English

This introductory course examines the causes of housing price fluctuations and their implications for urban life. It explores how housing functions both as an investment and a necessity, creating an owner–renter dichotomy with contrasting interests. The course analyzes the economic consequences of housing market swings, including negative equity, asset bubbles, financial crises, and affordability challenges, while considering broader impacts on living conditions, community sustainability, and urban policy. It explains the relationships between money, land, and housing; covers the factors that determine land and housing prices; identifies the effects of housing price fluctuations on financial stability and wealth inequality; describes how monetary and land policies influence housing affordability; and covers implications from the owner–renter dichotomy for housing policy.

This course provides the necessary background and experience in data science technology and concepts. Students gain experience tackling a complete data science project, from data gathering and pre-processing to data analysis through machine learning tools. Students apply fundamental concepts in machine learning to data storage and distributed processing as a foundation for their project.

How do people understand, experience, and shape place and space? How do space and place interface with difference, identities and groups in day-to-day life? How can we make sense of the social world through a critical lens? How does culture shape, and how is it shaped by, space and place? What are the practices, material artifacts, values and lived experiences that express and reinforce cultures? These are all key questions to social and cultural geography, an exciting and vibrant sub-discipline. This course sets out to examine themes such as place, space, power, difference, culture, and identity and demonstrates the value of a geographical perspective on a range of social and cultural phenomena worldwide. It also deepens students’ critical engagement with theoretical and methodological approaches that underpin contemporary social and cultural geography.

This course introduce students to the basics of personality and social psychology. It starts with an introduction to key dynamic personality theories of Freud, followed by Jung. Students learn about theories and research on aggression, pro-social behavior, and conformity. In addition, key fundamental topics in social psychology, attitudes and values, are introduced, as well as cross-cultural psychology and leadership. Topics include selected dynamic personality theories (e.g., Freud), leadership, attitudes values, and cross-cultural psychology.

The course provides a grounding in core theories, models, and concepts within the field of individual differences psychology, and then relates these to key health and wellbeing outcomes.  A major topic within the unit is personality. Critical and historical perspectives on key theories, approaches to, and models of personality are presented, along with details of the methodological tools that have been used to measure personality. A critical examination of theories and data linking personality to physical and mental health is then presented. Additional concepts from individual differences psychology, such as mood, intelligence, and motivation, are also introduced, and then examined in relation to physical and mental health outcomes.

This course serves as the first transgender focused gender studies course in the Gender Studies Program. The course introduces and discusses the concepts and theories of transness, transgender and otherness using some of the Western literature while incorporating and focusing on the Asian perspectives with Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines as focus. This course covers narratives and history of transness and otherness in 3 Asian contexts: Hong Kong, Thailand and the Philippines. The course looks into the evolution of gender identities, roles and expressions and sexualities in these societies and weave the intersections in these narratives. It covers current situations of trans, non-binary and "other" people in these societies and how their transness and otherness impede them from being fully integrated in their societies. It considers ways colonization (Hong Kong, Philippines) and non-colonization (Thailand) affect their transness and collectiveness. Finally, the course invites social justice allies to help map action plans to help improve their states in their respective societies. Prerequisite: GEND1001.

This course deals with masterpieces of Japanese visual art (architecture, sculpture, painting and decorative art) from ancient to contemporary period. The course explains the meaning; expression; material, and technique of artwork selected from various categories, so the class can gain basic knowledge and skill to express their appreciation of Japanese art in writing.
 

This upper division course applies concepts in symbolic methods and analysis to solve a variety of problems in combinatorics. Course content includes: 1. Combinatorial Structures and Ordinary Generating Functions: symbolic enumeration methods, integer compositions and partitions, words and regular languages, tree structures 2. Labelled Structures and Exponential Generating Functions: labelled classes, surjections, set partitions, words, alignments, permutations, labelled trees, mapping and graphs 3. Complex Analysis, Rational and Meromorphic Asymptotics: generating functions as analytic objects, analytic functions and meromorphic functions, singularities and exponential growth of coefficients 4. Singularity Analysis of Generating Functions: coefficient asymptotics, process of singularity analysis. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

Content creators serve as powerful cultural intermediaries. They have the power to shift representation away from traditional screen industries, bringing into sharp focus key questions of social justice in the digital age, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class, while evolving, reiterating and challenging textual traditions and conventions of film and television. In exploring the interplay of technologies, creativity, screen works and everyday life, this course applies prior learning in film and television to the emergent cultural form of content creation as social media entertainment, analyzing processes of both production and reception. 

This intermediate level course reviews the main theoretical considerations of cultural constructs, stressing the relevance of the role of otherness and the dimensions of intersectionality. The course starts from a critical and current analysis of identity in order to seek proposals for dialogue and peace policies aimed at building a cosmopolitan vision of the human being. 

This course does not require prior knowledge or experience. It is desirable however that those who are interested in taking it, show curiosity for intercultural dialogue, critical thinking and the development of capacities around collaborative learning.