University College London

This course explores the making of a modern metropolis: London in the 20th century. Using the city as a classroom, students take a social and cultural approach to London’s history. The course attends to differences in the urban space, thinking about the dividing line of the Thames that separates the city North and South, or the East/West divide. They consider the multiplicity of lives lived in London, as shaped by structures including gender, class, race, and age. Students study some of the major events of this period including suffrage campaigns, two world wars, mass migration, and decolonization. They also think about how the public history of the city has been constructed through museums, walking tours, podcasts, documentaries, fiction, and film.

This course surveys research methods for science and technology studies and across the social sciences that contribute to the generation of new data. Students study a diverse range of methods and learn to understand the strengths and weaknesses of particular methods for investigating particular questions. Students are introduced to the theory and practice of qualitative and quantitative methods. Topics include research ethics, research design, face-to-face interviews and focus groups, surveys, content and discourse analysis, and ethnography. 

Students learn fundamental theories and methods of database systems: what they are, how they are developed, and how they function to achieve their purposes. The course exemplifies these constructs with contemporary database technologies and students learn how these technologies are exploited to build effective information systems of different scale.

The aim of this course is two-fold: to take a retrospective view to trace the evolution of media sociology, and a prospective view to assess current challenges confronting sociological analyses of the new media paradigm – monopoly-owned and user-driven digital platforms – the business models which underpin them, including algorithmic journalism, and their perceived "surveillance" effects.

This course examines geography education, past, present, and future. Geography in schools is the focus, with some other educational contexts considered. The course offers a space for students to reflect on their own geographical education, considering how and why geography education varies. Students are encouraged to think about the potential of geography in education, as the world changes.

This is a research-led and research-based course, providing an introduction to the fields of cultural and historical geography. It has a slightly different emphasis to other courses because it explores some of the philosophies and methodologies used to create cultural and historical geographies, and is designed to give students the experience and confidence to undertake their own independent research using UCL’s museum and archive collections. The course encourages students to think critically about questions of representation, different kinds of materials, forms of analysis, and engage with questions of politics and ethics.

The course helps students to become confident with a range of data structures and algorithms and able to apply them in realistic situations. The course provides the tools required to analyze a problem and decide which algorithms or algorithmic techniques to apply to solve it. The course involves practical programming and encourages a thoughtful approach to analysis and design problems.

This course introduces students to the key ideas of Game Theory and strategic thinking, allowing them to use game theoretic tools to analyze real world problems. Students see applications in industrial organization, auctions, competition and cooperation, voting, solving environment problems, and arms races.

This course introduces students to geographical scholarship that has sought to explain, understand, and critically analyze the manifold relationships between space and society in different contexts. The course familiarizes students with innovative geographical research exploring issues such as, for example, environment and uneven development; culture, the global, and the local; transnationalism and migration; gender, race, identity; politics, the state, and regions; empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism; nature, materiality, and non-human agencies.

This course explores this question in the context of the languages and peoples of the Danube region, focusing on German, Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and Croatian, and Yiddish. These languages belong to two genealogically different groups (Indo-European and Uralic) and one (Yiddish) bears traces of a third group (Semitic); within Indo-European, three different sub-groups are represented (Germanic, Romance, Slavonic). The course uses data from these languages (texts in the original, idioms, proverbs, jokes, etc.) to explore language and cultural contact from both a purely linguistic perspective (language relatedness v. typological features of languages, script v. sounds, areal connections, borrowing of words, idioms, and figures of speech) and a sociolinguistic point of view (intercultural exchange, multilingualism, standardization, purism, and the relation between language and identity). It explores how Danubian languages both converge and differ, how Danubian culture is both intercultural friction and intercultural flow.