University College London

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.

Weekly workshop-seminar sessions and tutorials engage students in identifying and exploring the specific genre of Creative Non Fiction, with the goal of using such literary works as foundations for an examination of advanced principles in producing successful communicative writing (with an emphasis on the “creative” element). The course is based around an exploration of sub-genres of the form, with class discussion time given to considering the personal essay and memoir; literary journalism (“new journalism”); observational/descriptive essays and travel writing, for example. A reading list of creative non-fiction texts is used as the basis for lectures and example technique texts and as the springboard for in-depth critical analyses. During workshop seminars, students engage in peer assessment, providing oral and written critiques of classmates’ creative nonfiction writing (submitted on a rotating weekly basis). 

This course touches on themes in political ecology, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of food, and the anthropology of development through a detailed exploration of the world’s fisheries; from the fisherfolk that harvest them to the people around the globe that consume them. It critically examines the global fish "crisis" and prospects for global food security and supply; conservation v’s development discourse in resource management; scientific & traditional management of natural resources; certification/eco-labelling and the "green" consumer; commodity chains; ecology of small scale fishers groups; and poverty, development, and livelihoods. Each student on the course becomes a member of CARP-London (Cities Aquatic Resource Project – London) an initiative which both trains undergraduates in research and builds our understanding of the production, supply, and consumption of aquatic resources in our urban centers. 

The course sits at the interface between bioscience and business, covering the elements of management science that are most relevant to bioscience. Bioscience often has a long, complex route from innovation to implementation. Hence the content includes integration with practice, bioscience firms, medical behaviors, as well as the pillars of intellectual property, regulation and investment choices. How to gain stakeholder support is also included.

This course provides you with an introduction to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. While aesthetics is occasionally thought as synonymous with the philosophy of art, it examines questions raised by experiences that are appreciated for their own sake in a much wider variety of contexts, including natural environments, and watching sport. The course focuses on two main themes. First, the nature and justifiability of aesthetic judgements. Questions addressed may include: How should we reconcile the commonly held thought that taste is subjective with the equally commonly held idea that some artworks are nonetheless better than others? Is there a right or wrong way to experience the aesthetic qualities of a sunset or a starfish? The second theme is the contemporary debates in the philosophy of art. Questions addressed may include the nature and value of art (can just anything count as art if you put it in a gallery?), the aesthetic value of forgeries, what we can learn about life from art, and why we value painful works such as tragedies.

How do firms develop and conduct their strategy when operating across national borders? This course is designed to expose students to fundamental and advanced issues in international strategy enabling them to analyze opportunities and challenges from the point of view of business analysts and practicing general managers.