University of Edinburgh

What are the roots of our concern for the environment? What did environmental activism look like in the 1960s, the 1930s or even the 1870s? This course offers a survey of where environmentalism has come from and where it is going. This course provides students with a deeper appreciation for the history of environmentalism. We learn about links between the development of the sciences of the environment and environmentalism as a social movement. The geographical focus in this course is on Europe and North America. However, students also locate and interrogate how environmental concern and policy has developed in various parts of the globe. Students note the experiences and contributions of different identity groups. In doing so, they consider the impact of and reactions to European imperialism and postcolonial globalization. They also examine and critique the role of the United Nations and other international organizations in environmental affairs.

As a discipline, history is a matter of selecting and shaping historical data. Theory is a meditation upon the discipline and its data. The course is a study of historians, theorists, and their texts. After an introduction considering the Period as the object of historical definition and as the tool of the historian, the course introduces theorists and theories of architecture from Vitruvius to Deconstruction. They are arranged chronologically so that the force of historical determinism and purposiveness of historical reflection may be gauged. The course concludes with a discussion of the proposition that cultural time moves in cycles.

How did the cities in the Mediterranean world develop from the 4th to the 8th century? How did the arrival of Christianity and Islam influence the built environments, and how did the urban populations engage with the monuments of the pasts? This course uses texts and material culture (art, architecture and objects) to examine how people lived in, thought about and interacted with the urban space. Students begin with a critical examination of the models that scholars have used to explore the process of urban change. The course adopts a thematic approach by addressing the organization of physical space, examining the fabric of the late antique city, and exploring social and religious practices in the urban environment. Towards the end of the course, students return to the present to explore how archaeological practices and heritage management influences the view of the late antique city.

This course provides students with the tools needed to understand how domestic violence and abuse was and is now understood in public debate and what the key theoretical underpinnings are to understand domestic violence from a social science lens. The course explores how legislation within different jurisdictions has evolved to reflect new research evidence and changes in public debate, and it critically reflects on what the social policy response to domestic violence is and has been in different settings. The course focuses primarily on the UK context with potential for exploring other countries as case studies.

The course offers a unique opportunity to learn one of the official languages of Scotland. Students develop simple strategies to learn languages and gain confidence in holding a basic everyday conversation. This course is suitable for students with no previous knowledge of the language. Students achieve the equivalent of the A1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)and develop their confidence in holding a basic everyday conversation. Students develop these basic linguistic skills through a variety of comprehension and production activities. The course focuses on language that is required for communicating in real everyday situations, such as introducing oneself and others and talking about the daily routine. The course includes autonomous learning activities, which enable students to practice and consolidate their skills.

This course introduces students to the study of the archaeology and history of ancient Egypt from the start of the 1st Dynasty at c. 3000 BC, and through the two Pyramid Ages of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, ending at c. 1650 BC. The course focuses on providing a basic solid grounding on the chronology, geography, society, and political organization of Egypt during this period. It furthermore looks to aspects of religion, daily life, and provide some insights into art and literature, particularly pertinent for the Middle Kingdom, the classic period of Egyptian literature.

The world's knowledge is defined by hybridity between oral traditions and written texts. This course is an introduction to Scotland's rich oral/aural traditions of song, storytelling, instrumental music, dance, and folklore. Key concepts and theories relating to the interaction between orality and print, transmission (sharing) of oral material, and intangible cultural heritage as defined by UNESCO are explored in the context of modern (cultural) ethnology. Students learn fieldwork techniques, archival research skills and oral history interviewing. Themes can include children's song, ballads, political song, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, Highland bagpipes, Gaelic folktales, and Scottish legends, and special material is drawn from printed collections and the School of Scottish Studies Archives.

The course covers basics of Turkish language, alphabet, vowel harmony, simple, past and future tenses. Topic-based vocabulary is provided, and simple dialogue introduced.

In this course, students learn how to use Python to retrieve and parse data from biological repositories through bulk download and application programming interfaces (APIs). They learn about established data formats for different data modalities so that they understand the structure and content of the data they are using and how it was generated. Each week students focus on analytical tasks in linked topics that span the main components of modern biomedical informatics research. Topics change slightly each year, but typically include tools, algorithms, and approaches for biological sequence, multi-omics (transcriptomics, proteomics, methylomics), biomedical network, and biomedical text analysis. Each topic is explored using real-world examples.

 

This course explores the diverse and changing nature of the discipline of archaeology from the 19th century to the present day. Themes covered include the construction of chronologies, data recovery, classification and interpretation, cultural and processual/post-processual models, and the developing role of archaeological and environmental sciences.