King's College London

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.

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.