Australia

This course examines a pertinent challenge of humankind: how to feed 12 billion people while maintaining the integrity and function of our planet. It challenges participants with contrasting viewpoints for a nuanced understanding of the multidimensional aspects of food production and consumption. Course participants explore the food debate as consumers and scholars, with focus on the science behind innovation of food and food systems, locally and globally. Course participants map the future of food and agriculture with view of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

This course examines how art functions as collective expression of cultures, nations, and communities across history, and develops skills in visual literacy and analysis; image-based communication; and the psychology of visual perception.

This course examines major theories and current research in branding and managing products. It addresses building and measuring brand equity and aims to improve brand-related decisions. Specific topics include brand equity, brand positioning, brand marketing programs and measuring brand performance.

This course examines human-centred approaches to the design of interactive technologies and environments. It covers theoretical concepts, methods and tools used in human-centred design, including user research, ideation, prototyping and user evaluation. It provides students with the principles, processes and tools that are used in commercial design projects. Students learn to build empathy with users, identify the problem space, develop design concepts and persuasively communicate design proposals with an emphasis on the user experience through visual storytelling.

This course examines the turbulent and exciting history of the Roman Republic from its humble beginnings around 500 BCE to the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44 BCE. The first part of this course celebrating this formative period in world history discusses early Rome; the social, political and religious institutions of the Republic as they gradually emerged from 509 to 264 BCE; and the Roman conquest of Italy and its significance. The second part concerns the high point of the Roman Republic, approximately the period from 264 to 133 BCE, including discussions of the Punic Wars and the conquest of the Mediterranean, and its tremendous consequences for the Republic. The third and final part deals with the Republic’s troubled last century and surveys the ill-fated Gracchan reforms; the first full-fledged breakdown of the Republican system and the Sullan reaction; the social, economic and cultural life of this period; the rise of the great dynasts; and Caesar’s temerarious attempt to establish a New Order.

This course examines the field of environmental sociology. In particular, it examines how societies build a sense of human/nature divide into their concepts of collective identity and how the struggle to responsibly utilize natural resources is a vexing social problem. It focuses on environmental social movements globally, analyzing how this growing site of social conflict interacts with other inequalities. It also explores the social transformations being enacted globally to build sustainability, improve human/animal coexistence, address environmental racism, and to think about climate change risk beyond the nation-state.

This course examines group theory and ring theory, with a view towards commutative algebra, algebraic number theory and representation theory.

Contemporary Jewish identity is commonly refracted through the prism of two seminal historical events: the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. However, at the dawn of the 21st century, closer examination reveals that Jewish identity is today an increasingly diverse and ever changing entity. This unit will probe and explore the reasons for this heterogeneity, identifying and interrogating the intersections between the religious, cultural and political currents shaping today's Jewish identities in diverse communal and state settings.