University of Queensland

This course examines the theoretical and practical understanding of the psychology of communication skills and their application in everyday life, conflict management, dating, the workplace, intergroup situations, and even in how you talk to yourself. The course is designed to give you an exciting scientific overview of, and basic working competence in, communication skills. It covers communication and social skills; listening and the difficulty of doing so; conflict escalation and resolution; mating, dating, and relationships; communication across group boundaries; trolling and romance scamming; persuasion; cross-cultural communication norms; sex and/or gender differences in communication patterns; public speaking; organizational communication and leadership; and self-communication.

This course examines the major conservation issues facing threatened marine wildlife globally with a particular focus on Australia. It covers how marine wildlife research, management and conservation is conducted using ecological, population and life history data, and how threats may be managed. 

This course examines the history and theory of photography from the 19th century to the present. It considers several key critical debates on the role of photography as both an art form and a social medium of visual communication. It explores central figures and key episodes in photography's history giving particular emphasis to critics, photographers, scientists, media and art historians' writings on the medium. Students will consider seminal controversial debates about the ways in which photography has been historicized and conceptualized. Is photography an art or is it media? Is it evidence or fiction? Is photography an empowering medium? How can photography create change? The course includes an examination of the development of Australian photography in the 19th and 20th centuries and considers the new phenomenon of Instagram photography and its implications.

This course examines ecology & conservation of marine and estuarine plants and animals. It covers the dynamics & interactions of populations; assemblages & communities in marine environments, including an examination of theory, methods & approaches used to study these systems (including field activities); threats that impact marine ecosystems and how this can affect people; the degree to which evolutionary adaptation can build resilience to the effects of climate change; and cutting-edge conservation issues and practices including marine reserve design and the importance of blue carbon.

We all prepare food, play cooperative games, romance each other etc. But how we do so depends on our cultural background–we are, by far, the world’s most ‘cultural animal’. So what was the “X-factor”, the magic ingredient of culture that took humans out of the general run of mammals and other highly social organisms? By emphasizing research in developmental psychology and integrating perspectives from comparative, social and evolutionary psychology this course explores contemporary answers to this question. We will be focusing on how an understanding of social and observational learning is critical to any answer, and to do so we will study the following populations: (a) typically developing infants and children; (b) children with autism; (c) adults; (d) non-human primates; and (e) other animals.

This course will teach students to recognize, assess, and generate evidence-based crime policies across a range of contexts and criminal justice domains such as police, courts, and corrections. This will include a focus on how government and non-government agencies can develop "upstream" responses; that is policies and programs that aim to prevent crime before they become "downstream" problems requiring responses by the criminal justice system. This requires an evidence-based approach that emphasizes problem solving and analysis. Topics will include program design and evaluation and the course will cover various crime prevention approaches such as crime prevention through environmental design, situational crime prevention, social prevention, and developmental crime prevention.

This course explores the relationship between landscape-scale spatial patterns and the ecological, physical, and social process that drive environmental change. It then applies this to real-world problems to achieve sustainable landscapes in the context of biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and social-ecological outcomes.

This course examines a pertinent challenge of humankind: how to feed 12 billion people while maintaining the integrity and function of our planet. It challenges participants with contrasting viewpoints for a nuanced understanding of the multidimensional aspects of food production and consumption. Course participants explore the food debate as consumers and scholars, with focus on the science behind innovation of food and food systems, locally and globally. Course participants map the future of food and agriculture with view of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.