University of London, Royal Holloway

This course explores the representation of love and romance in Hollywood, Bollywood, global art and European cinema. Romantic movies invariably revolve around the obstacles that the couple has to negotiate, overcome, or succumb to. Obstacles such as the social marginalization of the couple, death, jealously and rivalry, differences of class, race or ethnicity tend to be genre specific. The course juxtaposes and compares films and genres from different cultural contexts. Examples include melodramatic love stories, queer romance in European arthouse films, wedding films in global art cinema, interethnic romantic dramas and films about the end of love or the breakdown of marriage. 

This course provides students an understanding of physical and mental health conditions. It explores the relationships between physiology, physical health, lifestyle factors, and mental health and wellbeing. 

Asylum seekers and refugees activate some of today’s most urgent and fraught issues relating to citizenship and national identity, human rights, immigration and border security, economic crisis, xenophobia and Islamophobia. This advanced research seminar  introduces students to some of the ways in which contemporary theatre makers, filmmakers and artist-activists are responding to the predicaments and experiences associated with asylum and migration, as well as to the ways that asylum seekers and refugees have found ways to tell their own stories. Course content draws from performance practices, media representation, policy frameworks, as well as critical and philosophical writing in Europe (the UK, Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece) and Australia. Students study theatre and performance, feature film, documentary film and live art produced over the past two decades. They are also required to seek out and study new work in London or further afield. Theatre, film and activism offer rich and mutually-informative points of entry into this complex and controversial topic, helping students to perceive how relationships between asylum seekers and their would-be hosts are being negotiated in the 21st century. 
 

This course helps students understand the general history and the principal concepts and debates in International Relations. The first half of the course critically examines contemporary international history providing students the historical background and context for the issues that they study on the second half of the course and in future years. The second part of the course draws on themes from the first term and explores them through an examination of key concepts in International Relations: sovereignty, intervention, nationalism, identity, power, international institutions, human rights, globalization and new wars. The emphasis of the course is on understanding and questioning the concepts as well as exploring their use discussing key debates in global politics.

This course gives students an understanding of the key topics and contemporary debates in work and employment relations. Students engage with key concepts and theoretical frameworks in the sociology of work and employment relations. They explore what work means to individuals and the various forms it can take. The course recognizes how employees interact with employers and the conflicts that can arise from these interactions. Students examine relevant trends and developments in the world of work, such as gig work, remote working and the impact of technology on work, as well as the "future of work." This prepares students for the practical challenges of managing complex employment relationships in the workplace.  

The period from the French Revolution to the end of the 19th century witnessed extraordinary transformations in just about every area of Europeans’ lives. New ideas of democracy, nationalism, socialism and women’s rights animated successive generations of radicals and produced major revolutions such as those that shook the continent in 1848. The rapid rise of industrialization and new technologies like the railway changed the face of European cities like Paris and Vienna, forced societies to confront problems like poverty and epidemic disease, and even altered basic conceptions of time and space. Artistic movements like romanticism and realism jostled with an emergent mass culture founded on widespread literacy, cheap books and daily newspapers. This course addresses these and other dimensions of the social and cultural history of Europe in order to ask both what drove the major changes of the 19th century and, just as importantly, how people responded to and made sense of them. 

The British empire decidedly controlled over a quarter of the world’s global real estate, and a fifth of the world’s population. The economic, cultural and global impact of British colonialism is still very much apparent today - from contested borders and inter-state disputes, through languages and cultures, to the inequities in wealth and trade that exist between the prosperous "North" and the underdeveloped "South."  Why, then, was imperial expansion so vehemently defended by its protagonists in the 19th century? And what made colonial conquest, colonization, and economic exploitation of non-European spaces feasible on such a global scale and for so long? These are the questions that underpin this course. 

The course introduces students to the important medieval genre of romance. It considers the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, as well as works by Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and Sir Thomas Malory. Students also increase their knowledge and understanding of medieval literature, building on material in earlier courses. 
 

This course provides you with an introduction to the philosophical issues in social research. Students look at ethics in social research and theory, quantitative versus qualitative methods, sampling, observation, interviewing, media analysis, and questionnaire design. Students are given the opportunity to work through the research process on a topic of independent study of your choosing.

The course provides an overview of the growth and development of the global economy during the 20th century. To develop an understanding of these processes, the course examines the forces shaping the global economy and the institutions to which it has given rise, from the World Trade Organization to the multinational enterprise. Understanding is aided by the introduction of relevant theoretical perspectives (economic, historical, management, geopolitical). Attention is given to the role of Foreign Direct Investment as a driving force in the integration of developing countries into the globalization process, although the consequences of globalization in relation to the environment, social inequalities and poverty are also examined and other measures of welfare studied.