Victoria University of Wellington

The course considers issues of current criminological concern in New Zealand and globally looking at the full range of crimes and social harms associated with these issues. Human rights are introduced as a way of thinking about harms perpetrated by the state. There is a focus on applying theory and research. The course aims to develop students who know how to interpret and respond to real life events in ways that promote security and social justice.

This course examines the definition, development, and normalization of ubiquitous media. Students trace the genealogy of ubiquitous media by examining the emergence of the network society, the development of social media, mobile media and apps, and the pervasiveness of big data and algorithms. Students also examine the relationship between ubiquitous media and a range of sociocultural issues including identity, space/place, digital labour, and commercialization.

This course introduces the relationship between education, society, and change. It analyses the ways in which political and cultural beliefs influence children’s and young people’s experiences of education in multiple settings with a particular focus on Aotearoa New Zealand and the Oceania region.

The course introduces the fundamentals of engineering statistics. Topics include probability mass and density functions, random variables and functions of random variables, confidence intervals, statistical tests, and regression.

This course examines how cinema represents issues such gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and/or class in a critical manner. Topics vary but may include women’s screen authorship and innovative approaches to gender, race and sexuality in global and world cinema. The course introduces theories of representation and spectatorship central to feminist film studies, surveys their applications to a wide range of films, and examines how queer and postcolonial theorists have adapted them to address provocative depictions of sexuality and social inequality onscreen.

This course addresses the design and engineering of user interfaces. It presents principles and guidelines for design and covers a range of design processes. The course covers techniques for testing user interfaces, and considers a variety of user interface styles and interface devices.

This course examines island and ocean geographies in postcolonial contexts, such as climate change, forced migration, militarization, biodiversity, and the blue economy. Geographic theories, including material geographies, political geographies, more-than-human geographies, and feminist geographies are explored. Topics include geographic concepts of region, scale, scarcity, boundaries, marginality, and identity. Case studies are drawn from the wider Pacific region, including New Zealand.

This course develops the academic writing skills of students from all university disciplines. Students practise techniques for generating research questions and for drafting and revising essays and reports, based on individual feedback from tutor and peers, prior to assessment. Research and referencing abilities are taught to help writers meet the expectations of university audiences.

This course explores British and Irish literature from 1910 to the Second World War. Students study many of the major writers of the Modernist period and poetry short stories, novels, and plays. Particular attention is paid to the historical context, including the First World War, feminism, the Depression, Irish politics and nationalism, and the emergence of totalitarian ideologies.

This course introduces American politics, with a particular focus on the continued development of America's system of government. The course examines major political themes in US politics against the background of the relationships between different branches of government under the US Constitution.