United Kingdom - England

This course teaches microeconomic analysis to let you explore important contemporary questions and special emphasis is given to the question how public policy can change (economic) outcomes.  Students will learn how to understand economic problems by focusing on their key characteristics, choosing the relevant microeconomic mechanisms and developing a solid intuition. The use of mathematics is minimal (in particular, with no calculus) and the emphasis of instruction is on graphical analysis and economic intuition. Precise topics and readings will be announced and are selected to be of current interest, such as the impact of the pandemic and environmental concerns.

This course offers an introduction to international macroeconomic theory and develops the main tools for macroeconomic policy analysis. Students study the balance of payments and the causes and consequences of global imbalances, followed by an in-depth study of the determination of exchange rates, money, and prices in open economies. They discuss the costs and benefits of different nominal exchange rate regimes and their sustainability, as well as examine the causes and consequences of debt and default, speculative attacks, and financial crises.

In this course, students develop the skills required to identify hazards, to estimate the magnitude of the consequences (typically fires, explosions and toxic releases) and the probability of such an event occurring. Additionally, a fundamental approach for the systematic assessment and reduction of risk is established. Such an approach is essential to minimize harm, the resulting loss of money and reputation, and to meet national regulatory requirements.

This course provides an introduction to Social Anthropology as the comparative study of human societies and cultures. Students are introduced to key themes and debates in the history of the discipline. Ethnographic case studies are drawn from work on a variety of societies, including hunter-gatherers, farmers, industrial laborers, and urban city-dwellers. Drawing on both classical and contemporary work, the course starts by posing the question: What is Social Anthropology? After exploring the ethnographic method and considering some historical background, the rest of the course is organized around core themes in the discipline, including (in the fall term) relatedness, exchange, and power. Through comparing different ethnographic examples, students consider key questions through anthropological perspectives. How do we become people and become related to others? What is love, and is it natural? Why do we think of some people as different and others as the same? Why are gifts and exchange so central to human societies? Does work empower or enslave us? What is power, and why do some people have it and others don’t?

The Napoleonic Empire was crucial in the formation of modern Europe. Much of Europe was covered by the Napoleonic Empire and its impact was felt across large parts of the non-European world. The influence of the emperor and his policies was most obvious in relation to the European international system, particularly through his military campaigns and his territorial reorganization of Europe in the wake of his successes. However, the Napoleonic era also saw major developments in the legal, constitutional, social, and economic order of many states, whether allied or opposed to the Napoleonic project. Likewise, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, much attention is paid to the impact of the Napoleonic era on the relationship between Church and State and the rise of national consciousness, whether in political or cultural terms. By studying how Napoleon's empire was created, challenged, and ultimately defeated, the course focuses on the nature of power and legitimacy in this era. An attempt is made to place the Napoleonic empire in a broader context, in part by comparing it to other contemporary, rival states, including Russia, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Finally, the course begins and ends with an assessment of the Napoleonic myth, both in terms of his contemporaries and for subsequent generations of historians.

The course provides an overview of data center technologies, the infrastructure needed to run a variety of workloads, and the design decisions when engineering scalable distributed applications. Students analyze the full system stack for managing and scheduling data-center resources. Further, they discuss the design principles for scalable systems; investigate concepts and techniques to build large scale systems, with a focus on distributed storage, coordination, computation and resource allocation. They get an overview of NewSQL and NoSQL technologies, learn new data models, their associated query languages and systems, and discuss new storage technology and its impact on query execution and data management systems in general.

This course introduces students to photography as a tool for communication and encourages students to reflect critically on issues of form and content to convey meaning. Students will learn key technical processes in contemporary image making and consider existing photographic theories alongside emerging digital practices. Students will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed series of images to a set brief.

This course begins by exploring the intellectual interventions and traditions that have emerged in the anthropology in and of Britain over the last 50 years, and then swiftly moves into exploring the ways in which interdisciplinary ethnographic research has been conducted across Britain. While reading ethnographies in cross cultural, global contexts, in this course students place a particular emphasis on the urban context of Greater Manchester. Students explore ethnographies that have been based on ethnographic research across Greater Manchester, and which raise and address urgent questions of social, political, and economic change in Manchester and beyond. The course tackles the concept of "the urban’" by exploring ethnographic examples from anthropology, sociology, human geography, and business studies that focus on social and cultural lives and relations. Students take two fieldtrips (Cheetham’s Library and Manchester Airport) and two walking tours (Fallowfield and Rusholme) to visit and reflect on the ethnographic locations of the materials and readings they engage with. 

Data science and machine learning are exciting new areas that combine scientific inquiry, statistical knowledge, substantive expertise, and computer programming. One of the main challenges for businesses and policy makers when using big data is to find people with the appropriate skills. Good data science requires experts that combine substantive knowledge with data analytical skills, which makes it a prime area for social scientists with an interest in quantitative methods. This course extends the foundation of probability and statistics with an introduction to the most important concepts in applied machine learning, with social science examples. It covers the main analytical methods from this field with hands-on applications using example datasets, so that students gain experience with and confidence in using the methods covered.