University of Edinburgh

This course outline the major processes giving rise to the diversity of extinct and extant organic life, to indicate the time frame over which these processes occur, and to introduce the methods used to study evolutionary processes. The examples used in the lectures and workshops are drawn from animals, plants and microorganisms, and the characters considered are behavioral, ecological, morphological, cellular and molecular. Visits to Edinburgh Zoo and the National Museum of Scotland allow students to think about how the evolutionary concepts that they learn apply to real organisms. 
 

The course introduces students to notions, definitions, and insights about social work practice from within the profession, discussing how they compare with public understanding (and prejudices) of the social workers' role and task. A theme is to explore how social workers can and do make a difference. Outside contributors discuss what they do and how they interface with other professions, providing students with an awareness of the distinct place of social work in the range of welfare services.

Open to all students, the course starts with a short history of the principles and background to the concept of "sustainable development" and proceeds to draw on insights from economic history and sociology, politics and international relations, social anthropology and human geography, to unravel the multiple issues and interpretations of sustainability, its politics, and its relevance. Students learn to think critically about what sustainability means and how it can be applied. Students are encouraged to examine from the lens of sustainability the challenges that contemporary societies are being confronted with from global to local levels. They also evaluate the changes that capitalist and industrial development and technological advancement have brought about to living patterns and the environment.

This course critically examines the subject of globalization from a sociological perspective. Globalization is a vast topic, and no one course can cover all its aspects. This course gives students grounding in the most fundamental aspects of globalization, with exploration of selected substantive topics to help root the general in the particular. Students examine the concept itself, the central themes of changing communications, social networks, and experiences of space and time, and the major economic, political, and ideological dimensions of globalization. The view taken in this course is that, while there have been distinctive social changes associated with globalization in recent decades, to understand this process we need to regularly relocate it in a long-term historical perspective. Globalization has been happening for centuries, and to understand current processes of globalization, we need to relate them to a deeper history of globalization. We also need to be careful about talking of globalization as if it were one thing. In fact this very broad term encompasses an array of different social processes that need to be distinguished in order to be better understood.

This course deals with experience. What is it to experience the material world? The course considers how our experiences are conditioned through multiple senses. Whilst the visual realm is, for many, still the fundamental way in which we experience the world this cannot be separated from the intermingling of all senses. In taking this position the course sets out to examine the complex relationships between the different senses and how these affect our engagement with the world around us. With a particular focus on material cultures the course employs a range of cultural contexts from art, architecture, design, sound, and the built environment. It explores these contexts through a variety of thematic approaches including (but not limited to): embodiment; hegemony of the visual; sounding objects; the olfactory imagination; touch and texture; immersive atmospheres; affect; mediated experience; rhythm analysis; creating the multi-sensory.

This course describes the mathematical underpinnings of Fourier theory, and digital signal processing, especially with regard to music and audio applications. The emphasis is on algebraic work, and on practical computation for sound analysis and synthesis.