King's College London

In the last few decades, the number of film festivals in the world has boomed. Even more recently, film studies researchers have begun to pay attention to this phenomenon, and the sub-field of film festival studies has grown rapidly. This course combines practice and theory. Students form small groups and curate their own evenings in a week-long campus film festival to be held in the final week of the semester. Students also read a wide range of research in film festival studies. 

This course introduces students to the theory, methods, and applications of linear models. The theory of the general linear model is introduced, with an emphasis on widely used methods such as regression analysis, analysis of variance, etc. Applications in various fields are used to give students experience of applying the methods using a specialized statistical software package to analyze linear models.

Health and disease are shaped by social, cultural, political, and technological forces and inextricably linked with questions of science, technology, modernity, religion, colonialism, capitalism, racism, globalization, humanitarianism, and the state. This course focuses on recent developments towards the pharmaceuticalization of health, the molecularization of life, the commodification of the body, the privatization of medical care, and the securitization of public health. These developments have fundamentally transformed today's landscape of therapeutic governance in fundamental ways.

This is a highly interdisciplinary course about natural hazards and risk. This course is structured around a series of lectures and discussions aimed at understanding current methods for assessing, communicating, and visualizing risk and reducing disaster for hazards that are natural (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, mass wasting, floods, climate and extreme temperatures, multi-hazards) and environmental (e.g. heavy-metal contamination, chemical hazards), and the complex relationship that exists between these hazards and society. It is expected that students are already familiar with the material in the 2nd year Natural Hazards module (5SSG2042).

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.