University of St Andrews

Building on the introduction and broad overview of Sustainable Development (SD) provided in SD1000, this course utilizes the UN's Sustainable Development Goals as a framework and is organized around five thematic clusters. These themes are explored from various disciplinary perspectives, explaining how each theme can be understood and what it entails in practice; who the key stakeholders are and the nature of their involvement; and how we can critically analyze the evidence in the context of SD and go beyond conventional paradigms and behavioral patterns. The course also highlights recurring, cross-cutting themes such as values, partnership, and diversity as ambitions of SD.

The course introduces students to major issues in modern glaciology, and to provides them with an understanding of how glaciers behave and why. The first part of the course explores the fundamental elements of glacier systems (accumulation, ablation, meltwater, ice flow processes, etc.), and explains how these interact to produce specific glacier behaviors (advance and retreat cycles, surges, etc). The second part of the course develops an understanding of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets and Mountain Glaciers, and how they impact other parts of the Earth system, including the oceans. The course develops a holistic understanding of glacier science, emphasizing the links between physical processes at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

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.