relationship between happiness and pleasure? Is happiness an emotion, a mental state, a social construct, or an objective condition? How is well-being/happiness pursued across different cultures, including Australian Indigenous cultures? And what does happiness have to do, if anything, with the philosophical idea of a well-lived life? This course doesn’t promise to make you happy, but it will certainly help you to clarify your thinking about happiness and the meaning(s) of life.

This course examines gender, sex and sexuality across a range of cultural settings seeking, in the process, to question most of what we - including most theorists of sex/gender - take for granted about the gendered and sexed character of human identity and difference. Topics explored include: the saliency of the categories man and woman; the relationships between race and gender; the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in the representation of gender, sex and sexuality; the usefulness of the notion of oppression; the relationship between cultural conceptions of personhood and cultural conceptions of gender; and the ethnocentricity of the concepts of gender, sex and sexuality themselves. To assist these explorations we will make use of cross-cultural case studies in a number of areas including rape, prostitution, work and domesticity, the third sex and homosexuality.

This course examines the theoretical and practical understanding of the psychology of communication skills and their application in everyday life, conflict management, dating, the workplace, intergroup situations, and even in how you talk to yourself. The course is designed to give you an exciting scientific overview of, and basic working competence in, communication skills. It covers communication and social skills; listening and the difficulty of doing so; conflict escalation and resolution; mating, dating, and relationships; communication across group boundaries; trolling and romance scamming; persuasion; cross-cultural communication norms; sex and/or gender differences in communication patterns; public speaking; organizational communication and leadership; and self-communication.

Our central question in this  course will be the extent to which our everyday experiences are determined by the nature of the world itself versus the extent to which they're determined by the structure of our own minds. Our approach to this question will be multi-faceted, drawing on philosophical texts, films and literary works, as well as our personal experiences. In topic 1, the nature of the world, we'll discuss Realism, Idealism, and Skepticism. Is the world really as it seems intuitively to be to us (Realism) or is it just a projection of our minds (Idealism). In topic 2, the nature of the self, we'll examine (i) what changes you can undergo and still remain yourself, (ii) the extent to which your personality and mind are constructed by you vs. being given to you by nature or upbringing, and (iii) whether genuine relationships exist between you and others or whether it's mostly a projection on your part. In topic 3, the nature of time, we'll examine time. Does only the present moment exist or does reality consist of many moments of time - some past, some present, and some future? Is there really any such thing as time or is it, as Kant says, just a feature of our minds? Does contemporary physics show there's no such thing as time, or is there a way to reconcile the findings of physics with our intuitive view that time exists?