University of Glasgow

In this course, students gain practical experience of welfare provision in Scotland through a placement in a voluntary organization. Tutorials are held to allow students to critically reflect on their practical experiences in combination with and informed by academic study.

In this course, students explore current debates on European integration, study European Union policy-making, and discuss the future of Europe on the basis of a broad knowledge of the EU's history, institutions, politics, and policies.

This course gives students an opportunity to study prose, poetry, and drama from the Victorian and Edwardian periods; authors studied may include George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Wilkie Collins. Students read literary texts in the context of some of the major social and political developments in this period.

Over the last 100 years or so, an astonishing number of writers have chosen to use fantasy as a way of responding to the challenges and traumas of modernity; that is, of writing contemporary history. This course discovers what happens when we read the history of the 20th century through the lens of the major fantasies it generated. Students have the opportunity to broaden their awareness of the range and complexity of fantastic fiction in the 20th century, explore a range of theoretical approaches to fantasy, develop independent research skills, and hone their abilities in the art of critical writing.

This course examines the nature of ethical properties, the nature of ethical judgements, and the nature of reasons for action. The first week begins with an introduction to metaethics, then each following week covers moral motivation, desires and reasons, emotion and moral judgment, character, well-being, and lastly natural science and moral knowledge. Throughout the course students critically discuss what science can teach us about ethics; explain reasons, internalism and externalism, and provide arguments for preferring one view over the other; evaluate competing accounts of the relationship between emotion and moral judgment; explain two or more theories of how we come to have moral knowledge; and assess empirical arguments for and against virtue ethics.

This course explores health and its determinants from a broad range of sociological approaches. It examines the relationship between health and the social, political, and economic organization of society, and the theoretical and empirical basis of the social context of health and health care. The course introduces students to the key debates and theories in the sociology of health and illness; provides an understanding of how these debates impact on our knowledge of health and illness; and examines the possibilities and limits of the sociology of health and illness.

In this course, students work in small groups to create and evaluate a measurement tool using predominantly quantitative methods, with additional qualitative techniques. Students generate items to create a tool that measures a psychological construct and is informed by existing literature, and then administer this tool and evaluate aspects of its reliability, validity, and applicability.

This course provides a study of tropical rainforest ecosystems, covering their origins, evolution, structure, and function. Important groups of organisms are covered in depth with particular emphasis on recent research. Delivery is by a mixture of lectures, tutorials, and seminars.

This course examines classical, critical, and contemporary urban scholarship to evaluate the sociological importance of the city in the 21st century. Using both international and local case studies, and drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, students are exposed to a range of critical questions pertaining to the past, present, and future of social life in cities. From the early days of industrialization to the present "age of urbanism," the city has occupied a unique position within the sociological imagination. As a site of conflict and community, inequality and identity, and continuity and change, depictions of the city have attracted a distinguished alumnus of scholars: from Benjamin to Jacobs, Whyte to Wacquant, and Simmel to Sassen. For these thinkers, the city represents a concrete manifestation of broad-based social forces that is simultaneously general and specific, global and local. Particularly through traditions of urban ethnography, the city has proven time and again to be a complex, contradictory, and nuanced social tapestry with distinctive social, spatial, and cultural patterns. For similar reasons, the city has also captured the imagination of countless writers, musicians, film-makers, and artists, for whom the city operates as muse, inspiration, and challenge.