King's College London

Experiments in economics have generated new insights into how people behave. Together with earlier psychological work, they have spawned a new field in economics: behavioral economics. This course is concerned with how the insights from this new field contribute to some key debates and issues in political economy. 

This course explores how the first Islamic caliphate transformed the society, culture, and politics of western Asia in the centuries after the mission of Muhammad, c. 600-950. In the 7th century the new faith of Islam emerged in Arabia. Its adherents, though few in number, overturned the geopolitical world order, defeating the superpowers of their day to create the world’s largest empire, stretching from Portugal to Pakistan. This course asks how this first Islamic state was brought into being and how it changed life in the Middle East and beyond.
 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now widely used, usually in the form of machine learning, in a broad range of applications including finance, healthcare, law, and social care, as well as playing a role in the arts and humanities as a tool to explore culture. This course introduces students to the issues raised by the development and deployment of AI. The content focuses on providing information and raising debate about the known and predicted effects of artificial intelligence on culture and society.

Conventional histories of French literature usually begin with the Chanson de Roland (c.1100), which is viewed as an inaugural text for a great tradition of national literature that runs smoothly through to the present and fosters a timeless ideal of France. However, this vision does not stand up to scrutiny – the “idea of France” turns out to be retroactive and fluid from the outset, then heavily contingent, in the post-medieval period, on changes of regime, on differences of class, gender, education or ethnicity, and on general cultural and political trends such as (to name but a few examples) Jacobinism, Romanticism, Republicanism, Fascism, Communism. This course examines how “France” and French national identity is constructed by studying a selection of key French literary texts from a variety of periods, including a postcolonial reflection on what it means to be “French.” 

This course examines how our place in the world is defined by gender. It introduces students to questions of gender in the culture and literature of Spanish America. The topic is studied through a number of cultural expressions, including prose, poetry, theatre and film, from a variety of countries and across various historical periods.

The course explores development and social change in and from the Global South. The course adopts a critical political economy perspective to trace the recent history, politics, and power relations which, following the 1980s debt crisis, saw the Global South integrated into neoliberal globalization. The course starts by locating the globalization project in the Global South and provides two further weeks of critical theory introducing students to the economic and political processes that makes development in the Global South a profoundly unequal, gendered, and racialized project. 

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.