King's College London

This course examines the idea that the contemporary production of urban space restricts the rights of many urban dwellers to inhabit, develop, and otherwise shape the cities in which they live and work. Drawing especially on the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre (alongside other "metromarxists") the course contrasts the way that cities serve the interests of financial powers, developers, and property owners with the forms of urban exclusion, alienation, and marginalization experienced by those who are oppressed by virtue of their class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, or gender. Though consideration of different struggles for urban space, the course explores important questions about how people should make claims to urban space, and explores the political potential of the demand for "the right to the city."

This course examines the role of the City of London in the broader context of social, political, and economic transformations. 

This course introduces students to some of the central questions in political philosophy, such as: What is political authority? What, if anything, makes the exercise of coercive power legitimate? What is the value of democracy? What, if any, are legitimate political constraints on freedom of expression? What is the proper role of expertise in democratic decision making? When is civil disobedience justified? The course is designed to complement (and lay the groundwork for) the Level 5 and Level 6 political philosophy modules. 

This course introduces students to the basic concepts and issues in contemporary political economy, with a particular focus on the political economy of the contemporary social democratic state. The course introduces students to the concepts of economic analysis and the relevance of these concepts to the study of government and politics. It provide students with an understanding of the problems of market failure and government failure and provides a scholarly framework to comparatively evaluate these problems. It provides students with a familiarity with a number of classic and key contemporary readings in political economy. 

In this course, students "place" Austen in a number of different senses: socially, environmentally, and with a view to her lasting legacies and impact on our modern cultural industries. They attend to the treatment of place as a theme across her own novels, the way that her characters navigate space and that particular geographical locations bear witness to social interaction. Though Charlotte Brontë famously complained that Austen's works offered only a "highly cultivated garden" with "no open country", students discuss Austen's interest in a much wider range of settings, which in turns allows for a complex engagement with ideas of nature, colonialism, health, leisure, and mobility.