English

The first section of the course locates South African local level politics and administration in the context of national and provincial state reform; examines the significance of local implementation and service delivery for policy outputs and for the policy process as a whole; and provides a theoretical framework for understanding how local government reorganization is developed with a comparative analysis of local government reorganization with particular reference to metropolitan areas. There is in addition a focus on contemporary reforms which have affected South Africa's contemporary urban governance, such as the new megacities, politics-administration interface, and developmental local government. The second section introduces an overview of contemporary urban political and administrative challenges and opportunities. These challenges and opportunities occur in a context of global and local conditions. The course examines and compares good solutions to urban problems in third and first-world cities. In its focus on delivery-level administration and politics, the course provides both intellectual and practical closure to the major sequence of courses on public administration, management, and the policy process. Assessment: coursework (50%), final exam (50%).

The course provides an introduction to tax policy that links real-world debates about the tax system with ideas from a range of academic disciplines, including political theory, economics, and sociology, as well as law. It addresses real-world debates about tax policy as they appear in the media and in politics, but to do so in an academically rigorous way. The course adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on ideas from across the social sciences to address two main questions: why do we have the tax policies we have, and how can our current tax system be improved? The main examples will be taken from the UK and US contexts, but the insights generated are truly global.

This course provides basic principles to the engineering of biology with emphasis on the design and construction of synthetic gene circuits in living cells. The course also discusses current and emerging applications driven by synthetic biology, and the socio-ethical responsibilities that are required of synthetic biologists. 

This course examines representations of the Australia's sporting past through the lenses of memorials, museums, film and the internet. As part of this approach, there is a focus on Australian sporting icons including Les Darcy, Dawn Fraser, Eddie Gilbert, Peter Norman and Michael O'Loughlin as well as the Australian Sport Museum (Melbourne), the Ration Shed Museum (Cherbourg) and the Australian Paralympic Movement.

This course examines sports in Hong Kong from personal development to the impact on society. It will first introduce different areas of sports, including medicine, the technologies involved in increasing and maintaining performance, and an overview of sports in Hong Kong. Following this, local elite athletes will share their experience in professional training and international events so that students can better understand strategies about how to tackle difficulties to reach the top of a profession and apply these principles to their own experience. 

The course provides a comparative understanding of mobility and migration patterns in prehistory. It examines theoretical approaches that explore human adaptation towards changes in society related to migration or increased/decreased mobility. The course is transdisciplinarily linked to subjects like anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and geochemistry. From anthropological models, it engages the societal causes and causations of mobility and migration. Linguistics is implemented as a tool to understand connections between languages and different forms of cultural movement, and novel approaches from the natural sciences like ancient DNA and isotope analysis are explored to further contextualize physical mobility. The course also implements a practical component where the theory from the lectures is put into practice in laboratory work (in a broad sense). Scientific approaches are explored to get a source-critical perspective on how to frame and understand contact between and within cultural groups.

This course examines typical communication development in English across the lifespan and in cultures relevant to the Australian context. It covers the sequence of normal communication development from prelinguistic communication development through to adult language; the significance of context and function in the development of language; the universality of communication development, and the effect of gender in communication development. 

This course examines practical questions of ethics and justice at the personal, professional, social and global levels. The course reflects on these topics in the light of philosophical theories about justice, liberty, rights, and different approaches to ethics that emphasize roles, rules, virtues and consequences.