University College London

This course provides an introduction to the sub-discipline of urban geography. It explores the distinctive contribution that geographers have made to the analysis of cities and urban life. The course outlines the economic and social origins of urban life, exploring the relationship between population density, size, and diversity that characterise cities. The course systematically outlines how contemporary cities can be interpreted as economic spaces, social spaces, and political entities. It also explores the different ways that urban geographers and others have framed their research into cities and urban environments. Given that cities – for all their attractions and strengths – are frequently defined by their dysfunction and inequality, the course examines how such poor outcomes are generated. It also explores the kinds of policy programmes that might be capable of generating more liveable and equitable cities. The course takes a selfconsciously international perspective, encouraging participants to read widely about the diversity of cities that form the focus of urban geographical thinking today.

This course is an introduction to linguistic pragmatics, an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics which studies the relationship between language form and language use. It seeks to understand what it is to use language or what we do when we use language (Verschueren 1999). The course is divided into three units: the basic theoretical concepts in pragmatics, such as Grice’s maxims of conversation, conversational implicatures, deixis, and speech acts; key analytical (and contentious) issues such as salience and implicit meaning by analyzing different types of discourse; and the analysis of conversational interaction. Here, students explore such phenomena as turn-taking and preference structure, politeness phenomena, formulaic language, humor, and pragmatic/discourse markers. 

The Greek myths of gods, heroes, and heroines have played a crucial role in the history of Western art, literature, and music. This course examines Greek myths as found in Greek literary sources and provides students with an introduction to the study of Greek mythology in its literary, social, historical, and philosophical context.

Much of modern machine learning rests upon a range of mathematical methods and many introductory machine learning courses seek to introduce algorithms before ensuring the link with these methods is made. This course offers students an introduction to traditional Machine Learning in a rigorous mathematical fashion. Assuming a familiarity with key results of linear algebra, differential calculus, probability and statistics, the course introduces the key areas of traditional machine learning and seeks to cover the key tools (and theorems) within these areas, and to illustrate these with practical exemplars. 

Computational biology and data science have undergone tremendous expansion in recent years, resulting from increased computational power and accessibility of quantitative biological measurements. The course teaches students about the power of mathematical, computational, and statistical analyses, and their roles in biological research. This is achieved through sessions that combine lectures, paper-and-pen calculations, and computer practicals. Topics include data carpentry, handling, modelling, and data analysis using different types of biological measurements from the areas of Genomics, Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity research. Students gain confidence in searching and curating real-life datasets, constructing mathematical models, and combining them to answer biological questions that are inaccessible without the use of computers or mathematics.

This course is about the geography of social change in Africa. It is designed to build on the second year course Development Geography, but there are no prerequisites. The course analyzes the different factors that shape spatial differences in development indicators across Africa. The course allows students to explore the diversity of forms that the geography of social change in Africa takes. As such the course investigates the impacts of history, politics, sociology, and economics on spatial patterns of development. The course uses postcolonial theory as an analytical framework. This entails reflecting on the ongoing legacies of colonialism not only in terms of empirical institutions, practices and norms but also in relation to the production of knowledge and ideas. The course relies heavily on wide independent reading, including reading from disciplines beyond geography.

From a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective, this intermediate-level course takes a gendered perspective to discuss some of the most important political, economic, and social problems of contemporary societies in the Americas. The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, it assesses the quality of democracy from a gendered perspective, focusing on descriptive representation, elections, and voter behavior. In the second part, the course examines the gendered dimensions of public policy, with a focus on specific policy areas (e.g., poverty, healthcare, violence).

This course will provide a quantitative understanding of the hydrologic cycle, will identify the properties of water as a natural resource, will describe the aspects of the integrated water resource management, as well as the engineering related to water purification processes. The module will recognise socio-economic factors that impact effective water solutions, including urban infrastructure projects and managed urban infrastructure. Models for water transport in the subsurface (hydrogeology) will also be discussed, specifically in relation to the resources sector with focus on the pressure on groundwater quality and quantity, relating to appropriate measures to preserve or improve the quality of water. This will cover aspects of water management to combat water shortage in the energy and mining sectors. Management of wastewater and produced water in the oil and gas sector, involving injection to the reservoir and suitable reclamation treatments will also be considered. Of particular importance for the mining sector, effective tailing management, will be discussed.

Through the study of some of the most controversial and celebrated examples of what may be termed as utopian, anti-utopian, and dystopian literature, this course explores some key elements of utopian/dystopian/anti-utopian literature. The course examines themes such as the control and manipulation of language, as well as religion, history, and gender and considers the way in which the contemporary can be explored in an imagined future. Examples of texts studied for this course include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s HERLAND (1915), set in an isolated society made up entirely of women and engages with issues relating to gender identity in the early part of the 20th century. Zamyatin's WE (1924) presents a totalitarian society, "OneState", and is arguably the archetype of the modern dystopia. BRAVE NEW WORLD (1931) in an imagined future engages with questions of identity, mass production, and homogenization emerging post World War One.