University of Manchester

This course students to the study of a rapidly changing Middle East and North Africa from a multidisciplinary angle. The course debunks preconceived stereotypical ideas students might have acquired through the media about a region often typified as a war zone and an area rife with conflict. Students gain a comprehensive understanding of the MENA from multifarious angles including history, politics, and culture.

This course introduces students to some of the key social theories and thinkers from the global South. The course's starting point is that classical and mainstream social theory has emerged and evolved in a particular context, and as a result of colonial and imperial power relations. The course is divided into two main sections as well as an introduction and a conclusion. The first section focuses on four theories which originated as a collective endeavor of a number of scholars in the South: postcolonialism, subaltern studies, dependency theory, and decolonial theory. In the second section, students focus on a number of individual social thinkers from different parts of the global South, their stories and social thoughts: Ibn Khaldun (Tunisia), Paulin Hountondji (Benin), Ali Shariati (Iran) and Veena Das (India). 

This course introduces students to the fundamental concepts, principles, and techniques of financial accounting and reporting for students who are not specialists in accounting. It takes a conceptual and practical approach which emphasizes general principles and methods in order to allow these concepts to be applied to specific problems and issues in accounting and the wider business/social environment. The course assumes no background knowledge in accounting.

This course encourages students to critically engage with key concepts and historiographical issues in the social and cultural history of the transitions from war to peace in the post-1918 and post-1945 period. It considers the complexity of French, British, German experiences of the transition from war to peace and the differences between the aftermaths of the First and Second World Wars. Students assess primary sources, particularly ego-documents such as letters and diaries, and interweave primary and secondary sources in arguments and discussions. 

In this course, students learn how to use a prominent data analytics programming language. They gain practical experience in different analytical techniques, such as network analysis and time series decomposition. The course also emphasizes the creation and usage of programmable visualizations for the communication of business insights by means of lab studies and presentations.

The projects, in addition to illustrating particular aspects of physics, represent tasks that might well be expected of physics graduates in the real world of research, technology, and commerce. Students seek to attain a goal agreed with the project supervisor by deploying all the skills and physical background they have accumulated. Feedback is offered by supervisors at each stage of the work.

This course introduces students to the inter-disciplinary field of peace and conflict studies, and the range of practices that have developed to make peace in different parts of the world. These include international peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, conflict transformation, and peace formation, among others. In particular, the unit sets such practices in the context of the key political science and international relations’ dynamics of power, international and state design, rights, resistance, and socio-political agency. It does so in the context of inter-disciplinary, multi-methodological, approaches, as well as a wide range of empirical case studies. The course outlines insights from a range of disciplines (social psychology, economy, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and geography) and places them in the context of insights from different conflict-affected regions around the world where various methods associated with peace processes have been applied.  

In this course, students learn to understand the basic background behind soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering and their importance and relevance in civil engineering; the importance of basic geology in civil engineering and learn about the three rock groups and origin of soils; classification of different type of soils; the principle of soil compaction and representing soil as a three-phase system; and the mechanics behind the flow of water through soils and to understand the concept of permeability of soils.

This course introduces students to an approach to politics which emphasizes a global perspective. Postcolonial studies moves beyond both International Relations, which tends to discuss relations between states or great powers, and Third World Studies, which isolates certain parts of  the world and discusses them separately. In contrast to a view of the world as split into the industrialized, developed West and the underdeveloped or developing South, what this course explores is the relationships between these two areas, seeing them as mutually constitutive: they produce each other. It examines how they have come to be produced as distinct, and how these differences are perpetuated as well as resisted through practices of development, race, gender, and neocolonialism. 

The course provides the key economic concepts and tools for analyzing environmental and urban issues; introduces and explains the application of economic methods to the analysis of the built and natural environments; presents the ways in which sound economic analysis is critical to urban and environmental policy making; and encourages critical debate and reflection on the key environmental and urban policy issues.