University College London

This course explores the relationship between collective and individual behavior, society, and technology. It is especially concerned with how technologies evolve in relation to organizational, collective, and individual behavior, and vice versa. Students evaluate how technologies deliver (and fail to deliver) profitable, effective and valuable products services processes and activities. The course explores in detail the relationship between society and technology, especially in terms of how and why technologies succeed and fail; the value that technologies deliver (and do not deliver); and the wider position of technology in society. Students examine also the relationship between individuals and technology, and how behavior influences how technologies are developed, and how technologies influence and shape behavior.

This course explores the ethics of artificial intelligence in the context of autonomous technologies that involve the transfer of control and governance from human beings to robots and other intelligence systems. Normative and behavioral theories of ethics are used to explore the implications of artificial intelligence in the areas of liability associated with ownership of AI, agency and privacy, biases, malicious and harmful use of AI, and the rights of artificially intelligent beings. 

This course explores the debates and social research evidence around personal relationships in contemporary society. The course mainly draws on sociological and anthropological scholarship. Students learn about the interplay between intimate life and social organization, to understand better how wider social forces shape the most personal of experiences. Drawing on scholarship from across the globe, the course explores how intimacy and love differ across the cultural, socio-economic, and political contexts in which individuals live. The course explores different kinds of intimate relationships, whether romantic, family, or friendship based. Sexuality is explored as a practice of intimacy. 

This course focuses on ethical and philosophical approaches to democracy. It introduces students to major theories of democracy, as well as major critiques of democracy. 

The course familiarizes students with theoretical perspectives that explain the emergence and change of modern welfare states. To this end, the course typically outlines the development of European welfare states, and discusses the emergence of different types of welfare states. The course usually covers core theoretical approaches to understand welfare state politics, which may include economic models of inequality and redistribution, party politics and public opinion, the influence of political institutions, and the role of immigration, race, and gender. The course may also include case studies of specific policy fields or social policy reforms, such as the Universal Credit reforms in the United Kingdom. Students learn a set of theoretical tools that help them understand past, present, and future debates about social policy and the welfare state, and evaluate social policies in a comparative perspective.

This course explores urban policy issues through a focus on the intersections between population, housing, and neighborhood dynamics across the Global North. The course considers a number of intriguing policy relevant questions about residential geographies. These include but are not limited to: Why do people live where they do? How does the housing system shape how people move through, experience, and use urban space? What makes urban populations change over time, how can we measure and perhaps influence these dynamics, and how useful are terms such as segregation or gentrification for describing processes of neighborhood change? How is housing provided and regulated in different contexts, and what does this mean for cities and for people's lives?

This course explores the challenges we face and identifies collaborative processes for nature-based solutions in urban planning, design, implementation, adaptation, and care. Through a range of creative processes, with reference to exemplar projects and contributions from industry experts and academics, students learn the principles and application of an urban green infrastructure approach for resilience, health and wellbeing, and social and environmental justice.

Recent years have seen a debate about the waning of war, though for millions of people around the world, wars and violence are part of their everyday lives - with implications far beyond the war-torn states’ borders. This course introduces students to major trends in warfare (types of wars, the actors engaged in wars, targets in wars, funding of warfare, technology of warfare), theories explaining these trends, the relationship between warfare and state-building, and ethical questions concerning how wars are fought. The course first looks at major concepts and theories, and then moves on to examine contemporary debates and issue areas such as international law, international institutions such as the UN Security Council and NATO, civil wars and peacekeeping, climate-conflict nexus, weapons of mass destruction, cyber warfare, new technology, future weapons, and killer robots.  

The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the modern theory of finance. It describes the functioning of the main asset markets, the most important theories explaining the formulation of prices of financial assets, and the role of financial markets in the optimal allocation of risk bearing. Students develop an understanding of the economics and characteristics of the main financial assets. 

This is an interdisciplinary course tackling questions of interest to political science, geography, environment, engineering, and anthropology. Infrastructure spans time and space, fills our daily lives but is said to be mostly invisible, especially when it works well. The course starts with a look at theories of infrastructure and its relation to power before turning to in-depth case study-driven work on roads, shipping and logistics, water and sanitation, failed infrastructures, and even the notion of "evil" infrastructure. Each of the thematic units develops skills and knowledge related to project management, public procurement and tendering, infrastructural financing in the developing world, decarbonization, debates on surveillance, as well as the geopolitical aspect of infrastructure seen in policies such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative.