University of Otago

This course is an anthropological analysis of responses to death and dying, drawing on cross-cultural case studies and relevant anthropological theories of grief, mourning, and funerary practice. It contextualizes a variety of historical and contemporary responses to death and critically examines the development of "modern" death practices.

This course examines principles of meetings, event and festival management. Topics include the significance of conventions and events, conventions and meetings design, management planning processes, methods and evaluation of conventions and events, infrastructural requirements, impacts, volunteers, sponsorship, programming, event planning and development.

This course examines New Zealand history in a global perspective. It covers the way forces of imperialism, colonization, capitalism and racial conflict have shaped modern New Zealand and its place in the world.

This is a project-centered course, in which students will choose and research a topic of their own choice (subject to approval), with the aim of producing a popularly-oriented non-fiction text which exhibits the fruits of sound scholarship. It examines the structures and strategies of a number of published texts, examining their structure and style, and the variety of sub-genres that can be deployed in writing creative non-fiction.

This course examines key ideas and concepts about the family, as well as looking at how issues like poverty and disability impact upon the family. This course will help students consider multiple perspectives on the family; engage in key debates about the family and its construction; and reflect on their own personal experiences and reactions to the family in all its forms in the broader structural contexts of Aotearoa/New Zealand society.

This course examines the scientific basis for, impacts of, and law and policy responses to climate change.

This course examines how social, political, cultural and material conditions shape scientific work and how science, in turn, shapes society. Because of the central role of science, technology and medicine in driving modern developments, understanding the relationships among science, technology and society is crucial for understanding the history of humanity and the contemporary world. 

This course examines how the concepts and techniques of chemical science can be used to gain an understanding of the synthesis, structure and reactivity of inorganic and organometallic molecules. It covers basic coordination chemistry emphasizing structure and bonding in coordination complexes, as well as an introduction to lanthanides and to symmetry in chemistry.