University of Edinburgh

Students work on two complementary projects exploring materiality through assemblage construction and reductive working methods as a way of engaging with the current debates surrounding environmental and social sustainability in the arts.
Students are encouraged to consider the concept of sustainability in reference to specific cultural, environmental and socio-political frameworks and the implications for the production of art in the 21st century. They explore these issues through the development of a sculptural process that incorporates experimenting, presenting and reflecting. The focus for these projects is the development of relative thinking through physical experimentation and reflexive methodologies.

This course introduces the discipline of Bioinformatics to students from both physical science and life science backgrounds. It introduces key biological concepts including the main types of molecules (DNA, RNA, and protein) as well as the cell biological processes involved in their regulation and function in biological systems. Students learn to work with and analyze biological sequences through biological sequence databases, process automation, algorithms, and tools to allow pairwise and multiple sequence alignment, as well as approaches using high-throughput next-generation sequence data.

This course provides students with the conceptual knowledge and practical skills to understand comparative politics in a globalized world. It introduces the comparative method, and applies that method to core questions and issues of comparative and international politics. These questions cover political regimes, state formation and institutions, political and economic development, democracy, order and violence. By the end of the course students are able to: Recognize the diversity of political systems around the world and their key components (including institutions, actors, and culture); Explain why political systems differ, and how those differences shape domestic and global politics; Understand the logic of the comparative method and be able to apply it to real world events and outcomes; Assess the value of comparative political science for understanding current events and global relations; Effectively communicate comparative political analysis in written and oral forms.