University of London, Queen Mary

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.

This course introduces students to a range of Victorian fiction. It addresses the content, form, and significance of the Victorian novel and how it develops amid the cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts of 19th-century Britain. It also examines the alternative form of the short story and considers what specific kinds of narrative and narrative effects this form enables. Authors to be studied may include Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Margaret Oliphant, Bram Stoker, and William Thackeray.

This course explores the fundamental environmental units: ecosystems. Students use biological and physical science perspectives to examine the geographical distribution of ecosystems and to understand the principles and processes governing their structure and function. Students study the exchange of materials and energy between biotic and abiotic ecosystem components, focusing on water and carbon cycles. Students apply biogeoscience perspectives when interpreting how ecosystems change in response to internal system processes, environmental change, natural disturbance events and human activities.

This course delves into the process of language acquisition. The course looks at different models and theories that have arisen from the different schools of thought. It explores the different processes of first language acquisition and stages of development (phonological, lexical, syntactical), before moving onto the cognitive framework of language processing (parsing). The next area of focus is bilingualism and second language acquisition. Students are introduced to different forms of bilingualism and the issues raised in second language acquisition. They are also introduced to language in the brain, speech pathologies, and other communication systems.