The module is designed to offer a comprehensive understanding of accounting, finance and governance of Islamic financial institutions and social financial services. This module will allow students to critically compare the ideal-ethical principles/theories and the practical implementation of Islamic banking, insurance and social financial institutions.
There is a growing demand for studying Islamic banking within a highly integrated global financial market. This module provides comprehensive insights over how Islamic finance operates and the structure of Islamic financial institutions in various national contexts.
There is a rich and often overlooked tradition of Islamic philosophy, or 'falsafa'. This module focuses on the classical period of the Islamic Golden Age, from Al-Kindi, via Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna), to Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes). The classical Islamic tradition played a central role in transmitting and transforming philosophical thought from the Ancient Greeks to the Early Moderns. Many distinctions familiar from the Early Modern tradition and not clearly present in Ancient Greek philosophy first started to take shape during this period, and Islamic philosophers made important contributions to topics such as the relation between the mind and the body, the distinction between essence and existence, arguments for the existence of God and concerning God’s nature, the metaphysical modalities of possibility, contingency, and necessity, and the nature of logic, science, religion, ethics, and philosophy itself. The aim of this module is to introduce some of the central views and arguments of classical Islamic philosophy and to explore and critically assess them in light of recent philosophical commentary.
Since the end of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980s, the modern world has witnessed the emergence of Islamist states and powerful Islamist political movements including in West Asia and the Near and Middle East: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic in Iran, the Islamic Da’wa Party in Iraq, the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, and the Islamist Justice and Development Party in Turkey. Paradoxically, the rise of Islamism that is best known for its anti (or at least non)-Western characteristics, has been either tolerated or supported by the Western World and the United States in particular both as a discourse borne of Orientalism and as a political convenience during the last stages of the Cold War . In fact Islamist states in the region were considered by the West to constitute a new “security” belt that was to protect the Western interests against the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation. Unpredictable developments in Afghanistan and Iran, however, caused costly wars but in exchange provided more opportunities for the USA to consolidate its military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The module aims to develop your critical awareness of Latin American music and dance cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the ways that scholars have approached them. Rather than a survey of Latin American music, the course will be thematically focussed on issues which may include indigeneity; social inequalities and marginality; gender and sexuality; migration; ‘race’ and racism; nation-building and cosmopolitanism; politics, dictatorship and social movements; exoticism, folklore and transnationalism; scenes and countercultures; religion; violence. Although the focus will be on Latin American and Latinx popular musics, students may opt to explore Latin American art musics and/or other cultural practices in assessments. Genres and music cultures that may be explored include bolero, bossa nova, corrido, cumbia, danzón, mambo, Nueva canción, punk, rap, reggaeton, rock and roll, salsa, samba, son cubano and tango. The module will be based on the study of books and articles, and close listening and viewing of audio-visual materials.
This module considers a range of issues in the area of the sociology of the policy and policing and more broadly the sociology of social control - issues, include domestic violence, public order and policing minority groups.
The aim of every language course at the University is to enable you to communicate in your target language (TL) at that particular level and in your particular area of interest. We use the word ‘communicate’ in its widest sense, meaning that you will not only be able to talk to people in the language but also to develop your proficiency in listening, reading, and writing. This means that the module aims for you to understand all the things which affect communication in that language, including knowledge of how the language is used, how it works and how to analyse it, and the cultural contexts in which it is spoken. This particular module is aimed at complete beginners. Successful completion of the full Stage 1, over 2 semesters, is approximately equivalent to having reached Level A1 of the Common European Framework or a good GCSE. Taking this single semester module at Stage 1 will take you part of the way to the outcomes of the full Stage. You are encouraged to take a full language Stage if you want to make significant progress in the language you are learning.
This module explores the rich variety of Jewish life and the development of Jewish experience, including Antisemitism and violence from the ancient to the contemporary world. It introduces students to ideologies and cultures of antisemitism and examines attempts to theorise antisemitism as an historical and contemporary phenomenon; it places antisemitism within wider histories of racism and racialised thought. It also examines ideas, processes and experiences of emancipation, looks at histories of Jewish/non-Jewish economic, social, cultural and intellectual exchange, and examines Jewish experiences of violence such as pogroms and expulsion and Jewish community responses to persecution.
The module offers a broad introduction to Jewish history from the ancient to the contemporary period. The first part of this module introduces and explains important developments for the Jewish minority in Europe, focusing on the period between the Enlightenment to the end of the inter-War period, from the late 18th century to 1933. While this history has often been regarded as a prelude to the Holocaust, our module will look at this period from a Jewish perspective. What were the opportunities, and what were the risks, that ‘modern times’ held in store for a group that moved from the margins of society to its centre? We will look at the Jewish experience in Western and Eastern Europe. The second part of the module covers the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era and then how that history has been remembered and represented but also how the Holocaust shaped the history of Jews after 1945.
German-Jewish history has often been regarded as ‘leading up to the Holocaust’. In this module we will explore the life and culture of Jews in Germany from the late C18th until the eve of the Nazi takeover in 1933. Starting with the Jewish enlightenment, initiated by philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729/1786), we see the emergence of a modernizing Jewish element within a modernizing German society and its capital city of Berlin. Here, all Jewish ‘fantasies’, from Assimilation to Zionism, have been played out, discussed, created tensions within the Jewish community and produced an unparalleled cultural creativity, particularly around the turn of the century and in the 1920s. Antisemitism in German society led to the establishment of Jewish organisations such as the Centralverein, but also to the development of a ‘Jewish renaissance’, a re-discovery of a Jewish identity nearly lost in the processes of modernization. Using a core set of primary sources as our foundation, we will trace Jewish life from the struggle for emancipation through to the cultural, social, and political transformations of the 19th and early 20th centuries
Among philosophers in the modern era, Immanuel Kant is widely acknowledged as the most important, original and influential. His challenging book, Critique of Pure Reason, asks what we can know about the nature of reality at the most fundamental level. Can we know about reality in a way that goes beyond science and experience, using reason to discover whether there is a God, or a human soul, or whether we have free will? Kant answers: No. We can know the world only as it appears to us, not as it is in itself. But his original idea is that, rather than being left with the despairing thought that our experience might be an illusion, we can turn to investigate the way the mind must work in order to experience anything at all, and discover how the world we construct for ourselves obeys necessary rules, and how we can distinguish in a new way what is objective from what is merely subjective. The aim of this module is to introduce and explain the philosophical positions and arguments advanced in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and encourage critical reflection upon them in the light of recent philosophical commentary.
This module provides the key background and skills for students on the MSc Geophysics programme to enable successful future careers. You will learn why geophysics is a key enabler of the energy transition, how to design geophysical surveys, aspects of equipment mobilisation, and acquire different types of high-resolution marine geophysical data.
Key Skills module for the MSc Applied Coastal and Offshore Geoscience
This module first provides students with an understanding of academic writing at Masters Level in UK Higher Education, with regard to essay writing and then with regard to the practical skills necessary for presenting a clear and concise business report. This emphasis is designed to provide early feedback on improvements that they can make towards studying further on this and other modules on their programme. This module then turns to developing skills and attitudes that enable us to work and act in the modern business world, spanning HR skills necessary for HR practitioners but also team work, collaboration and employability. The module is relevant not just too future work opportunities but also to day-by-day work at University. The lessons learned are intended to have immediate practical application.
The module introduces you to key thinkers and their contributions to social theory, their ideas about the social world and the way it works. These ideas provide the building blocks for your degree whether you are studying sociology or criminology. Different theories are introduced in their historical context highlighting the particular issues their proponents initially sought to grapple with and explain at the time they were writing. We consider the broad questions these theories address and highlight the relevance of these ideas to the world we inhabit today
This module introduces key sources of social science data (both UK and non-UK), and the measurement of key concepts using these data, within a range of substantive areas. In doing so it focuses on the analysis of a number of fundamental social issues – including (for example) poverty and inequality, social mobility, and educational attainment and achievement. The module links the conceptual and practical: it touches on debates about how these issues should be understood, and examines how these issues are operationalised and measured in practice using quantitative measures. It also introduces students to the use of the STATA statistical software package.
This module focuses on the knowledge exchange activities that take place between universities and educational institutions (school networks, schools, colleges). The module explores the different forms that knowledge exchange activities can take as well as their purpose and utility to different education stakeholder groups. You will be taught how to conduct a rapid evidence review and you will engage in group work to carry one of these out in response to the real-life needs of local education stakeholder groups in and around the City of Southampton. Depending on capacity, there is the intent to provide an opportunity to students to follow-up on this review with a presentation of its findings with local educational stakeholder groups external to the university.
