University College London

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 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 attempts to ground the analysis of human movement by focusing on the specific historical, sociological, economic, political, and cultural impact of migration from the "migrant's point of view." Accordingly, this interdisciplinary course locates "drivers" for migration in the post-war period, trace the settlement processes, engage with the myriad challenges and developments migrants faced as new workers and citizens, before exploring the impact on succeeding generations. Through a salient ethnographic perspective of experiences, the course provides students with overarching and critical theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of migration, diaspora, and the nation-state in a globalized late modern context.

This course provides students with a grounding in the foundational doctrines of European Union (EU) Law. It will focus both on the institutional and constitutional law of the EU and in particular on the processes of political and administrative decision-making, legislation, and adjudication. 

This course explores the relationships between urban form and formation: how insights from urban morphology and morphogenetic processes that created existing urban form can better inform the creation of future urban form through planning, design, and more informal urbanism. This involves study of different urban form components and patterns at different scales – buildings, spaces, streets, and districts – and how these are created in relation to each other to generate overall urban form. 

Modern bioscience research increasingly makes use of computational methods to collect, explore, analyze, display, and share data and results. In this course, students learn the foundational skills of coding so that they can write computer programs and analyze data using the Python programming language. Students are taught using examples drawn from bioscience research, and learn how computer techniques are used across a range of cutting edge research methods.

This course addresses the literature of the 17th century, tightly defined as the period running from the accession of Charles I in 1625 through the Civil War (1642-9) and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II (1660) to the end of the so-called "early-modern" era in 1700. 

This course covers theoretical anthropological approaches to the study of capitalism, from early accounts of the market versus other economic forms, to recent works on salvage economies and forms of financialization. Drawing on thinkers such as Gibson-Graham, Laura Bear, Anna Tsing, Andrea Muehlebach and Evans and Reid, it critically engages with ideas about neoliberalism, diverse (or alternative) economies, nepotism, austerity, performativity and prefiguration, and the way in which "capitalocentrism" obfuscates space for critical thought.

Domesticated animals have been identified in many societies across the world, but rarely have archaeologists considered how livestock management has shaped (and continues to shape) human societies.  In the past, archaeologists have tended to assume that once established livestock can be disregarded as a dynamic factor.  Such studies focus on the narrow confines of the economic significance of livestock produce, often associated with the animal's death.  This course considers the agency of livestock and its importance in transforming human relationships.  Examples and case studies are drawn from archaeology, but also from anthropology, history, and geography