United Kingdom - Scotland

This course engages with key contemporary issues and debates in politics through the thought of political theorists writing from different traditions and perspectives. It examines fundamental and perennial political questions as well as issues new to our time. Topics may include freedom and autonomy, epistemic crisis and democracy, intergenerational justice, animal rights, the impact of AI etc. It offers the opportunity for students to examine more contemporary theorists, debates, and literature in dialogue with each other. The course introduces students to a variety of competing theoretical perspectives, requiring critical consideration of the insights and problems each perspective offers. It provokes students to engage with, evaluate, and critically reflect upon the different ways to think about and conceptualize key issues and debates in political theory.

Sustainable development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are broad, context dependent, and interdisciplinary. This is at the heart of this course. Through short, pre-recorded lecturers from experts in different disciplines, to critical discussions of the Universities' own policies, this course breaks down this complex area into core principles, academic skills, and authentic case studies. The SDGs guide activity around the world, and this too is at the center of this course - critically exploring these goals from different epistemic, political, and cultural perspectives and giving students room to bring their experiences to debates and discussions.

 

This course surveys the paradoxical (sometimes productive) neuro-psychological phenomena that can be observed after lesions of the central or peripheral nervous system, or by non-invasive (transcranial) brain stimulation. These phenomena contrast with the more common functional deficits of brain lesions or brain stimulation, and are used as windows to detail current concepts in cognitive neuroscience, brain plasticity, and rehabilitation. Each lecture begins with case descriptions of patients with paradoxical (sometimes productive) effects of stimulation/lesions on behavior. Examples include hyper-attention; an anarchic hand; the experience of leaving one's own body; or the integration of phantom limbs into one's own body scheme. The lectures explore how these phenomena fit or inform models of cognitive processes and plasticity in different domains (e.g. attention, motor control, interhemispheric interactions, multisensory integration) and point to implications for neurorehabilitation. 

The course introduces students to 20th century Persian-language literary texts available in translation as a means of understanding the efforts of an ever-expanding Iranian intellectual class to address issues surrounding the rise of the modern nation-state in the Middle East generally and Iran in particular over this period via use of both the short story and the novel. The course can intersect with other departmental courses on modern Middle Eastern Studies, allowing students to explore their particular interests generally. But, it also intersects in particular with a course in modern Persian history which considers the political and socio-economic history of Iran since the 16th century.
 

In this course, the issues of water quality and water and wastewater treatment systems are examined. Advanced physical and chemical technologies, as well as bioengineering processes for water and wastewater treatment are introduced and studied. Emphasis is on state of the art solutions to tackle global challenges regarding water and wastewater treatment systems operation and effectiveness.

The course develops an understanding of visual perception and its functions. Focus is on the integration of findings from physiology, neuropsychology, anatomy, and experimental psychology. Topic areas include theories of human vision and their application to understanding our ability to perceive distinct visual properties, for example the shape, size, location, and identity of objects. 

This course is an introductory survey of architectural history in a range of global settings between c. 1775 and 2000. It is not just about buildings and designs, but seeks to place architecture in its historical contexts. What can architecture tell us about wider developments in social, political, cultural, and urban history? How did those contexts inform design and practice? The idea of "modernity" appears throughout the course. How has this idea informed architectural debate and production? The course begins with the stylistic revivals that dominated western architecture in the early 19th century. It also discusses the 19th century development of new typologies along with the new materials and technologies that made them possible. In the second part of the course, students turn to 20th-century Modernism in global contexts, including Europe, Africa, and Latin America. They explore how architects and their clients sought to invent new architectures, and the ways in which the results balanced international agendas with local and national concerns. The course concludes with the revision of Modernism in the 1950's and 60's and the emergence of a Post-modern consciousness.

This course comprises the Semester 1 material, including laboratory and course work, of the Chemistry 2 course. The course consists of the following lecture courses: Carbonyl Chemistry; Transition Metal Organometallic Chemistry 1; Heterocyclic Chemistry; Quantum Theory; Reaction Kinetics; Separation Techniques & Mass Spectrometry. The course includes six weeks of inorganic chemistry and three weeks of physical chemistry laboratory sessions.

The Late Republic (first century BCE) was a time of change and conflict in the city of Rome and the wider Roman Empire. In political terms the history of that century is dominated by the series of civil wars which led to the political dominance and assassination of Julius Caesar. The literature and art of that period in many cases reflect those tensions and problems. It was also a time of rapid development of Roman art and literature as it sought to form its own new identity through the traditions it had inherited from Greek culture. From the seething passions of Catullus' poetry, through Lucretius' philosophical poetic treatise ON THE NATURE OF THINGS, to the stylish rhetoric of Cicero, the course sets the main literary texts of that period against the broader backdrop of Roman art, culture, and social life. All texts will be studied in translation.

This course introduces key concepts and major issues of urban and regional economics for students with a knowledge of economic and econometric analysis at the undergraduate level. It emphasizes the role of market forces in the development of cities. Recent advances and empirical evidence are used to cover the following topics: market forces in the development of cities (spatial equilibrium, agglomeration and congestion forces, and transportation costs); land rents and land-use patterns (urban land rents, land-use patterns, neighborhood choice, zoning, and growth controls); urban transportation; housing; urban distress; and cities and public policy.