University of Glasgow

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.

This course examines the nature and impact of Web 2.0 in the economic, creative, and political fields, placing these developments in a theoretical and historical context.

This course introduces students to instrumentation and data systems for engineers covering error analysis, signal acquisition, and processing.

This course introduces students to the discipline of sociology, assuming little or no prior knowledge of the discipline. Drawing on a wide range of examples, it introduces students to some of the key concepts, theories, and research methods sociologists use to understand the nature of contemporary societies, the relationship between the individual and society, and processes of social reproduction and change.