University of London, Queen Mary

This course provides an introduction to the Bayesian approach to statistics.

This course looks at key moments in the history of globalization over the ‘"long" 20th century. Approaching globalization as a contested and malleable project, students move from the "first" high age of globalization and empire in the late 19th century, through the reconfiguration of the world system in the wake of the Great Depression and the World Wars, to the era of decolonization and neoliberal globalization in the latter part of the century. Students reflect together on how capitalism, internationalism, empire, immigration, race, the environment, and human rights came to shape the contemporary world.

This course examines the power relations of theatre and performance, focusing on how artists engage with the politics of representation and identity formation. Discussions and readings will draw from key academic and political debates, which could include queer theory, post-colonial studies, critical race theory, feminism, disability studies, Marxism, etc. Through study of a wide range of play texts and performance traditions, students will examine how formal and aesthetic innovations in theatre relate to the social and economic conditions from which they emerge.

This course engages witrh contemporary femninist thought, steering a course through the literary criticism, history, and theory of feminism. It examines the significant debates and key concept of feminist thought through a range of literary, political, and philosophical texts and encourages students to develop their own critical understanding of gender and equality issues in the contemporary period. Students are invited to explore the impact of feminism approaches on literary criticism, to understand the critical feminist project in its own terms, and to examine feminism in relation in Marxism, psychoanalysis, sexuality, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism, and international feminism.

The course explores the nature of civil society and the political role of civil society actors - at local, national, and global levels. Civil society's traditional role as a third sector between the state and the market is critically examined by considering both theories of civil society and empirical case studies of democratic activism and social change. The course covers the contested meaning of "civil society," attending to its historical and cultural variation. Empirical case studies consider a variety of social movements and, where possible, include meetings with activists and other practitioners. The course enables students to critically evaluate the changing role of contemporary civil society and develops a practical understanding of how civil society actors pursue social change, along with why they fail and why they succeed. 

This course introduces students to and explores the purpose, nature, and operation of the financial accounting function within businesses, particularly limited liability companies in the UK. It reveals, illustrates and explores how the financial accounting systems operate when tasked with measuring and recording the financial value of the transactions, events, and activities of a business. In so doing, it examines the nature and scope of financial accounting and the underlying conceptual framework of accounting conventions and standards. It further looks at the ratio analysis and associated interpretation of published financial statements from the perspectives of a range of differing users of financial accounting information. Accordingly, the course seeks to equip students with the knowledge, understanding, and skills to enable them to identify and record the financial value of business transactions, events and activities, and to generate financial information through the construction of balance sheets, income statements (profit statements) and cash flow statements, and through the use of financial ratios.

In this course, students gain an in-depth understanding of what makes consumers buy some products and not others, how various psychological characteristics influence our consumer behaviors, how companies can best try to meet consumers' wants and needs, among other topics. Building on a general understanding of marketing, this course develops a useful, conceptual understanding of psychological theories relevant to the study of consumer behavior.

From boy bands to Valentines, our ways of expressing sexual love were first formulated in the Middle Ages. This course traces the early history of the language of love, through poetry and songs composed between the 12th and 15th centuries. With the help of English translations, students explore different types of poetry in various languages: Spanish, French, Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and the Occitan language of southern France. They learn to analyze complex poems, and to understand and respect cultural differences, through a range of activities including creative rewriting of translations.

This course introduces students to the field of social geography, its theoretical perspectives and substantive concerns, centered upon an understanding of societies as products of uneven and always negotiated relationships of power. Drawing on a social constructionist approach, and using mainly UK examples, students consider intersecting constructions of social class, gender, race, and sexuality, and how these constructions both shape, and are shaped by space at a variety of scales. The course includes a field walk assignment designed to develop skills of critical observation and interpretation.