University of Bristol

This course examines the contemporary international business issues and challenges posed to managers and organization operating across national borders. The course is highly interactive and covers issues such as the role of multinationals and foreign entry strategies. The course also provides opportunity for students to develop their analytical and transferable skills. By the end of the unit, students would have developed the skills to critically evaluate issues and challenges facing organizations operating across national borders.

The course introduces students to some overarching questions associated with literary, artistic, and intellectual culture in medieval and Renaissance Italy, and will provide them with some of the linguistic and analytical tools and terminology for approaching literary and visual texts from these earlier periods. The course thus develops broader critical skills as well as prepares students for specific medieval and Renaissance cultural studies.

The course surveys the fairy tale in English from the 17th to the 21st century. Students survey the first translations of fairy tales into English by the Grimms, Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen – and explore the context of the huge popularity of these tales. Students investigate their early reception and influence, including on novels and tales written in English, before moving on to 20th and 21st century rewritings. Students also spend time on film adaptations and book illustrations. Detailed consideration is given to a range of critical approaches including psychoanalytical and feminist readings, and the classification of fairy tale plots. Close readings, comparing the language and emphasis of different versions of the same story, is also central to the course.

This course explores television programming in relation to its production and cultural contexts, initially by comparing the vision and practice of early British television (in the so-called Golden Age of the 1950s/60s) with the present complexities of the international television industry and contemporary consumer culture. Students also consider how commissioning decisions are made, and how notions of "quality" and expectations of public service shift in an increasingly plural environment that includes non-broadcast provision of television programming. Lectures and seminars are supplemented by screenings of a range of programs that may be seen to reflect the broader contextual changes of industry, markets, and the public sphere. Students deepen their understanding of practical creative decision making at various levels of the broadcasting industry by researching broadcaster requirements and working on commercially viable group TV program proposals to be presented/submitted at the end of the course.

This course  introduces students to contemporary European cinema. It explores some of the "blockbusters" of recent years against the backdrop of national film industries and develops the distinct and common features of a variety of films made in Europe between 1990 and the present. The following general issues are addressed: what makes a film a blockbuster; what are the dominant themes; what are the implications of filmmaking in Europe; and how does the film language differ from American blockbusters. Films to be studied may include: Boyle: TRAINSPOTTING (1996), Tykwer: RUN LOLA RUN (1998), Noe: IRREVERSIBLE (2002), Hirschbiegel: DOWNFALL (2004), Leigh: VERA DRAKE (2005), Almodovar: JULIETA (2016), Loach: I, DANIEL BLAKE (2016).

This course introduces students to core knowledge about child health and development, provides descriptions of common health problems of childhood and adolescence, and evidence-based responses to them, helps students understand the health policy context, including how health care provision aims to meet the health needs of children and young people, helps students understand how our physical and social environment shapes child health, and allows students to apply their knowledge and understanding to a range of topics and contexts.

The course foregrounds some of the most topical territory in art history and cultural studies today: how to deal with the Imperial past? As such, this course builds on the more global approach taken in Year 1, but it also provides an in-depth theoretical lens to examine the inter-relationship between visual culture and colonialism (especially in the context of the British Empire). Students explore the way the colonial past continues to influence contemporary art and the socio-economic landscape today. Students investigate notions of race, identity, national self-determination as well as the broader inter-connected ideas of Britishness, Black-ness and Other-ness. An understanding of these issues is vital for students to engage productively with the contemporary artworld. This course therefore explore exhibitions and artworks that are currently on view.

This course examines key concepts and approaches in film and television studies. Central ideas in the development and practices of these disciplines – such as auteurism, genre, national cinema, realism, representation, and ideology – are examined through close readings of scholarly texts, and the analysis of case studies and examples drawn from the history of film and television. In doing so, this introduction to film and television studies engages with questions of the distinctive place of these media – as popular and artistic forms – within culture and society.

This course introduces students to some key ideas and debates around human kinship and relationality; in other words, how humans relate to one another and how relationships are formed, maintained, severed, and conceptualized. In this way, the unit explores what constitutes kin, friends, lovers, and others. The study of relationality forms the foundation of anthropology, but also offers fascinating insights into what it means to be human in a range of historical and global contexts. Drawing on both classic and contemporary material from the study of kinship and beyond, the course traverses themes of marriage, reproduction, love, parenting, friendship, sexuality, reproductive technologies, and relations with non-humans. Students learn the wider significance of the topics to the interpretation and analysis of human societies more broadly. 

The world today faces immense challenges. Climate emergency, global inequality, pandemics, racial oppression, migration and mobility crises and conflict are just some of the complex issues that individuals and countries are required to manage. This course is to examine the roles and potential capacity of global, national, and local social movements and civil society organizations in promoting policy change, evaluating their abilities and limitations in constructing meaningful policy solutions.