University of New South Wales

This course examines stars and planetary systems in detail. It covers the building blocks of stars and planets, how they form, and how they evolve over time. It also covers telescopes and surveys, present and upcoming, used to understand the physics of these systems. Topics to be covered include: stellar structure, star and planetary formation and evolution, stellar spectra in relation to fundamental properties, end states of stars, exoplanet detection and characterization, planetary atmospheres and interior structures, and stellar activity and its effect on habitability.

The course explores the historic and contemporary links between religion and terror and helps students understand the complexity of religious violence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in relation to terrorism and the so-called “war against terror.” The course addresses the re-emergence of religious nationalism and the threats it presents to modern states. The course investigates legal and other definitions of terrorism and the development of modern doctrines of terror. It examines topics such as religious motivation, and the justification and legitimization of the use violence in a number of major religious belief systems. It identifies the differences between mainstream and extremist teachings. It analyzes significant acts of religiously motivated violence, and explores background issues such as secularization, modernism and globalization, as well as more personal ones, such as the nature of religious conviction and its influence on behavior.

This course examines ways of solving the (usually partial) differential equations that arise in physical, biological, and engineering applications. Many of the methods covered, such as Fourier Transforms, also have applications beyond the solution of differential equations.

This course examines the core theories and concepts of managing human behavior in organizations. It covers a variety of theories and concepts to provide a foundational understanding of the attributes of individual behavior in organizations, including personality, motivation, decision-making, as well as interpersonal behaviors, including teamwork, power and influence, leadership, and communication. 

This course examines media through a social justice lens – revealing hidden costs and social, political, cultural implications of emerging media technologies and longstanding media practices. It covers key concepts and theories from media studies, journalism studies, cultural studies, sociology, and criminology, with an emphasis on First Nations knowledges and critical approaches to race and gender. 

This course examines the key concepts and current debates in criminology. It covers basic issues such as the definition, measurement and explanations of crime, societal reactions to crime, criminological theories, the role of research and the influence of criminology on public policy.

This course examines the internal organization of firms and other organizations. It provides a rigorous introduction to foundational theories, and then discusses applications to real-world managerial problems. It looks at the following questions: How should incentives be designed in organizations? How should conflict within an organization be resolved? When should organizations outsource and when should they produce internally? Why do organizations arise in market economies? 

This course examines some of the most significant issues facing the world today such as the recurrence of violence between and within countries; the difficulty of lifting large numbers of people out of poverty; what is to happen to people who do not have a home in any country; increasing environmental destruction; intensifying global financial instability; and whether the current structures and processes of governance are adequate to address these issues. 

This course introduces the fundamentals of regression modeling, providing essential knowledge for students pursuing advanced study in statistics or careers as professional statisticians. Topics include parameter estimation in linear models, hypothesis testing for model comparison, model selection techniques for predictive purposes, detection of assumption violations, and identification of influential observations.

This course examines the rise of human rights discourse and its relationship to other discourses on suffering and social justice. It focuses on the experience of victims of human rights abuse and the politics of meaning. Students will engage in critiques of law as a reductionist discourse on the social by exploring the relationships between human rights and cultural differences such as gender, ethnicity, religion and indigenous cultures. The embodied self, social interdependency and the architecture of social institutions are the backdrop through which the course explores the tensions between universal and relativist understandings of human rights and their realization. Students will be introduced to the fundamentals of human rights, the global human rights machinery, and the ethics of humanitarian intervention, and will consider how sociologists have studied and written about human rights.