King's College London

This course introduces students to some central figures in the history of political thought: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Schmitt. Students look at why they wrote what they wrote, what they meant, and how well their arguments work. They ask why they give different answers to questions such as: What does it mean to be truly free? Is democracy possible or desirable? Should we educate citizens, or take them as they are? Are there absolute moral truths, and what sort of politics should we have in light of that? What rights do we have? What place should religion have in politics? Should citizens dedicate themselves to the state? The course particularly suits students who enjoy political theory and the history of political thought. There is a lot of reading, and much of it is very challenging. Great emphasis is put on understanding primary texts, which are usually dense and difficult. 

The course invites students to consider the ways in which the investments of literary and critical theory—most centrally language, class, race, gender, and sexuality—have intersected and overlapped in relation to socio-political transformations from the 1970s to the present. Each week is organized around one or more of these intersections, which students address though discussions of critical and literary texts and films. Topics of discussion might include the relationship between waged and unwaged work, and the systems of gender and race that are organized around the poles of this relationship; the construction of categories that are presented as “normal”; the category of the human; the relationship between finance and representation; the politics of visibility; the relationship between aesthetics and social structure; the challenge of trying to define the social, political, and cultural characteristics of the present (and the recent past). 

This course examines issues of environment and uneven development through the historical geography of empire. The course educates students on: 1) interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to empire in the social sciences and humanities, 2) the study of empire and environment (especially natural resources) within the subfields of political geography, historical geography, development geography, and political ecology, and 3) the complex natures, spatialities, and identities produced in the wake of European empires in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Specific topics include the spatiality of sovereignty, racialized labor regimes (including slavery, coolies, and peasants), imperial modes of water and forest development, imperial systems of food and agriculture, state responses to disease and disaster, and the contradictory political geographies of settlement, incorporation, exploitation, and decolonization. The course concludes with a reflection on struggles to ‘decolonize’ imperial knowledge systems, political economies, and social relations in the contemporary era.

Students learn about the comparative dimensions of urbanization from the 18th to the early 20th century. Students explore the relationships between urbanization and the broader currents of economic, social, and cultural change. Students learn to compare and contrast urbanization at different places and times in both quantitative and qualitative terms; explain the relationships between social, cultural, and political processes; and explain the production of urban spaces and urban forms.

This course introduces students to key theories and concepts of social justice and invites them to consider how these ideas apply to the real world public policy questions with which they are concerned. Drawing on a range of philosophical, sociological, and political perspectives, the course provides students with theoretical tools for understanding what social justice is and how public policy is formulated and enacted, and enables them to use these tools to critically engage with contemporary examples across a range of international contexts and public policy areas and to think creatively about alternative ways in which public policy issues might be conceived and addressed. 

Consumer behavior is an exciting, dynamic, and growing field of marketing that draws on different social science disciplines (i.e., psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology). The field uses these perspectives to examine individual and collective consumption behaviors in various cultural, social, economic, and environmental settings. This course examines how and why consumers think, feel, and behave the way they do and what this means for marketing products, services, ideas, and experiences.