University of London, Queen Mary

We live in a world profoundly shaped by science and technology. Yet few are equipped to analyse these aspects of the modern world, understand how they arose historically, and construct and assess arguments concerning the problems they raise. This course gives students the intellectual tools to do so — to live in and contribute to such a world as a historian and citizen. Accessible to students with no science background, each topic begins from a familiar controversy, newsworthy problem, or challenge in today’s world. Topics are drawn from controversy over the environment, animal rights, science and religion, race in science, modern sexuality, climate change, sustainability, IQ testing, technological disaster, eugenics, automation and robotics (in the workplace, medicine, and war), human experimentation, clinical trials in Africa and Asia, scientific experts in democratic societies, population and famine, intellectual property and biopiracy, what counts as a disease. The course introduces students to history of science, technology and medicine (STM) and their reciprocal relations with society, politics, government, economy, and culture.

This course explores the field of cultural geography. It draws on examples both historical and contemporary, in the UK and beyond, to demonstrate how spaces, places, and landscapes are laden with meaning. It shows that culture is not something that is fixed, but rather constructed through relations with different people, places, ideas, objects, and practices. The course therefore helps students understand and interpret matters of culture critically, with careful attention to plurality, complexity, and power. Students examine power and identity, cultural representations, more-than-representational geographies, geographies of embodiment and mobility, cultural geographies of food, emerging cultural landscapes and politics, and tensions and new directions in cultural geography. 

This course traces the origins, development, socio-cultural significance, and critical appreciation of the form from its beginnings in the amusement arcades to the mobile games of the present day. Considering video games as uniquely interactive visual sources, the course employs a diverse range of methods, approaches, and critical contexts, from the circumstances of socioeconomic national production in Japan, Europe, and the US to global gaming cultures, the representation of history, the video game's relationship to cinema, and the theoretical ways in which we might understand the nature of human leisure and play.