University College London

This course provides an introduction to archaeological theory. It helps students develop the skills and knowledge required to assess the coherence, value, and relevance of a variety of theoretical frameworks currently employed in archaeology. In order to achieve this, a number of issues are raised and explored that together give a good overview of the major trends of archaeological thought, and illustrate how archaeology has developed from its antiquarian past to a modern social science. 

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 explores 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.

This course offers students the opportunity to engage with art thinking and art practice. It proposes a collective and experimental space based on the individual projects of each student. Students learn, explore, and practice arts processes and develop a personal art project. This course provides an experience in interdisciplinary thinking. It calls on a wide-ranging set of materials from art, anthropology, architecture, philosophy, biology, physics, mathematics, neurology, and geology and introduce students to the work of some thinkers and practitioners working in those areas. 

This course aligns Political Sociology to the social scientific study of political issues by other disciplines such as Political Psychology and Political Science, and seeks to develop a broad account of politics that can be used to understand contemporary social and political themes. The course combines the study of institutional and everyday politics, focusing on topics such as formal and informal types of political participation, political partisanship, elites and the distribution of power, the rise of populism, the politics of emotion and identity politics. Students taking this course learn about the theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of research in Political Sociology and related disciplines.

This course introduces students to the important principles relevant to medical entrepreneurship. It guides them through the relevant theories underpinning entrepreneurial practice. The ethical framework governing medical entrepreneurship is explored, which allows students to understand potential unintended consequences of innovation. Using small group work, students collaborate and develop their entrepreneurial ideas, culminating in an assessed presentation to the cohort during their final week. Through this, students  develop their own teamwork, communication and leadership skills with a focus on creativity and design.

The course provides a comprehensive introduction to modern labor economics. After providing some basic information about characteristics and trends in actual labor markets, the course analyses in some detail the supply side and the demand side of the labor market. These building blocks enable further analysis of special topics such as human capital, labor market discrimination, and unemployment. Emphasis is also given to the empirical evidence on those topics.