University of London, Queen Mary

This course  examines the theories and evidence underpinning social inequalities in health (defined as the unfair and avoidable differences in health status). It considers structural/material and psychosocial theories, and hypotheses about social drift, self-selection, and genetics. Attention is given to the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Sources of data and measurement of scale of inequalities between and within groups are addressed. The course considers the distribution of wealth, income , resources, and power at global, national, and local levels. Redistributive mechanisms work through either government or market control, and the economic implications for inequalities are compared and analyzed. Policy interventions and their different approaches are explored including universal and targeted or selective approaches to reducing inequalities by reducing the inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources.

This course is based around the rich visual resources of London. Through lectures and visits to monuments and national museums such as Westminster Abbey, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Museum and the Tate Galleries, as well as to local collections such as the Whitechapel Gallery and contemporary art galleries in the East End, students explore the histories of art from the medieval period to the present day by focusing on a selected group of objects, images, or buildings. This allows students to develop skills of visual analysis and provide an understanding of the historical context in which the object or building in question was originally made. At the same time students examine issues of how these objects are presented today, considering the questions of museology, curatorial practice, and the contemporary art market. Topics covered may vary according to exhibitions and temporary displays that are open to the public during the semester.

This course develops an understanding of the theory and methods involved in the creation, storage, analysis, and presentation of geospatial data. Using industry standard software, the course provides the knowledge and skills to tackle advanced problem solving using Geographic Information Systems. This knowledge is fundamental not only to research in physical geography, environmental science, and many other disciplines, but provides a critical skill set used widely within a range of industries (including environmental management, local and national government, the utilities, and the insurance sector).

In this course, student learn to process XML (with XSLT and Java), to model data with XML (XML native, RDF), and to query XML data (XQuery). The course teaches many concepts of data modelling and knowledge representation that are beyond the syntactic issues of XML or RDF. The knowledge students acquire in the course is fundamental to the many data design and data analytics tasks occurring in todays IT and business landscapes. The second part of the course is dedicates to advanced DB concepts including active databases, mobile databases, spatial and temporal databases, triggers, performance tuning, distributed databases, and indexing and query optimization. The third part of the course covers the modern, agile world of data processing: NoSQL. It is about the processing of semi-structured data, transforming data streams into formats (triplets, JSON) to be processed by new DB systems (e.g. MongoDB, CouchDB). 

This course introduces the economic analysis of the labor market. It presents both traditional topics in the labor economics literature (e.g. demand, supply, human capital, discrimination and compensating wage differentials) as well as recent developments (e.g. early childhood education, migration, non-competitive labor markets and alternative work arrangements). The focus in the course are the fundamental models of labor economics, while basic empirical methods and empirical applications in contemporary labor economics are also discussed. Students apply the economic concepts to real world empirical problems.

This course provides a diverse cinematic palette, focusing on films, filmmaking formulations and new aspects of non-Anglophone cinemas from regions outside Europe and America. Course sessions cover multifaceted aspects of cinema creation, burgeoning film movements and industry dynamics whilst also studying established and emerging filmmakers. The broad geographic stretch is combined with a specific focus on the current cinematic terrain of countries including Chile, Argentina, Senegal and South Africa. The course also investigates recent and ongoing transformations, such as the magnified visibility of female filmmakers from the Middle East and the rise of new Indian Indie cinema as a competitor to Bollywood.

This course covers the fundamentals of game development in a multi-platform (consoles, PC, Web, and mobile devices) environment. The course focuses on development of 3D games, covering all aspects of game development: the game loop, math, physics, audio, graphics, input, animations, particle systems, and artificial intelligence. This course has a strong programming content, required for laboratories and assignments. The practical aspects are taught using a popular game development platform. 

This course provides an introduction to that most adaptable and global of literary forms: the short story. It explores stories from diverse cultures and traditions around the world, including Asia, Europe, and the Americas. By reading short stories from across the globe, students are also introduced to the idea of "world literature" and some of the debates surrounding this idea.

This course introduces theory and research in cognitive psychology, the study of the human mind and mental processes. Key theories and research in cognitive psychology are discussed, including visual and multi-modal perception, attention, memory, language, reasoning, and decision-making. Experiments and studies from classical and modern cognitive psychology are provided and discussed critically throughout to illustrate these concepts. This course demonstrates the essential role of that cognitive psychology plays in everyday life.

This course examines debates across the field of global ethics. It introduces students to frameworks for thinking about global moral questions concerning for example the global distribution of wealth, the appropriate meaning of human rights in a multicultural world, environmental sustainability, migration, development aid, conflict resolution, and transitional justice. Students are expected to evaluate different approaches to ethical judgment and apply them to real-world dilemmas.