King's College London

This one-semester course introduces students to world history since the end of the Second World War, looking beyond Eurocentric perspectives and taking a global approach. World history is both a way of thinking about, approaching and doing history, as well as a way of understanding the history of the world. The course traces the history of globalization in this period: the expanding processes of economic, technological, social, cultural, and intellectual change, and the increasing but still uneven integration of different parts of the globe into these processes since 1945. Students explore a diverse range of grounded perspectives on everyday life across the globe in this period, considering the different historical scales (communal, regional, national, transnational, global) on which human lives were lived and shaped. The course also examines the key historical processes and events of the period: the 1960s, the Cold War, emancipations and decolonisations, student protests, consumerism, poverty, political ideologies and alternative futures, thinking beyond dominant Western narratives. Energy, natural, and environmental resources and catastrophes and the challenges of planetary sustainability form an additional strand of historical structure and historiographical discussion.

Students study a range of epistemic issues that emerge in politics and political philosophy. Potential topics include democracy vs. epistocracy, deliberation, epistemic diversity, polarization, and the wisdom of crowds.

This course examines filmic representations of key social, political, and historical events in Portugal and Brazil, focusing on efforts by directors and producers in both countries to articulate history, memory, and national identity. Key concepts students engage with are race, gender, colonialism/post-colonialism, social inequality, memory, identity, among others.

This course examines in depth the critical legacies of and debates surrounding film authorship. The course surveys key theoretical texts and explores them in themselves as well as through comparative case studies of two directors-Robert Bresson and Takeshi Kitano-who have both produced a significant body of work and given rise to substantial attention to their respective careers in film. Students consider how Bresson and Kitano fit into and/or defy the "auteur theory" and its variants through close attention to both the films themselves and the critical discourses (aesthetic, historical, national, generic) they have generated. The course invites students to consider what "film directing" is, as artistic, and cultural practice.

This course is concerned with the ways we design, develop, and assess new technologies and innovations for organizations. It considers the activities involved in the design process: how to identify what users need, how to design solutions that fit those needs, and how to assess whether technology meets those needs.  It focusses on computer technologies to support work activities and organizations. The first part of the module details approaches and methods for design and development. The second part focusses on recent areas of technological innovation that are relevant to businesses and organizations. The course considers technology and innovation from a social scientific perspective.