University of St Andrews

This module provides an introduction to central figures, works and ideas of the period of the European Enlightenment (roughly 1700-1800), beginning with an account of its historical background and ending with a review of its legacy. It approaches issues both thematically and through the writings of major thinkers, considering for example various contrasts: experience and reason, belief and scepticism, individual and society, nature and convention, equality and inequality, and representation and revolution; and looking at the ideas of such figures as Locke, Hume, Kant, Smith, and Rousseau.

This course addresses evolutionary and comparative approaches to psychology. The course provides an understanding of major evolutionary forces and how they have shaped animal and human behavior and psychology. The course introduces key principles, concepts, and methodologies and relates them to specific topic areas such as the evolution of social behavior and the evolutionary origins of language and cognition.

The course introduces students to pharmacology, which can be defined as the study of the actions of drugs. The course has a strong focus on the nervous system. The basic principles of pharmacology are covered, including drug interactions with specific receptors in target tissues and pharmacokinetics. Students learn how drugs work and become familiar with pharmacological concepts and terminology. Students also consider the drug development process and the many ways in which new therapeutics are designed and developed. The effects of different classes of drugs upon the peripheral and central nervous systems and on different neurotransmitter pathways are covered. How drugs can be used to understand the function of these systems and to alleviate their malfunctioning in various diseases and afflictions is explained.

This course gives students a broad grounding in the antebellum literature and culture of the United States, from colonial settlement to Civil War. Focusing on the self-conscious acts of speech and declaration which characterized early attempts to bring the new nation into being, the course introduces students to a range of texts designed to be spoken, including jeremiads, lyceum lectures, and orations. Students are encouraged to think about the powers and limitations of these early American voicings, and they draw on a range of literary media - from travelogues and letters to political pamphlets and legal documents - as well as elements of rhetoric and style, to explore literary experiments set on establishing a distinct, "American" voice. The course's wide historical range offers students the opportunity to develop an understanding of the relationship between literary production and the major social and political issues that shaped the early Republic.

This course introduces students to the basic principles of spatial analysis. Students learn how to use spatial analysis methods and fundamental spatial algorithms for a variety of applications in human and physical geography. The course is structured along the two spatial data representations, vector data, and raster data. Students learn to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to perform the analysis.

This course focuses on the social and cultural relations produced by resource management projects, and explores the global and local frames through a series of world-wide case studies of mining, oil, gas, and forestry projects. Resource projects have long been important sites of cultural contact, environmental impact and anthropological interest: whether first contact with prospectors, disputes with multinational companies, sustainable development initiatives or civil-society monitoring, resource exploration and extraction has long played an important part in the interface with non-western and indigenous peoples and the forces of globalization. The course also examines the potential for anthropological skills and knowledge to contribute to an industry that has increasingly to account for its social and environmental impacts to a global constituency.

The course includes lectures on metal complexes and organometallics, descriptive transition-metal chemistry, atmospheric chemistry, solid-state chemistry and descriptive main-group chemistry.

Incorporating the human security discourse into sustainable development, this course focuses on four themes representing overarching approaches for developing sustainability solutions, whose interests they represent, and their implications on the "individual" as the referent object of security and sustainable development. Engaging the human security components allows students to understand the implications of sustainable development, or lack thereof, on the people whose development is to be sustained. Through critical interrogation of approaches to the sustainable development, this course explores the benefits and trade-offs implicit in different dimensions of sustainability and their implications. The course builds on the core material of SD1000 and SD1004.

In this course students think critically about diversity and inequality and how they are manifest in place, focusing particularly on local scales. Students learn to see the places around them as a product of complex processes that reflect and reinforce social differences. In studying the making and meaning of place students consider themes such as international and internal migration, housing structures and gentrification, neighborhood representations, and place belonging. Students interrogate how social and spatial sorting (or stratification, or segregation) happens along lines of race/ethnicity, class, and age, and who is advantaged and disadvantaged. In this course students work with a variety of types of evidence (data) and be encouraged to appreciate how this can provide deeper and broader interrogations of social phenomena. There is considerable focus on the UK but also examples from elsewhere, and the inherent themes and theories are applicable globally.

The future is increasingly framed as unpredictable, turbulent, complex, and unknown. This course considers the implications of the future framed as uncertain for sustainable development. It explores risk governance as a means of navigating uncertain futures and its deployment for sustainable development. The first part of the course asks: what is risk governance? Content is theoretical in focus and introduces risk governance as governance that involves interventions based on anticipated futures. Lectures cover theorizations of risk and core components of risk governance. The second part is empirically focused and considers examples of risk governance in practice. Lectures focus on the deployment of risk governance for sustainable development in different industry contexts, such as insurance and urban planning. Concluding lectures reflect on risk governance, including how it is lived, experienced, and resisted.