University College London

This course gives students an overview of child development from infancy to middle childhood. It examines core topics in contemporary research on cognitive development, and core topics in contemporary research on emotional and social development.

This course introduces Level 1 undergraduate students to thinking and writing about political, social, and environmental events geographically, using examples ranging (depending on the year) from environmental disasters and infrastructure failures to epidemics and conflicts. The course introduces students to a variety of ways of analyzing, researching, and representing events and then focuses on the analysis of a small number of past, recent, and on-going events, allowing them to think critically and geographically about current events.

The course covers key elements of financial management. It provides students with a conceptual and theoretical basis for making financial decisions. It familiarizes students with measurement and valuation matters relating to short and longer term financial operational decision making, issues in financing and investments decisions, and dividend policy. It uses practical examples and cases to explain the goals of financial management and investment practice. It also enables students to use appropriate models and techniques to solve financial problems in the context of uncertainty.

This course explores some complex and controversial challenges facing human rights that sit at the nexus of International Human Rights Law and International Politics. It covers the foundations of International Human Rights Law and examines its role and relevance in contemporary international politics. Students explore the United Nations system; the precise nature and scope of state obligations under International Human Rights Law; and how human rights are used and abused in world politics. Students also examine six thematic challenges to human rights that sit at the nexus of international law and international politics: the so-called "compliance gap”; the politics of poverty; the role of International Human Rights Law in counter-terrorism policy and practice; the complex relationship between economic globalization and human rights; and the controversial concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) under international law, including the complex relationship between state sovereignty, mass atrocity, and human rights.

The “industrial revolution” was one of the three or four most important transformations in human history, and Britain was the first society to experience it. At heart that transformation was economic, a profound increase in both outputs and productivity. But crucially it had important social, cultural, intellectual, and political dimensions: class, gender, and generational relations changed considerably; new attitudes towards risk and consumption were forged; radical new ideas proliferated about the economy and the environment, the individual and the collective; and both state and empire played important roles in this “great transformation.” This course, therefore, locates economic developments within a wider framework and explores how dramatically yet uncertainly Britain changed in the 130 years or so before 1830.

This course examines how ideas about development explain the various ways the world is divided into rich and poor. This course deals with the empirical reality, theory, and current governance problems of development, poverty, and inequality. Students investigate the influence of colonialism, state capacity, regime type, war and conflict, accountability, social structures, and corruption on economic development.

This course provides an introduction to computer programming with a particular focus towards tasks that are essential for psychological research, such as developing computer-based experiments and parsing/formatting experimental data. Students gain knowledge and confidence to tackle a variety of programming tasks, as well as the ability to adapt to future needs and changes in technology. Topics covered include basic programming concepts; file handling; user interface development; organizing code for readability and maintainability; advanced troubleshooting techniques. This course is for students with little or no prior experience in computer programming.

This course provides an introduction to the ways in which social identities have been studied in the social sciences. It presents key debates and the disagreements and areas of overlap between different theories. It offers students an opportunity to explore cutting edge research on social identities and the fact that everybody has multiple identities but tends to think of themselves in singular ways. It will explore the relevance of different theories for understanding the place of identity in social life by applying theories to everyday situations.