University of London, Queen Mary

Volcanic eruptions can influence earth systems on a number of scales, from individual landforms to landscape development and global climatic change. Volcanic hazards can have global-scale social impacts and directly threaten the approximately 800 million people that live within 100 km of an active volcano. This course provides students with knowledge about volcanic environments, the hazards they pose on many scales, and potential benefits to societies.

This course provides a broad overview of the key marketing concepts that underpin marketing practice. The course introduces students to buyer behaviour, marketing research, segmentation, targeting and positioning through marketing mix activities. Along the way, the social consequences of marketing practice are considered.

This course interrogates the resilient power of racism in American history from the founding of the United States to the recent past. Students survey African American history from slavery through the Civil Rights era, broadly defined, and to more contemporary struggles. Students embed this history in the larger sweep of American history, covering topics such as plantation slavery, abolitionism and emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the "New Negro," the long Civil Rights Movement, and the age of recent presidents. Students discuss the legacy of prominent African-American thinkers, activists, and political leaders, as well as the perspectives of ordinary black men and women. 

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.