English

This course introduces and engages in contemporary scholarly reflection on critical animal studies, posthumanism, and ecotheology. Students engage with theological perspectives on the definitions of “humanity,” “animality,” and “creatureliness.” They explore a number of theo-ethical topics in this area from animal conservation to food. Recent questions in ecological ethics swirl around “the question of the human” and “the question of the animal.” Theological and ethical concepts that define human beings as unique, with souls created imago dei, in the image of God with dominion over the planet are critiqued as being morally complicit with species decline, animal suffering, and habitat loss. On a planet undergoing the sixth great wave of animal extinction, this critique is no small matter. This course discusses how we understand the human in relation to other nonhuman creatures that occupy the planet. Students consider animal ethics, the blurry lines between wild and domestic, human and nonhuman, living and extinct, veganism and vegetarianism, human and posthuman and ask how these conversations cause us to rethink theological understandings of “creatureliness” and “creation” and “kinship.” The course asks how definitions of what it means to be “human” are already entangled in our theo-ethical and ecological concerns.

This course examines psychological theory, research, and skills training related to sport performance, exercise motivation, and adherence.

This course introduces the fundamental concepts and research directions of comparative government and politics and employs these methods and concepts to examine the political structure of various governments. What is comparative politics? The course then proceeds to explore research methods of comparative politics to build students’ basic abilities to engage in comparative political research. Subsequently, the course examines diverse political systems and structures, including democracies and autocracies, constitutional design, electoral systems, and party systems from a cross-national perspective.  

This lecture course begins with several recent historical and cultural assessments of Europe’s relationship to the orient in the early eighteenth century, together with an overview of the ways in which the popular taste for oriental tales was marginalized by the rise of the novel as the quintessential British literary form. Students examine the vogue of chinoiserie and the rise of sentimentalism and the man of feeling, before turning to an examination of works by British Romantic writers who variously imagine, engage with and negotiate cultures, lands and peoples from the East. Through an analysis of Coleridge’s Eastern fables, Percy Shelley’s evocations of the Indian muse, Byron’s oriental romances, Mary Shelley’s depictions of otherness and De Quincey’s encounter with the Malay, students interrogate the extent to which these tales, romances and musings are reflective of open engagement and productive influence, and to what extent they can be seen as attempts to control and subjugate an otherness.

This course develops a level of competence in Python, a modern programming language currently used in many physics research labs for mathematical modelling. No prior experience is required. The course starts with a grounding in the use of Python and discusses numerical methods. The main focus is then on the ways in which Python can be used for problem solving in physics and astrophysics.

This course examine core theories and frameworks used in geography to account for the social, spatial and economic unevenness in global development. it focuses on questions relating to who are the winners and losers from contemporary patterns of global economic change. This includes the analysis of relevant conceptual approaches to understand processes of global development and inequality (including comparative advantage, global value chain theory, developmentalism, structuralism, neo-liberalism, and post-development). Then, it adopts a livelihoods approach to better understand these broader processes from the perspective of individuals, households and communities. In general, issues are tailored to themes being played out in Asia-Pacific countries. 

People seem to be increasingly concerned with security. There is a marked perception that insecurity is on the rise, and that the world has become an extremely unsafe place. Security policies like predictive policing, urban surveillance, border control, and antiterrorism have grown in technological sophistication and legitimacy, and are increasingly debated in electoral campaigns, among policy makers, and in the press. And yet, crime statistics show unequivocally that we have never been safer. How do we explain this discrepancy, and how do we analyse critically society’s concern with security and surveillance, as well as the solutions proposed by different actors to solve such concerns? This course explores what security and surveillance teach us about our society, its fears, and the way different categories of people think about and act on (in)security both online and offline. It discusses case studies such as urban insecurity, digital surveillance, border control, and citizen initiatives to increase security, and explore the causes and consequences of such practices in our society. It reflects on whose (in)security matters and why, and assesses whether practices such as predictive policing, CCTV cameras, face recognition technologies really work, for whom, and how. Students think about what it means to live in a Big Brother society – where a lot of what we do is subjected to surveillance – and explore sociological insights on surveillance and security.

This seminar introduces the methodological and epistemological underpinnings and contributions of ethnography. The class situates this within a critical and expansive overview of anthropology, including tackling crucial issues raised by feminist, postmodern, indigenous, and decolonial scholars on methods, representation, power, and ethics and how these have shaped the ethnographic practice. To further develop participants' understanding of ethnography, guest speakers share their ethnographies, be it in the form of monograph or film, to open a deeper conversation and reflection on ethnographic strategies, the methodological, ethical, affective, and theoretical challenges they faced, and the potentials and limits of ethnography in understanding, navigating, and addressing pressing issues such as racism, sexism, coloniality, and violence.

This course introduces students to theoretical debates about the complex and multi-dimensional nature of crime, and conceptual frameworks that have been developed to explain and understand it.

This course examines the historical construction of the “tropics” as both an ecological reality and an ideological concept central to Western thought. Adopting a global perspective, the course explores how European and later North American interpretations of tropical environments shaped colonial expansion, economic development, and enduring social, racial, and cultural inequalities. This course explores the multiple dimensions of this history from a global perspective, emphasizing the creation of a unified and coherent bioclimatic zones that amalgamates parts of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. After discussing the concept of ‘tropicality’ – the European gaze on non-European environments – the course covers critical aspects of that amalgamation, including colonialism, resource extractivism, and intertropical species transfer and acclimatization. The last part of the course focuses on two urgent contemporary issues, namely climate change and decolonization, seeking to discuss the future of the ‘tropics’.