English

Law is often imagined as a mass of written documents containing intricate and arcane language, which is usually manipulated by lawyers and judges. This course expands this imagery by exploring the impact of legal practice, defined as a set of techniques deployed by legal professionals, in relation to our daily life. The course first surveys the historical underpinnings of legal practice, devoting special attention to the study of its Roman and Medieval manifestations. Moreover, it reflects upon the impact of legal professionals and legal techniques in the organization of geographical spaces, group membership, behavior control, and economic production. The course also discusses the tensions between legal pluralism and the centralization of legal authority promoted by the nation-State, as well as introduces the use of legal technique as tools for resistance and change.

In this introductory course, students study the mechanisms of the UK constitution and experience of understanding and applying legal texts, including landmark cases and statutes. They learn about the institutions of legislating and decision-making in the UK, the rule of law, and the judicial protection of the rule of law, alongside a specialist topic reflecting topical current research experience from UCL’s Faculty of Laws, such as environmental law, law and democracy, or social welfare law. This course provides a taster of legal education at university level, which at UCL Laws focuses on how world-leading research and a deeply inclusive law school can support a strong social mission and a set of values centered around the concept of justice: particularly the rule of law, the protection of human rights, and constitutional democracy.

Data science has unlocked exciting possibilities for social scientists through its diverse toolkit, including big data analysis, visualisation, and machine learning models, enabling them to extract valuable insights from their data.  Yet, the success of a data-driven project hinges on data quality. This is where data engineering plays a pivotal role. Professionals must ensure that their acquired data is sufficient and accurate and must be adaptable to handle 'messy data' effectively. A substantial portion of time in data-driven projects (anecdotally 80%) is dedicated to cleaning and pre-processing data, with only 20% said to be devoted to building, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models. Despite the emergence of new AI technologies, which promise to automate many coding tasks, data manipulation is likely to remain an indispensable skill due to the inherent messiness of real-world data. By the end of this course, students will be proficient in producing a website to communicate your collected data and showcase your newly acquired data-wrangling abilities.

Made from the stuff of dreams and nightmares, "the fantastic" in literature poses questions about the nature of reality in a changing world. As science transformed understanding of life in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature placed fears and hopes for the future alongside the oldest beliefs and superstitions, creating a new genre of the fantastic, a modern world of monsters and phantoms where nothing is quite what it seems. This course explores the development of the supernatural and fantastic in European literature from fairytales to science fiction, and examines contemporary resonances, including the enduring appeal of a Hollywood monster and a cult internet meme.

This course offers an introduction to the theory and cases of democracy in crisis, structured across three thematic units. The first unit introduces foundational concepts, exploring definitions of democracy and its crises, as well as theoretical frameworks addressing democracy's vulnerabilities. The second unit focuses on analytical tools and typologies, examining institutional approaches to democracy's collapse, democracy indexes, and comparative frameworks. Finally, the third unit delves into recent and historical case studies of democratic erosion across various regions, fostering a nuanced understanding of global trends. The course combines professor-led lectures, student-driven seminars, and debates, emphasizing critical analysis and active participation. Transversally, the course addresses qualitative and quantitative comparative methodological issues related to democracy.

How do social divisions and differences shape our identities, actions, and life-chances? This course provides an introduction to key debates in contemporary sociology, examining the forces that drive social stratification and the construction of social identity. In this course, students gain a critical understanding of current research and analysis in the study of social inequalities around class, race, and gender, exploring how sociology helps us to address topical real-world issues. The course centers on the ways in which power relations, patterns of social stratification and inequality, and diverse identities are shaped in contemporary societies – focusing on structural divisions, social movements, and everyday experiences and identities in different international contexts.

In this course, lectures are delivered by research-leaders in evolutionary cell biology, genetics, molecular cell biology, and ageing to provide a comprehensive understanding of cell function at the level of genome organization, gene regulation, proteome management, metabolic homeostasis and adaptive responses across different cell types and organisms (bacteria, archaea, fungi, plants, worms, planaria, tardigrades, fish, rodents and humans). By focusing on these areas of cell biology, the course then examines the similarities and differences in cell function across domains, kingdoms and species by discussing: 1) the cell biology behind specializations in cell function, 2) differences in the biology behind plant and animal cells, 3) the evolution of cell-type specificity and multicellular species, 4) organism-specific adaptive responses and 5) changes in function between young and old cells. In addition, students have the opportunity to conduct an independent mini research project in which they contribute to a real-world ongoing experiment aimed at understanding how cells respond to the presence of toxic proteins. 

This course provides students with a distinctly anthropological perspective on social media. It explores how familiar themes in anthropology, from kinship and friendship networks to the relation between circulation and value, take on new forms in a world of ever-increasing social media connectivity. Combining insights from anthropology and social media studies, students will consider questions such as: Is culture becoming more homogeneous now that more than one billion people worldwide have a Facebook profile, or are there as many different Facebooks as there are local contexts? How does the circulation of online content relate to pre-existing forms of community and belonging? What are the links between algorithms and agency? Are selfies a symptom of increasing individualism? And how can ethnographic methods capture social worlds of infinite distraction, endlessly interrupted by notifications, memes, tweets and Instagram stories?

This course examines the fate of the later Roman empire from the fall of Rome through the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms in the west and the rise of Constantinople in the East to the eve of the Arab conquests (AD400-700), interrogating models of decline, catastrophe, and transformation through the most recent archaeology. There is, however, much more to the study of the late antique world than the problem of how and why the Roman empire collapsed. The course explores key themes such as decline and fall, barbarians and ethnicity, urbanism, rural settlement, Christianization, the army and the economy and compare the different trajectories of Europe, Northern Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean in this period.