University of Bristol

This course introduces students to a critical understanding of how crime and harm are represented through different media. These may include: TV, film, radio (e.g., documentaries, podcasts, drama, true-crime series), text (e.g., crime fiction, crime biographies, policy documents, music lyrics), visual culture (e.g., art and sculpture, graphics, court sketches, photojournalism, architecture, graffiti, theatre, advertising), news media (e.g., online, broadcast, print), and social media (e.g., trial by social media, citizen journalism, livecasting offending, performance crimes)

In the first half of the course, students are introduced to key concepts and economic models that can be used to understand how different identities shape outcomes, including identity economics, social norms and stereotypes, models of discrimination and stratification economics. The second half of the course looks in more detail at current economic research on a range of topics, including hate crime, labor market discrimination, gender-based violence, diversity, and inclusion.

In this course, students explore a range of contemporary performance practices and develop their own original devised performance material. Students experiment with a range of approaches that might include working with: text-based improvisation, movement-based performance, creative technologies, adaptation, and found or verbatim texts. The course advances students' knowledge of a range of contemporary theatre and performance makers who are producing devised theatre and performance. Through this exploration of a range of approaches to devising, students build a toolkit for making original theatre/performance and identify techniques and approaches that are of particular interest to students as practitioners. 

Content creators serve as powerful cultural intermediaries. They have the power to shift representation away from traditional screen industries, bringing into sharp focus key questions of social justice in the digital age, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class, while evolving, reiterating and challenging textual traditions and conventions of film and television. In exploring the interplay of technologies, creativity, screen works and everyday life, this course applies prior learning in film and television to the emergent cultural form of content creation as social media entertainment, analyzing processes of both production and reception. 

Cryptology—the modern discipline that combines construction and evaluation of cryptographic mechanisms—is a highly interdisciplinary field, deeply rooted in mathematics, but with branches in electronic engineering, computer science, and software and systems engineering. The course introduces fundamental aspects of cryptology from a modern perspective, focusing on design and security aspects of cryptographic schemes used for secure two-party communication, and of their underlying primitives.

This course offers an introduction to conceptual and philosophical issues raised in modern economics. By employing core theories and discussions from the philosophy of science, political philosophy, and ethics, students ask questions about the nature, scientific status, and implicit value assumptions in economics. For example: What is science and rigor, and how does it relate to economics? Can there be laws of economics? What is utility, and how does it relate to well-being? What is the role of models in economics? What are the normative assumptions implicit in economic research? How are ethical issues related to economics, and can economists incorporate value judgements? Can economics be associated with wider social justice?

The course is concerned with the nature of mind and its relation to the natural physical world. It divides into roughly two parts, the first dealing with metaphysical and epistemological issues associated with the mind and mental states, the second dealing with specific issues that arise regarding explanations of consciousness and qualia. The course addresses traditional approaches to the metaphysics of mind, such as Dualism, Physicalism and Functionalism, as well as more contemporary positions, such as Illusionism and Panpsychism.

Religious traditions represent significant expressions of cultural values: understanding the past and present states of the world is not possible without some knowledge of these traditions. This course introduces the history, ideas and practices of the three religious traditions whose history is connected, and which together have informed the religious understanding of Europe and the West, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. With reference to matters of ethics, thought, politics and law, the course considers how the diverse ways these religions answer questions about the world and the place of human beings within it have shaped and continue to inform the way people, both individually and collectively, live their lives and seek to find meaning and purpose.

The course is an introduction to image processing and computational vision: the theory, principles, techniques, algorithms, and applications. Image processing allows the analysis and enhancement of images/videos, while computer vision facilitates the understanding of the content of images/videos. Application areas are far-reaching and wide, from data compression to measuring the quality of performing actions by humans. The techniques in image processing and computer vision may be used in autonomous driving, medical imaging, CGI, remote sensing, pedestrian behavior analysis, facial recognition and regeneration, traffic analysis, biometrics, product quality assurance, and much more.

Why do some countries grow rich while others remain poor? This course provides an introduction to theoretical and empirical research on economic growth and aggregate development. It introduces students to theoretical and empirical examination of income differences between countries and their growth processes. The first part of the course focuses on the impact of factor accumulation (physical capital, population growth, and human capital) on income and growth rates among countries. The second part of the course, demonstrates the importance of variation in productivity in explaining cross country differences in income and growth.