University of London, Royal Holloway

This course offers an introduction into the core concepts of the digital age, drawing on a rich variety of disciplines. Students examine a number of concepts, including, but not limited to: technicity, affective turn, digital subjectivity and extended mind, creative expression and participation in the digital era, amateur production, Free Software, fun and politics, self-organization, media archeology, and sonic architectures. 

This course introduces to students the neglected field of avant-garde film making through a study of its development in Europe during the 1920s and ’30s and its specific relationship to the thought and practice of the modernist avant-garde in other media, especially art and literature. The emphasis is on filmmaking as a personal practice, and its relation to developments in fine art and literary practices within western culture. Content varies depending upon emerging developments in the field.

Topics include (1) why modern psychology requires an understanding of neuroscience; (2) neuronal structure, function and information transmission; (3) the organization of the nervous system and how this reflects some principles of information processing; (4) methods used to study structure and information processing in the brain; (5) functional architectures in the brain; (6) the neural basis of learning; (7) brain evolution; and (8) the biology and psychopharmacology of reward, reinforcement, and psychological disorders.

This course gives an overview of the key arguments in the sociology of religion, including the social, cultural, and political significance of religion to the individual, social groups, and society at a national and global level. The course begins by covering the classical sociological theorists on religion (Durkheim, Weber & Marx) and examines the key debates around secularization and post-secularization. It then considers the social and cultural significance of new religious movements and the rise of spirituality and New Age movements in the West. Finally students consider the growth of fundamentalism around the world and how religion is becoming globalized.

This course addresses a number of topics in computer and network security. Topics include memory errors, Web, network, countermeasures, and pointers to research papers. The course prepares students to identify software vulnerabilities, shows how to address these, and introduces how vulnerabilities are exploited through malware.

In this course, students study films from the Franco regime in Spain and into the Transition to democracy. The films selected in different ways either express or subvert the ideology and iconography of Francoism. The films offer a combination of commercial and art-house cinema. Students explore issues such as the representation of gender, family, nationhood and religion, issues of censorship, ideology, iconography, and the dynamics of spectatorship. 

This course provides students with a broad overview of violence and harm as committed by individuals or groups within society. Several forms of violence are examined within the course including but not limited to intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual violence, and elder abuse. In addition to examining the nature and prevalence of violence and harm, the course also examines the ways in which violence and harm are assessed, managed and communicated by professionals who work with perpetrators and victims of violence. Concepts related to violence or the prevalence and nature of violence such as psychopathy and gender are also examined. 

In this course, students look at the extent to which our familiar norms and ways of interacting with each other transfer to our online lives, and how we should respond when these familiar ideas fail to apply to our online life. 

Topics include contemporary debates on sex work, sexual, and emotional labor, trafficking, and sex tourism as well as debates of the sex industry and sociological questions concerning structure and agency, and the articulation of gender, race, and class and globalization.

This course allows students to identify research papers relevant to a health psychology topic, summarize and evaluate published evidence, relating to a health psychology topic, apply health psychology theory to a practical problem, and describe and think critically about a number of health psychology theories, models, and concepts.