University of Edinburgh

This course provides an advanced introduction to the anthropology of health, illness, and healing. Students are introduced to key theories and current debates at the interface of anthropology and medicine through a focus on cross-cultural approaches to illness, pain, healing, the body, and care. This course explores biomedicine as one among many ways of thinking through and constituting personhood, illness, and the body. It deals with the challenges that arise when biomedical expertise meets other understandings of illness and suffering; the multiple kinds of care provided in institutional, public, religious and domestic settings; the relationship between curing and healing; and the ways in which people grapple with affliction and uncertainty through narrative, through relationships, and through action. 

How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? How is gender constructed in different contexts and what are the material consequences? How can gender analyses empower us to act as agents of personal and social change? This inter-disciplinary course provides an overview of the major issues at stake in the study of gender relations from a broadly social science perspective. It introduces students to gender studies as a theoretical field of investigation, examining key concepts and debates in the field. Students explore issues of power, inequality, intersectionality, change and resistance through contemporary examples of "doing gender" around the world. In doing so, this course equips students - as 21st century graduates - with awareness and understanding of global inequalities based on gender, race, class, and sexuality, as well as basic tools to undertake gender analysis.

Data is one of the most important assets of any enterprise and plays a central role in many aspects of everyday life, from healthcare, to education, to commerce. In order to be turned into meaningful information that enables and supports decision making, data must be stored, maintained, processed and analysed. Database management systems are complex software programs that allow their users to perform these tasks in an efficient and reliable way. This course is an introduction to the principles underlying the design and implementation of relational databases and database management systems.

This course provides an introduction to how economists analyze behavior in financial markets. It provides an understanding of the role of financial markets, the behavior of asset prices, and the economic causes and consequences of financial market imperfections. This is achieved through application of economic theory and examination of empirical evidence. Topics covered include the present value model and excess volatility; the term structure of interest rates; arbitrage conditions in foreign exchange markets; and consumption, portfolio choice, and the equity premium. The course is taught through a program of lectures and tutorials. Learning-by-doing, through problem solving and discussion of exercise sets, is an important ingredient of the course. A background in mathematics is recommended. Students with a weak math background need to be prepared to work at developing their math skills.

This course studies the principles and practices of secure programming. Secure programming means writing programs in a safe fashion, to avoid vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers. It also means using security features provided by libraries, such as authentication and encryption, appropriately and effectively. A range of programming platforms is considered, ranging from low-level (e.g. Android OS), through web programming (e.g., JavaScript and Python) to high-level large-scale languages (e.g., Java). New and emerging language-based security mechanisms are examined, including ways of specifying and enforcing security policies statically and dynamically (e.g., to enforce access controls or information flow policies).

The course explores the global history of three themes - goods, peoples, and ideas. Students interrogate the new forms of power which sought to reshape global connections in the period from c. 1450 and explore the ways in which polities and societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America engaged with and resisted the rise of European power and produced alternative imagined geographies, leading to the creation both of new connections and new forms of disconnection. The course also provides an opportunity to reflect critically on the writing of global history and to consider how to best make sense of the intersections of the local and the global in this period.