University of Edinburgh

The course provides students with the analytical tools to make sense of similarities and differences across welfare states, focusing - among others - on the socio-economic outcomes associated with different welfare states, the reasons for distinctive social policy structures across countries, and the relation between public, private, and informal sectors in the provision of social policy. It illustrates these similarities and differences by introducing in detail selected national models of welfare states drawing on examples from Europe, North America, and East Asia. It reviews the role of international organizations in shaping social policy in the Global North and in the Global South. It discusses crises and opportunities for renewal that affect contemporary welfare states.

The course conveys broad factual knowledge on the military forces and infrastructure of some of the ancient world's largest, most powerful, and long-lived empires, those of Rome and Persia. Students acquire the skills to use all evidence at our disposal (material as well as written) for the topics under discussion. They gain deeper understanding how topography and geography influenced military strategy. The course provides students with the skills to assess the effectiveness of relevant military installations. Students learn to adopt a more nuanced approach to history and are encouraged to question Eurocentric worldviews.

This course offers an introduction to equilibrium thermodynamics. The course covers the First and Second Laws of thermodynamics, along with the concepts of temperature, internal energy, heat, entropy, and the thermodynamic potentials. The course also considers the applications of thermodynamic concepts to topics such as heat engines, the expansion of gases, and changes of phase. The Third Law, and associated properties of entropy, completes the course.

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.