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This module will start by exploring the work of Johnnie To, a prominent Hong Kong crime film director, as the main example to study East Asian Noir, and to interrogate issues of genre and authorship, as well as the intersection of the local and the global. The second half of the module looks at noir examples from, South Korea and mainland China.

This optional module for the MA English Literary Studies, taught by those contributing to the programme in a given year, will introduce you to key critical, theoretical and conceptual debates about our current ecological crisis. It will explore how we perceive and engage with our environment globally and culturally through science, film and fiction. It will explore these questions by exploring contemporary science communication documentaries and books as well as fictional works across textual and visual cultures that explore how our current climate crisis is thought about and what solutions scientists and civil society are envisioning.

This course is intended as a beginner’s guide to marine ecological modelling. It is suitable for students across a broad range of academic backgrounds and does not assume a high level of prior mathematical knowledge or experience in coding.

The course will give you the knowledge to better understand the strengths and limitations of published models and the skills to develop your own.

This course is intended as a beginner’s guide to marine ecological modelling. It is suitable for students across a broad range of academic backgrounds and does not assume a high level of prior mathematical knowledge or experience in coding.

The course will give you the knowledge to better understand the strengths and limitations of published models and the skills to develop your own.

This course is intended as a beginner’s guide to marine ecological modelling. It is suitable for students across a broad range of academic backgrounds and does not assume a high level of prior mathematical knowledge or experience in coding.

The course will give you the knowledge to better understand the strengths and limitations of published models and the skills to develop your own.

This course is intended as a beginner’s guide to marine ecological modelling. It is suitable for students across a broad range of academic backgrounds and does not assume a high level of prior mathematical knowledge or experience in coding.

The course will give you the knowledge to better understand the strengths and limitations of published models and the skills to develop your own.

In this module, you will learn how to critically examine the political and ecological implications of how space is produced, governed, and experienced. You will research key theoretical and systemic frameworks of political ecology and spatial justice to evaluate how these impact urgent global issues such as climate breakdown, urban inequality, and territorial fragmentation. You will use critical thinking, ideation, and design analysis to propose spatial strategies that seek to reveal, resist, or reconfigure these conditions. On this module, you will build a vital vocabulary to analyse the spatial implications of design decisions within cross-cultural case studies, political, and environmental contexts.

You will be asked to investigate ecologies, policies and politics of spaces in which we undo our structural knowledge and instead absorb learning at the intersections. Specifically, we will consider the design of spatial, political, and social systems that are uncharted, marginalized, uninhabitable, or rapidly shifting, and where traditional knowledge fails and new, often speculative, frameworks emerge.

Spaces investigated will include, but are not limited to the urban, the empty, the ruined, spaces in the ecosphere, spaces of surveillance, digital and AI space, utopic and dystopic space, and spaces of the future – science fiction, extraterrestrial space, and post-anthropic realms.

This module highlights the production of ignorance, the "slow violence" of environmental change, the policies and practices of spaces in our late Anthropocene and our struggle as designers to define and connect and imagine the unknown in the post-Anthropocene.

This module introduces students to the main branches of ecology by considering the various levels at which the subject may be studied: individuals, populations, communities and ecosystems.

The aim of the fieldwork and practical sessions is to demonstrate how professional ecologists define and identify problems, how data are collected, and how results of ecological research are analysed, interpreted and applied to environmental and global issues.

This module introduces students to the main branches of ecology by considering the various levels at which the subject may be studied: individuals, populations, communities and ecosystems.

The aim of the fieldwork and practical sessions is to demonstrate how professional ecologists define and identify problems, how data are collected, and how results of ecological research are analysed, interpreted and applied to environmental and global issues.

This module explores human evolution in terms of physiological, social and cultural adaptations. It explores human ecology in the broad sense, combining not just cultural and social variability, but also physiological adaptations in past and present-day hunter-gatherers and great apes. These physiological adaptations are not just skeletal, but are also reflected in soft tissues and in surviving genotypes. We shall cover six main themes: different models of biocultural change; Human Behavioural Ecology; hominin energy budgets; brain size changes; dexterity, handedness and tool-use; social organisation over time and space. Evidence derived from primatology, ethnoarchaeology, ancient DNA, stable isotopes and Palaeolithic assemblages can be used to test models such as the Social Brain hypothesis, Daily Energy Expenditures, hominin thermoregulation and mobility/locomotion costs, and the applicability of different evolutionary mechanisms to change in the archaeological record (e.g. Lamarck versus Darwin). Lectures will be augmented by student-led seminars on key debates in palaeoanthropology and Human Behavioural Ecology.