University of Manchester

This course offers students a conceptual and geographical grasp of key debates within human geography. Most notably, the course explores how geographers have understood and examined issues of social difference, identity (gender, sexuality - along with race and ethnicity), morals and ethics, bodies and emotions, the geopolitics of nation-states and borders, the politics and process of international migration, and the social geographies of the city. Using a range of contemporary examples from both the Global North and the Global South, the course helps students understand the ways in which geographical debates have shaped our knowledge of culture, place, and politic

This course introduces students to the principles of environmental pollution. Students explore the major types of pollution in air, water, and on land. Students think about the impacts and issues posed by environmental pollution. Finally students reflect on the strategies used to prevent and control environmental pollution.

The course links share prices or returns to accounting items from the income statement and the balance sheet and in doing so effectively advises standard setters and regulators regarding the value-relevance of accounting information, especially bottom-line earnings and book value of equity. It also advises about the value-relevance of management (performance related) narratives, which often complement the disclosure of the audited income statement and balance sheet. Unlike classical financial statement analysis this course does not attempt to value individual companies. Instead, it analyses large sample evidence generated from regression analysis. It is important to note from the very beginning that this course is based to a large extent on journal articles. The main journals of interest in this course are Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting & Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, European Accounting Review (EAR), and Accounting & Business Research (ABR). This course is unusual in the sense that it is based on journal articles not a textbook.

This course extends understanding of historical and contemporary theories in social psychology and challenge students to use their knowledge to engage with real-world issues. For example, what brings people together, and what keeps them apart? The emphasis is on fostering ethically minded and socially responsible psychology graduates, through critical reflection of our personal place in a social system. Students consider one’s potential to help others in need, and to be critically and responsively aware of known biases in social perception and judgement. The course equips students with enhanced employability skills through a focus on the ability to understand and articulate complex arguments, and to support claims by making sense of and explaining empirical evidence. Students are encouraged to engage with compelling experimental paradigms and debates in social psychology to move beyond directed textbook material and to become independent, active, and self-directed learners.  

This course covers a selection of topics in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, as well as exploring some of the points of contact between aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. Students consider how to understand some distinctive aesthetic experiences, such as awe, amusement, horror, and the experience of the uncanny. Students discuss the nature of fictional representation and, in particular, examine some of the ways in which a fiction's representational content relies on far more than, e.g., the words on the page or the images on screen. This enables students to consider some questions about the ethics of representation, such as: What is an offensive joke? If I like to make my character do terrible things when I play a video game, does my behavior deserve criticism? How  secure is the distinction between an extremely violent film that trivializes violence and an extremely violent film that implicitly critiques the representation of violence? And when, if ever, does the choice to perform a role amount to an endorsement of the actions we are representing?

The course focuses on a selection from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, along with some writing by Chaucer’s contemporaries, and more recent translators and adaptors such as Patience Agbabi. Students consider such central themes as genre, gender, constructions of the self and community. The lectures provide a context for the selected texts and raise central issues and stimulate debate. Seminars involve workshop elements to help students to read Chaucer’s Middle English and also engage in close reading exercises. 

This course provides a basic but comprehensive introduction to some of the intellectual traditions within sociology with a focus on the origins of the discipline. The course provides the student with the necessary conceptual tools to understand the distinctive origin and nature of sociology as an academic discipline and as a wider cultural presence within modernity. In all cases emphasis is placed upon the specific historical context of particular writers and theories. The argument is that the emergence of sociology and the social sciences in general represents an intellectual response to the cultural and material problems of capitalist industrial societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The course equips students with the concepts and information necessary to grasp the main themes of the classical sociological tradition.

This course offers an examination of the nature of work in capitalist societies. The first half of the course builds a picture of the development of contemporary, global capitalism. The course make sense of the nature of capitalism, and its periods of transformation, through looking at institutions, culture and periods of crisis. In the second half of the course, the course turns to an examination of work. Work is presented as a highly pervasive institution, structuring life experience within and beyond the workplace. Observing the nature of work over time also reveals transformations in the operation of power in the workplace, in the way work is organized, and in the cultural values typically attached to work. The course presents these changes, and explains them via the large-scale structural aspects of capitalism covered in the first half of the course. In this way, students can connect macro-level social theory with micro-level depictions of life experience, and thus see how capitalism matters for our everyday lives.

Students begin their practical element of their program with a wide range of skills and experience. This course gives all students a clear point of entry into practical skills in drama and theatre. It focuses on student’s skills in creating their own work with an emphasis on creating original pieces of performance through writing, devising, and physical theatre.    

This course introduces the central problems and issues in contemporary philosophy of religion. Among the questions that students will consider are: Are there any persuasive arguments for the existence of God? Is religious belief rational if it is not supported by evidence? Is it reasonable to believe that just one religious tradition is true? The aims of the course are: Help students to engage with some of the most central and enduring problems in philosophy of religion; Enhance students' power of critical analysis, reasoning and independent thought, and ability to bring those powers to bear on important philosophical issues; Familiarise students with some of the most interesting and provocative texts in contemporary work on philosophy of religion.