University of Edinburgh

Looking at art sociologically involves questioning conventional understandings of "art" and "the artist." Who has the authority to decide what counts as art, and what social conditions allow for the idea of the "artist" to emerge? The sociology of the arts also entails investigating cultural institutions. How do organizations (such as academies, conservatories, companies, galleries and festivals) become established, and how do they shape artistic innovation? To see the arts from a sociological perspective means examining the relation between the arts and society. How is artistic activity affected or redefined by macro social processes (such as globalization), and what role can the arts play in micro-level processes that foster social cohesion, identity formation, and active citizenship? Through an exploration of theoretical perspectives and empirical studies, this course considers the role of art in the social, and the role of the social in art.

Topics include 1. Structural and Molecular Biology: The structures of biomacromolecules (DNA, RNA and proteins), structure determination (NMR, X-ray crystallography and CryoEM), post translational modification of proteins, synthetic gene design, recombinant protein expression, mutagenesis, unnatural amino-acids, methods of purification and characterization including electrophoretic methods and mass spectrometry. 2. In Silico Methods: Sequence analysis, databases, structure prediction and molecular dynamics. Some of the material in this section are delivered as a workshop to foster the development of in silico skills. 3. Biophysical Techniques: The application of spectroscopic and analytical techniques to measure the physical properties of biomolecular systems, including kinetics, coupled assays, biothermodynamic methods (SPR, ITC), fluorescence, vibrational spectroscopy and imaging techniques. 4. Enzymes and Biosynthesis: This section focuses on enzymes, systems and their applications, beginning with an overview of the structures and functions of the different classes of enzyme. Case studies are used to illustrate the application of techniques covered in earlier sections to the study of complex biological systems and processes. Topics covered include specialized catalytic centers, analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters, protein engineering, directed evolution and highlights of recent natural product biosynthesis.

Musical instruments are central to all forms of music. This course introduces the study of instruments, introducing methods and methodologies that can be used to inform ongoing studies across the music curriculum. Through considering instruments from around the world as socially and musically located craft objects that are tools for music making, a decolonized approach is central to the ethos behind this course. The course touches on the history of instruments; the history of studying instruments; how instruments are made, preserved and used; the meanings that instruments gain through association; and the materials available to makers in different contexts. The course is grounded in the University's Musical Instrument Collection.

When can we legitimately go to war? When we are attacked? In order to intervene in the domestic affairs of another country on the grounds that this best serves our national interest? Once we are at war, can we do anything that is necessary to win, or are there moral restrictions on what we can do? For example, can we use nuclear weapons? Can we tortured suspected terrorists? Can we target civilians, in the hope to undermine their government? The course addresses those issues, from a normative, philosophical perspective.

Database management systems are at the core of computer applications that need to store, manipulate, and query data. This course takes a deep dive into how modern database systems function internally, from studying their high-level design to understanding the underlying data structures and algorithms used for efficient data processing. The course covers a range of data management techniques from both commercial systems and cutting-edge research literature, enabling students to apply these techniques to other fields of computer science. This is the undergraduate version of INFR11199

 

This course teaches students the tools required to develop, simulate, and explore economic models using a computer. It may also be of relevance to economics students who wish to develop coding skills.
 

This course introduces students to the field of environmental economics. They discuss and analyze how markets, without policy intervention, fail to capture environmental externalities. They then discuss the possible regulatory measures and policy instruments available to correct such market failures yielding what might be the socially optimal level of pollution. The course introduces various environmental valuation techniques that help identifying the costs and benefits of controlling environmental externalities. 

This course provides students with an introduction to the anthropological study of the USA, incorporating perspectives on a variety of topics and regions, and referring to research carried out at a range of historical moments. It provides a grounding in key debates. It shows how ethnographic work carried out in the US has influenced the discipline of anthropology. The course takes a (self)-critical look at what area-based foci of study do. Those teaching the course draw from rich ethnographies and from their own fieldwork experiences in the US.

This course introduces students to political data analysis using domestic and international data. The course covers core substantive topics in politics and international relations, typically exploring one major research question from Politics and one major research question from IR. It explores how to access relevant data and assesses the appropriateness of data. It provides key skills in quantitative data analysis, including descriptive statistics, cross-tab/contingency tables, measures of association, correlation, and regression. 

The course explores key works from the Irish Literary Renaissance, otherwise known as the Irish Cultural Revival, or the Celtic Revival: an extraordinary period of literary endeavor during a time of intense cultural and political transformation. The texts on the course are key works of Irish literature, of literary modernism, and would also come to be hugely influential on post-colonial writing through the rest of the 20th century. Students explore how the texts shaped and contested ideas of identity and history; how Ireland's push for freedom from English rule coincided with the context of modernity; and students close-read our primary texts, discussing how they challenge conventional notions of style, form and genre, asking how their formal innovations related to historical and political change.