University College London

This course provides students with a thorough understanding of the nature and origin of igneous and metamorphic rocks, from their formation and distribution to their geological expressions and associations with particular plate tectonic settings. The course also builds on fundamental concepts of geochemistry and mineralogy to explain phase behavior in high temperature systems using quantitative phase diagrams and approaches. Integral practical classes use both hand specimens and optical mineralogy to understand diagnostic textures - which are used to identify and classify igneous and metamorphic rocks. The course provides an introduction to modern research practice in the fields of igneous and metamorphic petrology.

This course provides students with an in-depth understanding of innovation and its dynamics. It explores the determinants of innovation, drawing on theories to examine how and why innovation occurs, and the types of innovation that may emerge from different political economy perspectives and institutional frameworks. Part of the course involves examining policy evaluation and design, specifically discussing how to provide policy advice that considers the complex societal ecosystem, including societal hopes and fears.

The course covers different theories of human communication and utterance comprehension are discussed, including Gricean, neo-Gricean, and relevance-theoretic approaches. The specific topics and data discussed vary from year to year but are taken from the following list: referring expressions and speaker’s reference, conversational implicatures, pragmatic enrichments of explicit content, word meaning modulation, unarticulated constituents, indexical saturation, and non-literal uses of language (metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, irony).

This course is for students who are new to the subject of pharmacology. The course provides an overview of pharmacology and some of the most important mechanisms of drug action; illustrates these actions for you with specific examples of important drugs; provides a foundation in some of the basic theory for pharmacology; illustrates some of the principles of pharmacology whilst providing basic laboratory skills and experience; and introduces principles of laboratory safety. 

This course introduces students to public health, a discipline which seeks to prevent disease and promote the health of populations through the organized efforts of society. Public health addresses complex health and social problems that are influenced by social, cultural, political, environmental, organizational, and economic factors. Students explore determinants that shape inequalities in health and explore how the organized efforts of communities and governments can help to ameliorate these. Students learn how different theories support public health practice and develop their skills in critically appraising evidence. They explore a breadth of public health topics – from sexual health to mental health - and include examples from low-, middle-, and high-income countries.

The human voice is a highly flexible tool for communication with others. The course familiarizes students with the main concepts underpinning the psychological processing of the human voice, and to introduce them to research on the perception and expression of speech, emotions, and identity. The content covered ranges from basic articulatory and acoustic properties of verbal and nonverbal vocal behavior (e.g. speech, laughter), to social and cognitive aspects of voice processing (e.g. identity recognition, evaluation of personality traits), and the neural underpinnings of human voice processing.

This course provides a broad outline for the processes of change which led from the introduction of farming to the metal producing societies of the Bronze Age in Europe. Students discuss the different explanatory frameworks offered for the introduction and spread of the Neolithic economy and the formation of early stratified societies. The course discusses the changing definitions of the Neolithic, looks at the Mesolithic background, follows the introduction of farming in the Aegean, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, central and Northern Europe, the lake shore settlements of Central Europe, Megalithic monuments, the Tells of Southern Europe, the settlement of the steppe, the first metals, the inventions of charts, and the Bell Beaker network.

In this course students gain a deeper understanding of equality in moral and political thought. The first part of the course focuses on the idea of moral equality. What grounds all human beings’ equal moral status? What does it even mean to say that all human beings are morally equal? The second part of the course focuses on the idea of political equality. Specifically, it considers what the equal status of all citizens implies about how we should distribute power and make political decisions. Does a commitment to the equality of all citizens commit us to democratic rule? If the political decisions made in Community A significantly affect the members of Community B, should the members of Community B have a (democratic?) say in Community A’s decision? 

This course takes London, a global, multicultural city as our lab for exploring social science theories and methods. It engages with current social issues in the city, situating them historically and within wider national and global contexts. The course considers what a focus on a particular city, in this case London, can contribute to the social sciences, and conversely considers how social science concepts and theories can contribute to a richer understanding of cities and city life.

This course examines the impact of global change - broadly defined as the impacts of climate change and demographic change influencing global-scale changes in land use, environmental degradation and pollutant emissions - on physical and human environments in Africa and Asia with a specific focus (thread) on water supply. The course deliberately engages issues of climate injustice, equity, and adaptive capacity from the local to the global. A distinctive aspect of this course is its engagement not only with the hydrological science underlying the impact of global change on water supplies but also with the pathways and processes of water governance including transboundary issues that inform solutions towards more equitable and sustainable water supplies in a warming world. The course draws from case studies informed by active research programs in Nigeria, Niger, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and India.