United Kingdom - England

Neuroendocrinology is the discipline concerned with how the nervous system controls hormonal secretion and how hormones control the brain. It is pivotal in understanding both general physiology and medicine. This course provides up-to-date and research-orientated information delivered as a series of lectures and group exercises. The lectures are presented by experts in the particular area of research, and the group exercises are based on current research literature and/or results, and are designed to develop students' ability to read, understand, and appraise the current research literature.

This course examines the global politics of trade, development, and the environment against the background of continued economic globalization and the emergence of new forms of global governance. 

This course gives students a thorough introduction to the field of behavioral organizational economics. Students discuss seminal as well as current research papers in the field, featuring empirical studies as well as lab and field experiments. Students study employment relationships between workers and organizations and get to know key factors that shape them in a positive way.  They focus on the two concepts of motivation and selection. When it comes to the question of how to motivate workers on their jobs, students discuss desired as well as unexpected effects incentives can have and examine the interplay between incentives, on the one hand, and cultural and psychological factors on the other. When it comes to selection and hiring, students tackle the question of how to best match candidates to jobs. Students also find out more about how to detect discrimination in the hiring process – and discuss measures that can help to mitigate or even eliminate it.

This course introduces students to the analysis of science and technology from a social and cultural standpoint. It also introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology and Society (STS) – also called Science and Technology Studies – which seeks to understand how science and technology shape society and culture, and how society and culture, in turn, shape the development of science and technology.  

The key goal of this course is to appreciate different "modes" and "lenses" of urban thinking and their relationship with urban policy practice, and to understand how to source and interpret different types of urban expertise in relation to complex urban challenges.  Whilst cities have in the past years been an exciting locus of experimentation, and the promises of the "smart city" agenda as well as a city gender lens have fast risen to wide popularity in urban research and policy, there remain many areas in which complex urban challenges test our contemporary understanding of the "urban age." The course engages with urban change-makers working across academic research (in UCL and beyond) and public and private sector institutions. 

This course is about political, social, cultural, and economic change in the Benelux-countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) from the inter-war period to the present. Among the themes covered are the crisis of democracy in the 1930s; collaboration, resistance and accommodation during the German occupation of World War II; decolonization; Dutch, Belgian, and Luxembourgian post-war politics; the Cold War and European integration; development of the modern welfare state; cultural revolution and new social movements in the 1960s; linguistic and inter-communal tensions and federalization of Belgium; immigration, the polder-model, the "crisis of multiculturalism," and the recent rise of populism in the Netherlands.

This course enables students to understand how money and finance, and processes of global political economy more broadly, enable, shape, and condition the way development, environmental governance, and conservation are practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. The course draws on economic geography, but also social, financial, and cultural geography, anthropology, development studies, and work on society and environment relations. Although the course will have a major reference to sub-Saharan Africa - including Uganda, Kenya, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and South Africa - it also includes examples of financialization, conservation, and eco-system services from the UK, the Caribbean, and Asia. 

This course examines human experience as a source of truth, knowledge, and belief about war. Representations of human experiences of war play a significant role in human culture and society, often defining social memories and collective understandings of war. As such, this course examines how human experience is transmitted and interpreted via historical sources as well as cultural objects such as films, novels, and video games. It also engages students with key social, political, and moral arguments about the representation of war experience in the media, museums, monuments, and commemoration rituals. 

This course explores the diverse roles that money and finance have played across time and space, and the roles that we want them to play. Students explore debates about debt and democracy – from geographies of offshore tax and state financing, to the use of financial assets and property investment as the basis for social welfare. Students consider geographies of finance and development, including inequalities and inclusion in the global north, efforts to create more ethical and postcolonial approaches to finance, and the rapidly changing landscape of fintech. Themes may vary.

This course presents an advanced treatment of econometric principles for cross-sectional, panel and time-series data sets. While concentrating on linear models, some non-linear cases are also discussed, notably limited dependent variable models and generalized methods of moments. The course focuses on modern econometric techniques, addressing both technical derivations and practical applications. Applications in the areas of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and finance are considered.