University of St Andrews

The majority of the world's population live in close proximity to the coastal zone. Coastal processes are highly dynamic and sensitive to external drivers, including long-term climate change and anthropogenic activities. Understanding these systems is important for developing appropriate coastal management strategies. Coasts (and coastal processes) therefore represent an excellent opportunity to study the interactions between humans and their physical environment. The course enhances students' understanding of environment-shaping processes and to offer advanced field-based training in the coastal environment. Including practical classes and an obligatory, reasonably priced, weekend field excursion, it encourages students to think about the ways in which process knowledge can inform coastal management.

As the global population speeds past seven billion, mounting evidence about resource depletion and climate change, and global economic inequality and social injustice, suggests current human development is unsustainable and that we are now living in the “Anthropocene” – an era in which human activity has, for the first time, become the dominant driver of environmental processes, and is causing unprecedented global change. The course shows how Geography, a discipline that draws on knowledge that spans the social and natural sciences and the humanities, is uniquely placed to understand our changing world.

Having considered in Level 1 why the concept of sustainable development (SD) is important and key concerns and areas of debate in understanding meanings of SD, this Level 2 course introduces aspects of how SD might be encouraged and facilitated. This course considers broad conceptual approaches to implementing SD. It includes more traditional frameworks based on governance and regulation ("command and control") as well as examining the role and importance of other approaches, including human security, environmental justice and management as well as community-based solutions and partnerships and conservation science. The course also addresses the extent to which these different approaches are interdependent, and how they can be used together to bring about change for SD.

This course explores some of the most dynamic literary and artistic achievements of archaic and classical Greek culture. Using a twin focus on myth and on ideas of community, the course ranges across Homeric epic, Athenian tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and the writings of intellectuals; it studies the relationship between texts and images in the expression of cultural values; and it examines a series of major themes in Greek views of identity, morality, politics and religion. 

In this course, students learn to read early forms of English language and literature, using specially edited texts from Old English, Middle English and Older Scots. They also encounter and gain a critical understanding of Renaissance verse, via the study of John Donne's poems and Milton's Paradise Lost.