English

This course examines the ways that crime is constructed and popularized. Given the localized context of colonial Australia, it pays particular attention to crime as a settler colonial construct. The course requires that students read and think critically about their own assumptions, media representations, and the ways that powerful groups define, measure and regulate crime. By examining a range of topics including youth crime, street crime, crime in the home and crimes of the powerful, this course will consider how understandings of crime inform and produce a range of state responses and varied experiences of justice/injustice.

This course gives students a thorough introduction to the field of behavioral organizational economics. Students discuss seminal as well as current research papers in the field, featuring empirical studies as well as lab and field experiments. Students study employment relationships between workers and organizations and get to know key factors that shape them in a positive way.  They focus on the two concepts of motivation and selection. When it comes to the question of how to motivate workers on their jobs, students discuss desired as well as unexpected effects incentives can have and examine the interplay between incentives, on the one hand, and cultural and psychological factors on the other. When it comes to selection and hiring, students tackle the question of how to best match candidates to jobs. Students also find out more about how to detect discrimination in the hiring process – and discuss measures that can help to mitigate or even eliminate it.

This course introduces students to the analysis of science and technology from a social and cultural standpoint. It also introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) – also called Science and Technology Studies – which seeks to understand how science and technology shape society and culture, and how society and culture, in turn, shape the development of science and technology.  

This course is an undergraduate-level seminar on politics of contemporary China. Understanding politics, economy, society, and their complex relations of our neighbor, People’s Republic of China becomes indispensable for everyone no matter what you study and pursue in this globalized era. In this vein, surveying politics of China would be a priority. We try to systematically (not randomly) analyze and understand those objects through applying some theoretical frameworks of political science such as regime type, political institution, participation, contentious politics, clientelism, developmentalism, nationalism, and interactions between domestic and international politics, to them. More specifically, this course aims at (1) understanding basic political history of contemporary China; (2) theoretically and empirically exposing students to major issues and debates in the study of reform-era Chinese politics and helping students understand major characteristics of the Chinese Communist Party regime; (3) In addition to the conventional contents of “Chinese Politics” course, letting students do a “problem-solving” project from creative and multi-disciplinary perspectives of political interactions as well as politics of things; (4) and finally, encouraging students to pursue their own agendas related to contemporary China in further studies in schools and job market (and beyond).

In this course, we shall read five to six European novels from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, by such writers as Dostoevsky, Proust, Woolf, Kafka, and Camus. We shall consider the following questions, among others: What have these authors discovered about the self, for example, about the richness and opacity of the inner life, about self-knowledge and self-deception, about possibilities of redemption through love, art or memory? In what ways do the novels we read reflect upon—or even intimate beforehand—the unfolding of European socio-political life over the course of a crisis-laden century? How do these authors ponder questions of individual responsibility, guilt and conscience, and do they, in their largely post-Christian era, propound any alternative possibilities of transcendence? How does each writer’s art of narrative extend or transform our consciousness of time and space and help us reinterpret personal experience and collective history?

The course covers sufficient statistics, factorization criteria, exponential families, Rao-Blackwells theorem, ancillary statistics, Cramér-Rao's bound, Neyman-Pearson's lemma, permutation test, and connection between hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. Asymptotic methods: maximum likelihood estimation, profile, conditional and penalized likelihood as well as hypothesis testing with likelihood ratio-, Wald- and score-method. Bayesian inference: estimation, hypothesis testing, and confidence interval and the difference compared to frequentist interpretation.

This course examines analytical functions; cauchy-riemann equations; complex mappings; cauchy's integral formulas; morera's, liouville's & rouche's theorems; taylor & laurent series; analytic continuation, residues & applications to integration; and boundary-value problems.

This course is designed to familiarize students with important concepts and theories of international security studies as well as prominent security issues in the contemporary world. The first part of the course introduces the basic analytical concepts and theoretical frameworks as regards direct and indirect use of force in international politics; the second part explores strategic policy during the Cold War and the lessons that scholars have drawn from that historical period; the third part examines several security challenges at the dawn of the 21st century such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism and insurgency, and the security implications of technological change; the last part focuses on the rise of China and international security, with particular attention paid to the relationship between China and the United States, the Taiwan issue, and maritime disputes in East Asia. It is worth noting that the course will not touch upon most non-traditional security issues such as energy security, climate change, food safety, etc.

The key goal of this course is to appreciate different "modes" and "lenses" of urban thinking and their relationship with urban policy practice, and to understand how to source and interpret different types of urban expertise in relation to complex urban challenges.  Whilst cities have in the past years been an exciting locus of experimentation, and the promises of the "smart city" agenda as well as a city gender lens have fast risen to wide popularity in urban research and policy, there remain many areas in which complex urban challenges test our contemporary understanding of the "urban age." The course engages with urban change-makers working across academic research (in UCL and beyond) and public and private sector institutions. 

This course aims to help students acquire the basic knowledge of the development and functioning of the EU. Additionally, students are expected to analyze the EU’s role in various sectoral policies and its relationships with selected partners.

This course consists of three parts. The first part covers the basics of the EU, including major theories of European integration, its core institutions, decision-making procedures, and legal order. In the second part, this course explores the major bilateral relations between the EU and third parties in the second part. The last part focuses on selected policy areas critical to the EU’s internal stability and external posture.