English

This course examines various historical networks that flow across the Malay world from the 11th to the 21st centuries. It introduces students to the evolution, characteristics, and impact of commercial, diasporic, political, religious, educational, and media networks on the lives of Malays and other communities in the region. The three themes that recur throughout the course are: how networks are formed and sustained; how they interact with one another; how insights from different disciplines can aid in a more holistic study of these networks.

This course covers contemporary issues of international relations, politics, and political economy in Northeast Asia, with an emphasis on the role of the United States in the international relations, politics, and economy of Northeast Asian countries as an ‘informal empire’. 

This course will use Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback as a textbook to analyze various interpretations of the U.S's roles affecting Korean, Japanese, and Chinese politics, economy, and society. 

Waste and recycling seem like every-day, if important, issues with which we are all familiar. But do we actually know what waste is? This course introduces students to the anthropological study of waste, an area that straddles politics, economy, and the environment. Early anthropological studies focused on issues such as the symbolic pollution beliefs associated with persons and substances within a coherent cultural framework. A more recent and clearly defined "anthropology of waste" has taken discards and the regimes of production, labor, and value that generates them, as its central areas of study. This course introduces key theoretical understandings of waste alongside compelling ethnographic accounts of waste work that involves both dignity and discrimination, citizenship, and segregation. 

This course builds upon the concepts studied in INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMICS A and introduces business strategies. The course covers cost calculations, market structures, firms' decision making, supply chains and such other topics. 

The regular version of this course is worth 3.0 UC quarter units. The Q version of this course is worth 4 or 4.5 UC quarter units. Students must submit a special study project form which outlines the requirements for the additional units. This is typically an additional paper graded by the instructor of the course.

This course provides an introduction to strategic people management, with a focus on people management innovations and the major changes affecting contemporary people management. While this includes coverage of the basic people management functions and how people management contributes to value creation and organizational performance, the course’s strategic perspective means that people management is analyzed in light of several major changes and innovations, including diversity management; employee involvement; employability, soft skills, and labor market trends; employee wellbeing; global value chains, downsizing, and other forms of organizational restructuring; and the internationalization of people management, also through multi-national corporations. Furthermore, promoting a strategic perspective, the course also discusses contextual factors influencing people management decision-making. 

The Visual Literacy course equips students with a new language to communicate with the world: visual language. Simply put, visual literacy can be described as the "ability to construct meaning from images." Through this course, students learn the components and rules of visual language, enabling them to read, understand, and analyze various types of images. Beyond analysis, the course also focuses on developing the ability to create intentional images using visual language and articulate these images in verbal and written forms. The course combines theoretical lectures with practical exercises, including art appreciation and essay writing. A significant component of the course involves field trips to museums or galleries to observe and analyze artworks. Additionally, students participate in hands-on activities where they create images using the syntax and principles of visual language. For example, assignments may include expressing narratives using basic shapes, helping students internalize how images communicate meaning. This course is designed for a broad audience—not only for students majoring in art or design but also for those who wish to develop an appreciation for art, effectively use digital platforms, or write about art. Starting from the fundamentals, the course provides a step-by-step exploration of what visual literacy is and why it matters in contemporary society. 

Researchers often overlook the environmental impact of cutting edge research; however, there is growing awareness that environmental sustainability needs to be embedded into all aspects of scientific research, and that all scientific communities need to take action to preserve our planet. This interdisciplinary course meets this challenge head on. Students review scientific benefits of state-of-the-art research methods in psychology and neuroscience, while also discussing methods for assessing and mitigating the environmental impact of these activities. Students evaluate research methods such as lab work with animals and people, scientific imaging, field work, and AI and data sciences. In the context of these methodologies, students discuss the practical and ethical dimensions revolving around emerging sustainability assessment and mitigation methods both inside and outside the University.

This course teaches symmetries and group theory, and their applications to physical problems – from basic discrete groups, representation theory, and Lie groups and algebras.  This course also includes formal mathematical concepts.

Students learn about group theory and formal mathematics, giving them a firm framework for further study.

This course examines the making of the modern world to 1900. It covers the following questions: How did the modern world happen? How did a few small countries in Europe (and later the United States) come to dominate so much of the world’s wealth and power by 1900? How did they displace the great empires of the Middle East, South Asia and China?

This course involves student-led research and dissemination around contemporary environmental topics e.g. renewable energy, food security etc. Working in groups, students explore an issue or problem, undertake research on it, and communicate their work in a form accessible to non-academic audiences e.g. a policy note or a science communication piece. This helps students to develop key graduate attributes and consider their own employment prospects beyond the academy.