King's College London

This course examines a range of contemporary issues in international politics across a number of areas of economics and politics, which include events that are occurring in contemporary world politics that have significant interests for students and layperson alike.  Students get out into the real world, thinking about the wider meanings of the events that they have witnessed and are witnessing in world politics. Students question what is the relationship between IR (as a body of knowledge) and international politics (as the subject of that knowledge)? Do the IR theories make sense in terms of contemporary developments, do they shift in line with these developments or do they lag behind politics? Whilst issues form the foreground, this question forms the background to the course. 

In this course students learn skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in Arabic in a range of predictable situations and contexts. Students interact in a simple way orally and in writing in Arabic. They develop strategies for coping with unfamiliar language or unexpected responses, such as asking for repetition or clarification. They also use Arabic to reinforce/further their knowledge of other disciplines. 

The course looks at financial institutions, including central banks, commercial banks, broker-dealers, money market funds, and hedge funds, as well as financial markets and their infrastructures. Students analyze the underlying business models as well as the legal and regulatory environment in which these institutions and markets operate. It also focuses on financial products, with a particular emphasis on money and money-like financial instruments. This includes the basics of finance theory, monetary theory, the money creation process, but also derivatives and repurchase transaction and the role they play in the modern economy.

More than half of the world's population today live in urban areas, and this share is expected to increase. Modern cities are highly complex political and economic systems. But with the complexity also comes the challenge of how to organize them well. This course applies concepts and theories across philosophy, politics, and economics to the challenges of urban living. The course is divided into two parts. The first part will introduce students to the key theoretical debates relevant to the socio-political organization of the city. Students investigate whether living in the city is qualitatively different to living elsewhere. During the second part of the course, students apply this theoretical knowledge to concrete problems and case studies: urban informality, sanctuary cities, housing, residential segregation and proposals for urban independence.  

This course explores the contributions made by economic theory to several important economic problems. While the list of topics is generally quite flexible, the underlying theme is the use of game theoretic modelling and the use of mathematical modelling and equilibrium concepts developed in economic theory. There are no formal prerequisites, but the course is quite technical and students with weak quantitative background should be willing to catch up with constrained optimization (e.g., Lagrange & Kuhn-Tucker methods) and intermediate microeconomics (e.g., competitive markets vs monopolies).

The analysis of communication on social media is rapidly becoming a key-area in (socio)linguistics and discourse studies. This course introduces students to the main methods of data collection and analysis of language and discourse for a variety of social media contexts. The course combines familiarization with frameworks of analysis with practical steps on how to approach data. A variety of case-studies of social media afforded practices (e.g. sharing, tagging, Like & Follow) ranging from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter illustrate the role of a range of language and multimodal resources in presenting ourselves and relating with others online. 

Avant-garde cinema also goes by other names: underground cinema, experimental cinema, and artists’ moving image. It describes, in short, films made by artists. This course examines a wide variety of films made by American and European artists from the 1920s to the 2010s. Students engage with a diverse range of avant-garde films by engaging closely with their formal strategies and techniques. Topics include (but are not limited to): abstract film and music, Dada and surrealist film, city films, psychedelic films, the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative, women’s filmmaking, black/queer histories, found footage remakes, and experimental ethnography.

In this course, students explore the German-speaking world through a range of cultural materials drawn from the Medieval period to the contemporary. Work in the course is rooted in an understanding of race as a culturally constructed category whose meanings shift in different historical and cultural contexts. From year to year the course’s primary texts might include films, short literary texts, performances, objects, visual artefacts, music and other forms. These are allocated to thematic blocks that focus on key concepts including borders, language, and the body. Weekly exercises in close analysis, alongside key short readings in theory and method, equip students with the critical skills to analyze how cultural materials both construct and challenge ideas about race and ethnicity. 

This course offers students an introduction to the relationship between the media, technology platforms, and politics, and an exploration of how that relationship is changing in the digital age. The course introduces students to general theories of media power and effects, outline the economics of media, shows how the media impacts political campaigning, illustrates how the media can affect public policy, and assesses the negative externalities associated with the new political economy of the media (including monopoly, surveillance and information disorder).

Neuroendocrinology is the discipline concerned with how the nervous system controls hormonal secretion and how hormones control the brain. It is pivotal in understanding both general physiology and medicine. This course provides up-to-date and research-orientated information delivered as a series of lectures and group exercises. The lectures are presented by experts in the particular area of research, and the group exercises are based on current research literature and/or results, and are designed to develop students' ability to read, understand, and appraise the current research literature.