University of Edinburgh

This course focuses on ethical practice in the caring professions. Compassion in caring constitutes a key theme through the course. Starting from an overview of the philosophical foundations of professional ethics, students examine key debates around universality and context-dependence in professional ethics. The course explains how moral reasoning related to professional practice goes beyond the entirely rational and requires the capacity for empathic engagement with others. Students also apply the concept of professional wisdom to ethical practice. Through this exploration, students gain an awareness of their personal ethics and values. Particular ethical principles relating to care and treatment are explored, including beneficence, autonomy, self-determination, informed consent, confidentiality, human rights, dignity, respect and professional fidelity. Students will analyze the strengths and limitations of various professional ethical codes by applying them to complex ethical case studies. Ethical issues relating to the vulnerable service user/patient are examined, including ethical challenges in relation to capacity and decision-making in the context of mental health, dementia, end of life care, critical care, childhood and intellectual disability. 

This course provides a multidisciplinary introduction to fire dynamics covering fundamentals applicable to fire safety engineering in the built environment, manufacturing, and process industries. It considers the processes that govern how fires are ignited and how they burn and how they can be controlled through engineering design. The course covers fundamental fire science including thermochemistry, transient heat transfer, material flammability, smoke and fire plumes, and basic fire models; as well as the principles of fire safety engineering, including regulation relevant to the built environment and process industries. 

The course is concerned with gathering, critically analyzing, and presenting a coherent body of information on an engineering-related topic. The group is allocated a theme and each member of the group is assigned a topic relevant to the theme. The students, operating as a group, are required to research the theme, developing a body of interrelated knowledge and an understanding of their topics. This is accomplished primarily through investigation of the published literature, and by making contact with industry and other organizations. The objective is to collect, distil, analyze and present in a logical fashion, a summary of the information collected.

In this course, students discuss current topics related to global environmental change. Topics include nature of contemporary/ongoing global warming; recent climate variability: models and reconstructions; discerning natural versus anthropogenic changes; future sea level rise; stability of ice sheets; atmospheric changes, rainfall, and extreme weather; future climate change predictions; and dangerous climate change & 2 degree warming.
 

This course develops students to understand the dynamic and contextual meaning of health and wellbeing within a complex and globalizing world. Political, sociological and ethical conceptualizations of health and wellbeing will be explored to understand the current health and policy contexts for individual, families and communities. The range of environmental, social, political and individual factors that influence health and wellbeing are explored within the context of contemporary society to examine how health inequalities are produced, replicated and reinforced.

This course offers a wide-ranging survey of Scandinavian history and culture from the Mesolithic (c. 8000 BC) to the Enlightenment (c. AD 1750) and beyond. It begins by defining and distinguishing the key concepts "Nordic" and "Scandinavian," the linguistic heritage of the regions concerned, and the core terminology used to compartmentalize and describe their past. It then moves on to the evolution of Scandinavian culture from earliest antiquity to the Iron Age, as a longitudinal introduction to our study of the Viking Age. The survey of Viking culture provides an overview of social structure, worldview, and belief, and examines different aspects of the Viking Expansion overseas. Students explore the discovery, settlement, and early society of Iceland, and also chart the rise and fall of the Danish Empires, the deep-reaching influence of the Hanseatic League, the profound impact the Protestant Reformation of the mid-16th Century on Nordic society, and the role of Sweden as an "Imperial power" in the 17th Century. The course concludes with an overview of the origins and ideals of the Enlightenment as experienced in the North.