University College London

This course explores the role of money and banking in normal and crisis times as well as the most recent developments in the financial industry, namely cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. In particular, students investigate the role of credit for economic growth, why do banks exist and how they do compete. Students then research how banks possibly triggered the Great Financial Crisis (2007-08) as well as governments’ policies in response. Finally, the course devotes its attention to the most recent development in the money and credit markets, such as blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, with specific emphasis on bitcoins. The course is articulated around standard theoretical models, empirical evidence, policy developments, and case studies. With the latter respect, students take advantage of the international dimension of the UCL Summer School and draw from the experiences of different countries in the world

Bringing together political science and history, this course examines British politics since 1945. The course is not just narrowly about politicians and political intrigue, though: it’s about ideas and ideologies, social change, and political communication. It starts by examining the structure and institutions of British political life. Students examine the construction of the welfare state and postwar social democratic settlement, before looking at the big turning point in the 1970s as politics shifted towards a "neoliberal" governing paradigm. Students consider how the Second World War, social change, the end of empire, and the development of Europe transformed politics in the postwar period. They also think about the practice of politics, the role of ideas and idea-producers like think-tanks, campaigning, and the media. There is a strong focus on linking history and contemporary politics, and students hear from people in the thick of current politics as well as visiting key sites in Westminster and Whitehall.

This course provides a general introduction to educational studies through the use of media. Media understood here includes both fictional (e.g. film and literature) and non-fictional sources (e.g. TV shows and documentaries). The course considers how various educational concepts are represented through media, including (but not limited to) teacher-student relationships and identities, educational curricula, schooling, the function of academic institutions, as well as broader understandings of what constitutes education itself. Through engaging with selected sources, questions around what education is and how education is represented are considered. Students examine the value of both fictional and non-fictional sources when thinking, researching, and writing about education, as tools for both entertainment and insight. This further raises questions around performativity and reliability in education and educational research, the relationship between representation and reality, and the ways in which understandings of reality are affected by such images more broadly.

The course explores, among others, the topics of aesthetic judgement, morality and ethics, political change, ideology, and the relation between language and reality. The core lectures introduce the broad parameters of the topics being studied, contextualizing thinkers and readings, and providing indications of ways of thinking through materials being read.