University College London

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. 

In this course, students learn from a theoretic and empirical point of view, how economists study gender and ethnicity in the economy. This includes considerations of the education system, the labor market, and the role of the state. The course uses applications of microeconomic theory and modern empirical methods to establish the facts about the effects of gender and ethnicity differences in the economy and to evaluate policies designed to address these effects. This course uses a flipped learning method. 

Darwinian approaches can contribute to our understanding of human behavior, including our demography, health, psychology, culture, and can be applied in hunter-gatherer, small-scale agricultural/pastoralist and post- industrial societies. This course is about the evolution of behavior in humans and examines how much of the variation in human behavior can be understood in terms of individuals making choices that are adaptive in different ecological and social circumstances. The course introduces classic theories of social evolution (kin selection, reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity). It covers aspects of our behavior and life history that have parallels in numerous species, as well as those that are (more or less) uniquely human (such as menopause), and discusses how cultural evolution has influenced our behavior. Topics include basic behavioral ecology (as applied to both animal and human behavior) and some evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution, mate choice, parental investment, life history evolution, evolution of cooperation and kinship and marriage systems.