King's College London

This course gives students a thorough introduction to the field of behavioral organizational economics. Students discuss seminal as well as current research papers in the field, featuring empirical studies as well as lab and field experiments. Students study employment relationships between workers and organizations and get to know key factors that shape them in a positive way.  They focus on the two concepts of motivation and selection. When it comes to the question of how to motivate workers on their jobs, students discuss desired as well as unexpected effects incentives can have and examine the interplay between incentives, on the one hand, and cultural and psychological factors on the other. When it comes to selection and hiring, students tackle the question of how to best match candidates to jobs. Students also find out more about how to detect discrimination in the hiring process – and discuss measures that can help to mitigate or even eliminate it.

This course introduces students to the analysis of science and technology from a social and cultural standpoint. It also introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) – also called Science and Technology Studies – which seeks to understand how science and technology shape society and culture, and how society and culture, in turn, shape the development of science and technology.  

This course enables students to understand how money and finance, and processes of global political economy more broadly, enable, shape, and condition the way development, environmental governance, and conservation are practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. The course draws on economic geography, but also social, financial, and cultural geography, anthropology, development studies, and work on society and environment relations. Although the course will have a major reference to sub-Saharan Africa - including Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and South Africa - it also includes examples of financialization, conservation, and eco-system services from the UK, the Caribbean, and Asia. 

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge, and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. 

Psychoanalysis is a highly influential and contested form of 20th century discourse. This course introduces students to key Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives. By bringing these into dialogue with a wide range of literary texts, it encourages students to consider how issues of unconscious motivation, sexuality, and madness operate in and around different forms of writing. It serves as a starting point for students to engage with existing psychoanalytic literary theory but emphasizes the close reading of foundational texts alongside literary works with the hope of generating new, mutually informed readings of both psychoanalysis and literature.

This course explores the changing relationships between health, lifestyles, and the city in both historical and contemporary contexts across the Global North and South. Focusing on a wide range of case studies, the course will critically examine the emergence of the idea of "lifestyle" as an explicit public health concern and, in addition, an object of geographic analysis. The creation of lifestyle as a problem to be addressed comes as part of a wider acknowledgement of the capacity of certain features of urban landscapes to perpetuate the risk of certain "lifestyle" conditions such as obesity that result from an amalgam of factors including sedentary behavior and poor diets, perpetuated by the risks presented by the places in which people live, work, travel, and play. 

This course explores the psychology behind entrepreneurship and innovation. The topics include the personality of entrepreneurs and exploring whether entrepreneurs are born or made; how entrepreneurs and innovation leaders make decisions about risk and manage uncertainty; what drives entrepreneurs and what "returns" they can expect (in terms of income and well-being); what success means to entrepreneurs, how individuals may lead successfully on entrepreneurial, entrepreneurs and innovation initiatives. Students also reflect on how each person can act in an entrepreneurial and innovative manner. The course examines the psychological underpinnings of the entrepreneurial process and innovative behaviors within established business. It is mindful of the diversity of entrepreneurial and innovation endeavors ranging from high-tech and digital entrepreneurs to social entrepreneurs that launch social innovations.

This course explores key topics in understanding British electoral behavior, election campaigning, and political communications, in particular the changing role and influence of public opinion on politics and vice versa. Topics covered include the nature and measurement of public opinion; theories of electoral behavior, and an introduction to the use of quantitative methods in political science; the nature, operation and impact on politics of the British electoral system; influence of the media on public opinion and politicians' attempts to communicate with the public through the media; the tension between "image" and "substance" in modern democratic decision making; and the democratic implications of modern trends including falling turnouts, lower engagement with politics and the parties' adoption of a political marketing philosophy. Each of these issues is set in context by examining their contribution to explaining the significance and/or outcome of various key elections in Britain since the 1930s.

The course will provide students with an understanding of the basic human anatomy and physiology. Students learn the coupling of structure with function through a series of lectures, tutorials, and practicals.

This course introduces students to world history through material culture. The main objects and configurations of material culture, from the body as commodity to cowries as money, are analyzed in this course. Food, drinks, drugs, fabrics, dress, houses, furniture, interior decoration, urban planning, and gardens structure a diversified program. The circulation of objects around the world, in some cases under different materials and forms, opens the way to consider cultural exchange between different civilizations, meaning forms of transfer, contamination, adaptation, and refusal.