University of Sussex

This course explores religious and ritual phenomena and the key theoretical issues by examining ethnographic material that deals with initiation, myth, witchcraft, symbolism, and religious experience. Some "secular" rituals such as carnival and Christmas are also analyzed. The focus is as much on how people believe as on what they believe; on why they perform rituals and what these rituals look like. It explores both classic texts and more recent accounts, to give students a sense of where particular arguments have come from and where they are going.

This course examines the psychological underpinnings of economic behavior, recent theories, and empirical results in behavioral economics. Behavioral economics forms the starting point in core economics courses and the dominant model of choice in economics, in which agents maximize expected utility given the information they possess and the choice set they have. Students analyze recent empirical evidence across a range of fields of economics and examine the new theories of economic behavior.

This course introduces the central themes in the works of Plato, concentrating especially on ethics and metaphysics. Students examine the attempts to define virtues in some supposedly early dialogues, and the central Socratic ethical claim that it is impossible to do wrong knowingly. These issues are examined in the central moral argument of the REPUBLIC. This course also explores the so-called "theory of forms" as it appears in various dialogues, including the REPUBLIC and the criticisms of it which are made in the Parmenides. Students consider Plato's philosophy of art in connection with the theory of forms.

In this course, students explore their intercultural awareness and develop skills for effective written and oral intercultural business communication. It focuses on working in multicultural environments. Students research literature on business and intercultural communication and work on small-scale collaborative projects. Students explore areas where cultural knowledge and assumptions might impact on effective business communication, and they examine notions of intercultural communicative competence.

This course focuses on the anthropological master trope of culture and on the political dimensions of representing culture or cultures. Students consider how anthropological understandings of culture, as well as anthropologists' modes of analyzing and representing it in anthropological work, developed over the 20th century, partially in conversation with other disciplines. The course also analyzes how culture operates as a key idea in the public domain, used by politicians, communities, human rights activists, artists, scientists, museum curators, and others in relation to a wide range of issues and debates when distinctions between "ourselves" and "others" are at stake. Finally, the course examines some activities within the cultural domain (such as music, dance, theater, and verbal artistry) which have a performative dimension, and consider how anthropologists have approached these activities to address questions about structure and agency, embodiment, experience, art and aesthetics, creativity, and power and protest.

This course provides an overview of child development from birth through adolescence. Students examine contemporary research in five main areas of development including social and communicative (e.g., language acquisition), cognitive (e.g., mathematics development), social cognitive (e.g., moral development), emotional (e.g., processing and regulating affect), and biological (e.g., temperament).

This course offers reflective ways to approach arguments by observing paradoxes. Students clearly lay out the arguments and assumptions behind paradoxes and analyze them. Students understand the reasons in favor of different solutions to see how arguments work and how hidden assumptions are often in play.

This course covers topics in biological and cognitive psychology. Students learn about the brain starting with the basic processes of brain development and plasticity, as well as neuronal signalling , and they explore visual perception as well as other cognitive functions such as attention, learning and memory, language and decision making.

This course introduces the major debates and issues in documentary film studies, a burgeoning field within the discipline of film studies. Students examine issues that have historically concerned the field, namely, questions related to objectivity, truth, observation, surveillance, interaction, and performance, raising key debates about the documentary form, issues that return time and time again in the literature. Finally, this course considers emergent forms and context that challenge documentary filmmaking. Students look at the essay film, the emergence of new forms of non-linear documentary on the web and documentary in the context of the art world.