King's College London

This course explores the ways in which psychology allows us to understand the mechanisms behind the choices we make – including situations such as addiction, where people seem to have a reduced ability to choose. Across a series of lectures and seminars, students see how varied the approaches to this topic area can be, taking in attempts to measure the degree to which an action is freely willed, analysis of choices in terms of expected outcomes, the influence of environments (physical, informational and social) on your choices, habitual choices where we may not be aware of making them, and addiction to both substances and gambling, where people’s short-term choices may directly conflict with their longer-term aims. Students learn how information from a range of approaches can be integrated to develop our understanding of the topic. In addition, through a series of practical sessions students design, implement, and report a novel piece of research on choice behavior. 

The course examines the ways in which Brazilian fiction has articulated and responded to the experiences of social, economic, and political upheaval in the second half of the 20th century, with a focus on Brazil's authoritarian tradition, in particular the traumatic military dictatorship of 1964-85 and the process of Democratic Transition in the 1980s and 90s. Themes explored include: anonymity and identity - personal and national; love, sexuality, and the family; censorship and repression; ideas of a Brazilian revolution or utopia; popular and mass culture; marginality and exile; history, journalism, and alternative approaches to narrative. 

The course responds to key contemporary events within the creative industries. It presents cutting-edge research that analyses current issues within its specific cultural, social, and political contexts e.g. decolonization, value, entrepreneurship, digitization, labor, globalization, Brexit, and Covid. The course provides students with the building blocks to generate their critical analyses of the sector, and the capacity to apply theory to practice and real-world case studies. 

The course explores the international political economy of sanctions in the constantly changing context of economic warfare and geopolitical rivalry. The aim is to investigate various theoretical approaches to sanctions and to apply those to case studies (e.g. Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iraq, etc.). Sanctions are analyzed with reference to wider political debates over essential topics, such as national security, state sovereignty, economic warfare and sustainability, legality and legitimacy. The plurality of visions is explored by listening to alternative voices and narratives. By counterposing the justifications for the use of sanctions by sender states to diverse perspectives, expressed by the target states, as well as to increasingly heterodox views of third parties, students develop their critical thinking, and obtain a comprehensive and holistic understanding of sanctions.

This course considers how contemporary world cinema imagines the non-human, via a focus on those uncanny figures that are disturbingly close to the human; cyborgs, vampires, people who turn into animals, and aliens who pretend to be humans. It introduces some of the critical terrain of the posthuman, and connects it to cinematic questions of identity, genre, and style. It addresses topics such as feminism and queer theory, globalization and biopolitics, technology and nature, while analyzing a range of sci-fi and horror cinema, as well as speculative and fantastical art films. 

This course introduces students to the study of History and Political Economy. Students consider the difficulties related to data collection and the use of proxies in historical contexts. They review the main methodological approaches used by scholars in this field, and they  probe the advantages and limits of History and Political Economy as a discipline in answering some of the most challenging questions of our time: Why do humans cooperate? What are the origins of democracy and the rule of law? Why are some countries more developed than others? And what lessons can we draw from historical institutions to redesign our own?