Australia

This course examines the ways in which light interacts with surfaces, objects, and the human visual system. It covers some of the fundamental properties of light, mechanisms of human perception, and the ways that light interacts with surfaces. 

This course examines concepts as diverse as the origin of the Solar System through to the evolution of life. It will touch on the big geological processes that have shaped our planet, covering topics including plate tectonics, volcanology, earthquakes and climate change. 

This course examines sex, love, and attraction in humans and other animals from a broad-based perspective including comparative, psychobiological, cross-cultural, and evolutionary approaches. An emphasis of the course is placed on evolutionary concepts and how these could be used to interpret sex, love, and attraction. It covers topics such as relationships, sexual behavior, social monogamy, paternity, parenting, and menopause.

This course examines Indigenous Australian peoples and their music making; diverse forms of Indigenous performance; and how Indigenous Australian performers simultaneously resist and use colonialist constructions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performance to create new and exciting forms.

This course examines the economic transformation of less-developed countries from microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives. It covers applied topics such as education, health, nutrition, demographics, labor, agriculture and the private sector, focusing on how policies attempt to overcome market and institutional failures that are particularly acute in the developing world. 

This course examines the use of economic tools to assess and develop environmental protection strategies. This includes methods for evaluating “environmentally friendly” products, projects and policies in terms of their benefits and costs. Benefits considered include marketed benefits, such as energy savings and avoided property losses, and non-marketed benefits, such as improvements in human health and conservation of biological diversity. Economic tools for solving environmental problems that will be considered in the subject include taxes on environmentally harmful activities, tax deductions for “environmentally friendly” activities, making polluters or “risk creators” pay for environmental damages, and allowing private ownership of environmental assets.

This course provides an opportunity for students to gain experience in a research laboratory in the School of Psychology. Students will participate in the day to day running of a research laboratory, which may involve attending lab meetings, assisting with conducting research, and conducting literature searches.