King's College London

This is a course in policy analysis, and it helps students understand how policy is made and what impact it has. The course introduces the concept of the policy process – studying policy-making in terms of decision, implementation, and evaluation. Students seek to understand how governments function, why policy is often not implemented effectively; and how we can judge and measure policy success and failure. 

The course enables students to develop an understanding of contemporary dimensions of citizenship as a way of thinking through how these shape and are shaped by cities.  This understanding includes an awareness of the different kinds of primary, secondary, and gray sources available for the study of cities and citizenship. The course uses case studies from the global North and South to explore the political, economic, social, and cultural processes that shape cities and citizenship as connected sites of people's sense of identity and belonging.

In antiquity, the city as idea and as experience provided a central trope for Greeks and Romans to think about their place in the world, their social and political organization, the relationship between culture and nature, self and other, morality, and history. This course focuses particularly on the presence of urban everyday life in classical literature and asks students to explore ancient representations through the lenses of cultural history and current critical approaches to the city. Our starting point is to think about what is ‘natural’ to us and put it at a critical distance: the ways in which the city has featured in literature and film in modernity. Students proceed to explore the extent to which these modern representations and their cultural context find antecedents in antiquity. Students pay special attention to urban space (house/home, street, theater, baths and barbershops) as well as time and occasion (city at night, erotic city, landscapes of disaster, routine).

The course provides students with a theoretical and practical understanding of the relationship between business and society through the umbrella concept of corporate social responsibility. It focuses on three main aspects: understanding corporate social responsibility, applying corporate social responsibility, and managing corporate social responsibility. The course analyzes different perspectives to understand corporate social responsibility. It explores the relationship of the corporation and a variety of stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, investors, and the environment. 

This course explores some of the relationships between ethnicity, migration, imperialism, place, race, technology, and modernisms in US artistic and literary culture from the turn of the 20th century through to the 1930s. The period under question includes cultural responses to the fallout of late 19th-century governmental Americanisation projects; competing claims for the ‘new’; responses to the Great Depression and New Deal state interventions; and the development of an American modernist aesthetic avant-garde. Students focus on four points of activity: New Mexico, the Mid-West, Paris, and New York. In each case students look at written texts within an interdisciplinary approach that learns from looking at painting and photography, journalism and the world of ‘little magazines’, new styles of dance and, of course, jazz.