University of Bristol

Drawing upon criminological, sociological, historical, political economy, penal theory, intersectional and decolonial perspectives, this course critically examines why and how societies punish criminal wrongdoing. It provides students with a thorough understanding of the main theoretical perspectives on punishment and their application to contemporary issues in penal policy.

The course examines the big questions about social welfare’s current developments and future prospects. The "state" in this case implies the economic conditions and the political and institutional environments in which welfare operates. It explores the relevance of key theoretical contributions to the understanding of welfare origins, trajectories, and futures. It examines the contributions of Marxism, Varieties of Capitalism, Social Reproduction Theory, and The New Political Economy of Welfare, with a particular focus on the contributions of Polanyi, Foucault, Thelen, and Schmidt. In looking at the current period it exams welfare in crisis and welfare retrenchment and resilience and considers recent debates about labor market change, social differentiation, and dualism. The institutional environment is examined in the decommodification and recommodification of welfare and a review of international experience explores the varieties of liberalization.

This course offers a comparative approach to fairy tales that highlights their transnational circulation and their contributions to shaping European values from the late 17C to the present. The course will give students a powerful sense of the hybridity and fluidity of cultures and of the way tales are appropriated to consolidate national, social and gender identities. By studying fairy tale adaptations in different media (including film), students will develop new techniques of interpretation. And by writing a fairy tale for our times, students will stretch their imagination and creativity. This course is well suited to students of Comparative Literatures and Cultures and of Modern Languages, as it will build on and stretch your understanding of how cultures function and interact. More broadly, this course will also be of particular interest to students interested in the cross-fertilization between cultures and nations in the history of Europe.

In this course students explore central theoretical issues in modern social anthropology and in the history of the discipline; key figures and their contributions to the history of anthropology; important ethnographic case studies; connections between ethnographic materials and theoretical positions; cross-cultural similarities and differences in a number of social and cultural domains; and the relevance of social anthropology for 21st century citizens.

This course takes students on a journey from the seemingly familiar surroundings of everyday France to a more complex and enriched understanding of the key debates and issues which have defined French and Francophone identities over the centuries. Using source material in French (also available in translation for ab initio students), it focuses on figures and places that seem easily recognizable to many students and scholars of France and explores the networks of often competing ideas and values that have shaped who or what they are perceived to be today.

Students learn to identify and remove simple trends and seasonalities from time series data; describe the properties of stationary time series and their autocorrelations; define various time series probability models (ARMA, ARIMA, GARCH); construct time series probability models from data and verify model fit; define the spectral density function and understand it as a distribution of energy in the frequency domain; compute the periodogram and smoothed versions; and analyze multivariate time series.

In this unit, students study five major authors working in a range of genres and offering radically different outlooks and outputs. Students explore the conditions in which their work was produced, and the social and political contexts in which it was consumed, reflecting critically throughout on the category of the "woman writer," and the history of scholarship thereon.