Victoria University of Wellington

This course provides an introduction to music in world cultures. It examines music within its cultural context and introduces the study of ethnomusicology. The class covers music from the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

This course focuses on the study of masculinity to explore systemic inequality, and the close relationship between gender and power. The course treats masculinity as a gender identity in constant transformation. The course considers social dynamics, such as sexual-affective relationships, violence, everyday culture and the sexual division of labour. Through diverse theories and analysis of case studies, the masculinity is understood as both a systematic producer of power relations and as a performance of a gender identity. By studying hegemonic masculinity and ways to subvert it, this course provides tools to understand and analyze the dynamics of power, inequality and change.

This course is an introdcution to the analysis and design of urban places. The course looks at alternative models of urban form and development, ranging from much-admired traditional cities to new paradigms that promise to shape 21st-century settlement patterns. The course examines various factors including urban morphology, human experience, economic performance, the role of the designer, and the politics of decision making.

This course is an introduction to solid state physics. The course is primarily concerned with establishing descriptions of the periodic nature of crystalline materials, and the implications for the propagation of EM waves, atomic vibrations, and electrons in solids.

This course examines anthropological approaches to kinship, sexuality, and gender. Students explore the shifting social norms surrounding gender, sexuality, the family, and relatedness across diverse cultural settings. The course reveals how practices of gender, sexuality, and kinship intersect with new reproductive technologies, media, nationalism, capitalism, colonisation, class, and race.

This course provides an introduction to theoretical questions and experimental research in developmental psychology, from infancy to adulthood. The course covers critical issues in perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, emotional and social development.

This course provides the opportunity to practice traditional and contemporary approaches to both observational and imaginative drawing. In addition to building on skills and techniques developed in DSDN 152 Drawing I, students are encouraged to nurture their personal practice and develop their creative voice through drawing. Each week the bulk of time is spent drawing in studio, with mentoring. Emphasis is placed on experimentation with mediums, styles and exercises that expand individual drawing practice beyond the classroom. Occasional tutorials or lectures introduce fundamental concepts, provide historical and contemporary context, and provide examples for critical analyses. Discussion and critique aid this process while creating a vehicle for students to incorporate gained knowledge into their personal creative expression and design practice.

This course introduces the main themes, concepts and debates in human geography and development studies. Case studies to illustrate these topics are drawn from across the world, with particular emphasis on patterns and processes in developing countries in the regions that surround Oceania, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region. The course introduces core, cross-cutting concepts in geography and development studies and how these seek to understand global problems. The course then explores development geographies; political geographies, migration geographies, social and cultural geographies and how these are manifested in urban and rural settings.

Great Ideas is a course reflecting on some of the most exciting, important and revolutionary ideas that have shaped society and culture as it is today. It also considers how those ideas have an ongoing influence. It’s an interdisciplinary course looking at topics across the humanities, arts and social sciences.

This studio-based course covers creative and interpretive aspects of drawing with an emphasis on manual graphic processes. The course examines the conventions and standards of architectural representation common to drawing practice.