University College London

Fashion and textiles operate at the intersection of persons and society, and are the primary cultural signifiers of what sorts of people, individuals consider themselves to be. Fashion goods are the primary points of debates about unfolding values, aspirations, hierarchies, objections, new technologies, and ways of socializing. The course in equips students to understand the societal impact of emerging new technologies and new materials in the production and retailing of textile and fashion with an emphasis on modelling societal take-up via the unique method of anthropology, which provides a depth of focus on the human life cycle and unfolding biographical relations across many cultures.

This course examines the nature and value of democracy, and the various roles played by citizens and constitutions in sustaining it. The first part of the course examines different justifications for democracy and different understandings of the nature of the democratic process. The second part of the course focuses on issues of democratic citizenship, such as who should be viewed as a citizen, and whether democratic citizens have duties to obey the law and to vote. The final part of the course studies some of the ways law and politics interact with a particular focus on the relationships between constitutions, judicial review, and democracy.

This course is an introduction to Psycholinguistics, an interdisciplinary field of study which aims to understand how humans learn, represent, comprehend, and produce language. It begins by asking what it means to know a language and explore the nature of our linguistic competence. Students examine core properties of mental representations and processes involved in acquiring and understanding language, and how linguistic processes unfold in real time. Finally, students explore issues in perception, production, and acquisition in three core domains: speech sounds, words, and sentences.

This course offers an introduction to the field of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Tracing the development of CRT out of a critique of Critical Legal Studies in the USA, students explore the philosophical underpinnings of CRT, its critiques of ahistoricism, meritocracy, and "colorblind" policy. Students examine how the field itself has internationalized and engaged with other fields of study such as education, women's studies, film studies, and literary criticism, and how it has been subjected to academic criticism from within and without the field, most notably by Marxist scholars and liberal multiculturalists.

This course develops the skills required to analyze and contextualize literary prose. The texts to be studied are predominantly Nordic (in English translation), selected from the long and rich tradition of Nordic folk, fairy, and fantastic tales, from Medieval ballads to Gothic tales and postmodern short stories, animated and fantasy film. More generally, the course investigates a variety of narrative components (e.g. narrator, character, genre, theme), and explores why storytelling has been and continues to be a central human activity, how it has changed over time, and how stories reflect changing conceptions of Nordic societies, cultures, and identities. The course introduces students to a broad range of theories and methods in literary studies including narratology, gender studies, print culture, and monster studies.

This course is an exploration of the history of Greek and Roman ideas, which formed the modern world. In the first half of the sessions focuses on Greek ideas like democracy, philosophy, hospitality, fair play, athletics, drama, eros and love and how these ideas have been generated through specific Greek cultural systems or artistic modes of representation (literature, painting, sculpture, theatre). How were these ideas born and what is their influence in the modern world? How does Greek literature relate to these ideas? And more generally, what is the relationship between these ideas and the Greek life and thought? In the second half of the sessions, students examine Roman ideas, and the course focuses on ideas like fame, liberty, virtue, justice, epicureanism, stoicism, citizenship, republicanism, imperialism, public order, and how they have been generated through specific Roman cultural systems or artistic modes of representation (literature, painting, sculpture, theatre). The sessions then examine the relevance of these ideas to modern politics and society.