University of Melbourne

This course examines the science behind the fundamental perceptual processes underlying your sense of vision, including: motion and time perception, luminance and contrast perception, colour perception, geometry perception, space and size perception, and face perception. Visual illusions will be used to highlight key features of these complex perceptual processes.

This course examines the relationship between transport planning and urban design in diverse urban, Australian and international contexts. It will investigate contemporary practices and policies of efficient integration between transport planning and design that delivers human health, ecological sustainability and social equity outcomes.

This course examines Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through time. It explores the historical, cultural institutional and political relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, in the past and how these continue in the present. Topics include Indigenous resistance and activism, constitutional recognition, kinship, racism in sport, Indigenous astronomy, sovereignty, First Nations literature, and criminology and incarceration. 

This course examines decadence as a textual, historical, sexual and cultural formation across a range of literary texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Students are introduced to European and British varieties of literary decadence and aestheticism; art for art's sake theories of aesthetic production; relations between lifestyle, aestheticism and commodity culture; and emergent discourses of degeneration and sexology. The course asks students to consider how decadent aestheticism was shaped by regulatory categories of taste and vulgarity, and by cultural practices of tastemaking, lifestyling and the aestheticisation of sexuality. Students also consider the relationship between sexual dissidence and social and cultural distinction as produced in the representative examples of decadent literature studied.

This course examines what is artificial intelligence (AI); current uses of AI in society; frameworks for ethical AI, including fairness, accountability and safety; technical responses, including transparency and explainability in AI; legal regimes, including privacy, consumer law, discrimination and human rights law; public and private accountability; uses of AI in the workplace; AI home assistants; autonomous vehicles; AI and robots in medicine; AI in media, including social media platforms; AI in decision-making by governments, courts, police and other public institutions; and military uses of AI.

This course examines materials science, construction materials, and mechanics of materials. The material science component examines basic concepts on inter-atomic bonding, microstructure of solids and generic material properties related to density, deformation, yield, ductility, fracture, toughness, susceptibility to corrosion and fatigue. The construction materials component examines the engineering applications of structural and light-gauge steel, concrete, masonry, timber, glass, fibre-glass and composites. The mechanics component examines the basic concepts of stress-strain compatibility, composite actions, the concept of shear stress flow, basic two-dimensional stress analysis, strength and ductility and arching actions.

This course examines how to optimize one’s own personal performance. It critically examines psychological, sociological and scientific research related to expertise development and examines a range of embodied, and frequently tacit, everyday practices that enable progress in all aspects of human endeavor. By highlighting both similarities and differences between various performance domains it aims to capture, understand, inspire and disrupt ways of thinking about one’s personal performance that cut across a wide array of domains, including the arts, business, medicine and science. Attention is given to the various sub-skills of performance, especially the conditions that enhance expectations for future performance, influence personal autonomy, and facilitate attention focusing within various contexts.