University of Hong Kong

Is knowledge of the world possible? And is there even an objective world for our knowledge to be about? These are the topics of skepticism and relativism. Skeptics challenge our ability to know anything about the world. Relativists contest that there is no absolute, objective truth. In this class, we will study both historical and contemporary thinking about these perennial topics. We will address ancient arguments for skepticism, but also look to more contemporary relativistic thinking about science, morality, and other matters.

This course examines selected network protocols relevant to the World Wide Web (e.g., HTTP, DNS, IP); World Wide Web; technologies for programming the Web (e.g, HTML, XML, style sheets, PHP, JavaScript, Node.js.; other topics of current interest (AJAX, HTML5, web services, cloud computing).

This course introduces major concepts and definitions in political geography followed by a brief introduction of the intellectual history and lineage of political geography. The course then examines theoretical issues and empirical cases, grouped into a number of topics. The tenet of this course is to show how world order and the lived experiences of people are shaped by, but also reshape, the respective capacities of, and interactions between, state regimes. It is to show that sovereignty, territoriality and nation-state matter a great deal in defining global economy, social transformation and culture. Topics investigated in the course include: classical geopolitical theories; global economy and the world-system; critical geopolitics; globalization and the regulation of difference; imperialism and post-colonial geographies; territoriality, sovereignty and the border; nation-state, nationalism and citizenship.