English

This course teaches how economic and psychological factors affect economic decisions of individuals, focusing on their bounded rationality. Each class is composed of two parts. The first half of the class explains the basic concepts and principles of Behavioral Economics; the second half introduces a few research articles to bolster student discussion of related research questions. 

This course provides foundational knowledge, understanding and practical skills aligned to complex challenges of the modern era from an Earth Science perspective. It covers geoscientific data collection, analysis and visualization, hazard analysis, and spatial mapping.

This course provides an essential toolkit for solving real-world problems that arise in various industries, such as the financial and tech sectors, healthcare, manufacturing, and planning. Through an engaging set of lectures and classes, students develop problem-solving and modelling skills, and learn insights necessary for strategic decision-making.

How does government work? This course focuses on public policy and management, especially on their recent development and on changes in public service delivery under NPM (New Public Management) and NPG (New Public Governance). Through cases of various nation states and local governments, the course discusses main issues about public management, focusing on its historical and theoretical background. Special attention will be paid to centre-periphery relationship and possibility of devolved government. The course also discusses recent topics such as privatization, deregulation, decentralization, devolution and agencification. 

At the end of the 19th century, Britain was in many ways at the pinnacle of its power, having established global supremacy thanks to advances in industrialization and its vast colonial empire. However, cultural texts from the period project a number of profound anxieties about deviancy, degeneracy, decadence, and indistinct threats from adversaries both at home and abroad. Sociopolitical reasons for these uncertainties include the suffragette movement, socialist and anarchist action, campaigns for national self-determination in the form of e.g. Irish Republicanism or the Indian National Congress, as well as geopolitical tensions and technological changes. In this class, we examine narratives that represent, respond to, and process late Victorian cultural anxieties with a particular view to the violence that results from perceived threats to cultural hegemony. We situate a number of late Victorian novels in relation to emergent contemporary concepts such as (social) Darwinism, the unconscious, and (homo)sexuality, exploring how these concepts both shaped and were shaped by cultural anxiety. Additionally, we adopt frameworks from more recent theoretical approaches such as postcolonial and trans*queer studies to understand how cultural anxieties negotiate the boundaries between normative structures and their Other. Primary texts include Oscar Wilde: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, 1891, Florence Marryat: The Blood of the Vampire, 1897, Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, 1899.
 

This course introduces students to a variety of strategies for approaching a selected play text through performance. The course includes a study of the theatrical and non-theatrical documents relating to the play, the playwright, and the cultural context in which the play was produced. Where appropriate, students may study other representations of the play and the playwright in theatre, cinema, radio, and television, for example. Towards the end students develop a performance project based on the play.

This course explores cultural heritage definitions and relevant conceptualizations in the local context. It introduces the historical development of cultural heritage in the contemporary world. It then further discusses the current legal and policy framework of local heritage selection and conservation. It requires students to reflect on what heritage is and how heritage shall be selected and defined. Students will explore the social relation between cultural heritage and the local community through various local case studies. They will debate how cultural heritage shall be interpreted from a local perspective but could be operated sustainably.

This course critically evaluates Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), focusing on firms’ attempts to prevent labor standards violations in their supply chains. Students begin by analyzing the rise of CSR, setting it in the context of global value chains, international labor standards, and emerging private forms of regulation. They then analyze topics such as the impact of CSR on corporate financial performance; whether CSR is an effective means of raising labor standards; theories of CSR; and how to embed CSR within the firm and comparative CSR. The course includes examples of how large firms are dealing with the ethical challenges posed by global supply chains. The course will include one lecture from a CSR professional.

At the zenith of the civil rights movement in the USA and de-colonizing movements in Africa, the Carribean  and Asia, just prior to the advent of second wave feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and other social movements linking political liberation to embodied physical differences, something new was born. There arose a new vision of the body as precisely the obverse of how we now consider it—a single, universal human body shared by all, ungendered, unraced, unsexed. This new body-in-common, unmarked even by such core physical differences as biological sex, became legible as radically dissident under a new political ideology that has thus far largely escaped historical attention: Eros. As a potent challenge to a number of repressive orthodoxies, not least capitalism, Eros was also, perhaps not surprisingly, a central theme in a number of art works of the period, from Carolee Schneemann’s nude performances to Claes Oldenburg’s erotic public sculpture, Yayoi Kusama’s immersive environments, Helio Oticica’s Tropicales and Kenneth Anger’s films. This course examines the relationship among art, sex, gender and revolution from the vantage point of Eros’ brief historical moment, a vista now largely obscured by our contemporary fixation on a politics of social distinction and bodily difference. Reading the work of Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Norman O Brown and others, we will also study the art, film and performance of such key figures as Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Franz Erhardt Walters and Rebecca Horn.  As such, this period constitutes both the theoretical prehistory of the sexual revolution, as well as perhaps the defining episode in our ongoing transubstantiation of flesh into politics.