King's College London

This course introduces students to the key texts, arguments and controversies in European political thought from the end of the 17th century to the present. This is based on the close reading of classic and complex texts, situated in their broader intellectual and historical context. A single key thinker is typically central to each week’s teaching, but these thinkers are read in relation to the political environments that shaped them and the debates in which they participated. Students explore the development of the central assumptions, arguments, institutions, and concepts that have played and continue to play a crucial role in political organization and debate across the Western world and beyond. 

The focus of this course is on critically evaluating the place and meaning of American popular culture in contemporary life. In order to do so, students look at the complex historical and transnational roots of American popular culture. Students also discuss how American ideals, both constitutional (such as freedom of the press, and also the right to keep and bear arms) and mythic (the American Dream, the frontier, individualism) have influenced the place and content of popular culture in the US.

This course introduces and explains a range of concepts from set theory, philosophy of language and metaphysics, probability theory, and decision theory. These include the notions of set, cardinality, infinity, analyticity, necessity, possible worlds, reference, scope, probability, conditionals, utility, decision rules, dominance, backward induction. The emphasis is on basic ideas rather than on technical elaboration. The concepts are sketched, illustrated by examples, and made familiar via exercises. 

This course provides an in-depth understanding of the principles and practices of brand management, with a focus on building and managing strong brand identities in various contexts. Students explore the strategic and tactical aspects of brand management, including brand positioning, brand equity, brand extension, brand communication, and brand performance measurement. The course also covers the latest trends and issues in brand management, such as digital branding, brand storytelling, and brand sustainability. 

This writing-intensive course provide preparatory skills in written communication that will support students in their multidisciplinary academic work throughout the degree and beyond, enabling them to develop as a confident and effective writer who can tailor their writing for a range of audiences. Throughout the term, in small-group writing workshops, students write and reflect on formative short pieces and will receive tutor and peer feedback; students then edit and redraft their writing to compile a summative portfolio. Moreover, the course provides opportunity for students to engage in detail with an interdisciplinary topic in the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences, led by a tutor from the Liberal Arts core team with specialist expertise in this area. 

This course examines how individuals, communities, societies, and states address legacies of violence and atrocity. The course considers how best to commemorate and memorialize the experience of victims and survivors. The course opens by introducing the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of key concepts of war, crime, atrocity, and genocide, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of transitional justice on the other. In the first half of the course, students look at key mechanisms of transitional justice – trials, truth, and reconciliation commissions and reparations, drawing on a set of empirical cases including former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Cambodia. In the second half, students look at some emerging areas of transitional justice practice, and the potential for transformative approaches using the arts and education and in relation to gender, and memorialization. Finally, the course addresses the question of what works, and how we measure success in transitional justice, drawing implications for policy and research.

This course explores the ways in which life is lived in relation to experiences of war, violent events, and war-related afflictions and displacement. While students follow and discuss the debates of researchers who have tried to determine and verify the effects of violent conflict on the mental health of those affected by focusing on concepts like war trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), students challenge conventional and universal understandings of trauma, and disease-centered approaches to traumatic experience and health interventions. While this course is heavily informed on comparative history, both of psychiatry and of wars, it engages with current affairs and public health concerns. It considers mental health as both a medical and a socio-political matter. 

This curse is about the recent and quickly emerging trends of voluntary and mandatory reporting on sustainability issues. It develops knowledge and understanding of the history, theory, and practice of environmental, social, and sustainability accounting and deals with concepts such as accountability and stakeholders. The course provides students with a critical appreciation of the relevance and role of sustainability accounting and reporting in contemporary society as the world transitions to net zero carbon emissions and aims to further the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The course critically examines current and emerging practices in corporate settings including voluntary practices, how well stakeholders’ information needs are met, mandatory requirements, and greenwashing issues. 

This course explores intersections between theatre and politics in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be introduced to a range of political performance forms and the debates that surround them, from the political theatre of George Bernard Shaw, to the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, to the provocative performances of the Black Revolutionary Theatre Movement, to the feminist performances of women’s theatre groups in the 1970s, to the recent rise of documentary and verbatim theatre. In addition, students will consider the theatricality of political protests, from die-ins to zombie walks, as well as recent protest reenactments by artists, including Jeremy Deller’s miners’ strike reenactment, The Battle of Orgreave (2001). Moving chronologically through the semester, the class will focus each week on a particular performance form, engaging with a selection of performance texts and relevant scholarship. By the end of the semester, students will be familiar with a number of influential practitioners and theorists of political theatre and performance; you will be knowledgeable about the contributions of playwrights and theatre-makers to a range of political movements; and students will be able to engage in informed debate about how various theatre and performance forms act politically. 

This course engages critically with the relationship between visual culture, written narratives and modern life in selected works produced in Latin America from the late 19th century to the 1930s. In order to create a dynamic space for critical debate, the primary bibliography features short pieces – short stories, chronicles, essays, poems – and various types of images such as illustrations from periodicals, paintings, photography, and cinema. The wide range of texts and images to be discussed includes representative works from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.