University College London

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. 

This course introduces material culture studies including their history, comparative study of technology, theories of artifacts, art and museum practice, and theory.

This course introduces different aspects of material and visual culture, and focuses on the relationship between people and "objects."  Lectures cover the object, the museum, the artwork, and the image, decolonization and object repatriation, art and agency, as well as photography within the digital age. 

The course provides an introduction to the major vertebrate groups (jawless vertebrates, placoderms, cartilaginous fish, ray-finned fish, lobe-finned fish, early tetrapods, modern amphibians, lizards, snakes, turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs and birds]. The core of the course concerns the anatomy and evolutionary relationships of these groups, which are examined through lectures and practical classes in the Grant Museum of Zoology. The course also uses vertebrates to illustrate two important aspects of palaeontological research: analytical methods and evolutionary processes. The methods introduced by these lectures include phylogenetic analysis, cladistic biogeography, and taxic and phylogenetic diversity estimation. Students also examine evolutionary phenomena such as exaptation and adaptation, extinction, adaptive radiation, and the influence of physical factors on evolutionary history.

This course provides an overview of "classical" and contemporary theorizations of gender, and of the multiple ways in which gender is encountered in every aspect of our lives. The different ways of defining gender issues and shaping gender politics in Western and non-Western societies are considered. Students study the historical and cultural contexts in which the main debates have arisen and analyze themes such as gender, identity, sexuality, motherhood, nationhood, ethnicity, race, and religion. A variety of genres including press, novel, film, and essay are examined with the purpose of considering how gender and sexuality are conceptualized within Western society, focusing on the UK. Students explore how media and popular culture can reinforce or challenge traditional notions of gender that perpetuate inequalities.

.