The global challenge that is 'sustainability' impacts every dimension of all of our lives. Regardless of your degree, the social, cultural, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability have important implications for your studies, your daily behaviours, and your future career. This module will challenge you to develop your own definition of sustainability while considering how it is actioned by the many different actors (from citizens to governments, NGOs and businesses) who play a part in taking decisions about sustainability at various scales at the local and global level. We will consider key areas of current and future global sustainability concerns, taking a multi-disciplinary holistic approach that crosses the traditional divides between academic disciplines. Much of the module will be framed around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. By the end of the module, you should be able to tackle the difficult question of how we can continue to develop and improve human wellbeing in a socially just way without overstepping the planet’s ecological boundaries. Undergraduates may forward-track or back-track as permitted by the University regulations. Any student who repeats the year externally will complete the Referral Assignment.
The module will introduce you to some of the central themes and concepts in the study of terrorism, extremism, and political violence – spanning history, geographies, and the ideological spectrum.
This module will build on your knowledge and understanding of sustainable and responsible textile practices. You will delve deeply into the skills, culture, ethical values and historical contexts of global artisanship, and further build your practice and skills through an external collaborative project to develop sustainable textile products. You will investigate and debate the global environmental, social, economic and business sustainability factors that influence the textile industries and the role of artisanal practices in ethical, sustainable and responsible textile product development. You will experiment with traditional crafts, materials, techniques and processes in order to build your global textile culture awareness. You will learn about the textile product development process for luxury textiles for fashion, interiors or lifestyle products. You will build on your professional, ethical and academic skills, standards and practices, preparing you for employment or further study if you wish to take a work placement or study abroad in the next year. By the end of this module, you will have gained the knowledge and skills to understand what it means to responsibly apply and value artisanship in the global textile industry.
This module will explore how humans have been impacting the planet over recent millennia, and how more recently the increased impacts are leading to tipping points in many global systems, from biogeophysical to social. As such the module will discuss a range of contexts and approaches, including palaeoscience, an understanding of what a tipping point is and how we can measure/define it. It will cover the raft of recent human impacts, how they are creating change in the natural, social and built world, and what potential solutions exist.
In recent decades globalisation has impacted national education policies in industrialised, emerging and developing economies. This module will look at the different ways in which some education systems in different regions have changed their policies and provision of education in line with ongoing and expected changes, and learn about the contributing actors and shaping factors. We will look at ways in which these changes have impacted upon the teaching and learning processes and possible outcomes
'Globalisation' encapsulates the developing inter-connectedness of markets and economic systems, driven by trade liberalisation. Yet, alongside this drive towards trade liberalisation, the international community has committed itself to a diverse range of objectives, including environmental and social, exemplified by the commitment to sustainable development. These objectives are established and pursued by different actors through separate (specialist) regimes. Thus while the World Trade Organisation regulates international trade at multilateral level, alongside this trade regime are numerous regional and multilateral commitments relating to, for example, environmental protection, climate change, to labour standards, to and human rights. This module, 'Globalisation and Law', is concerned with the challenges posed to democracy and accountability arising from the emergence of new and diverse forms of governance, undertaken by a diverse range of actors, responsible for a diverse range of (sometimes conflicting) interests. To explore, and give substance to these otherwise potentially abstract issues, the module is structured around a case study through which to expose the issues raised, and consider responses to the regulatory challenges posed, by globalisation.
This module explores emerging markets as important players in the global economy. It introduces theory and practice of doing business in emerging markets and beyond, showing you the unique features of emerging markets and the related opportunities and challenges. You will also learn how firms from developed countries and emerging markets compete in different contexts. Concepts and theories will be applied to analyse case studies.
This module will problematize the concept of globalisation and explore and develop an understanding of its meaning in economic, political and cultural terms. Furthermore, we will examine the ideological struggle between competing forces over the nature and purpose of globalisation through a focus on the roles played by states, corporations, global institutions and social movements.
Graph theory was born in 1736 with Euler’s solution of the Königsberg bridge problem, which asked whether it was possible to plan a walk over the seven bridges of the town without re-tracing one’s steps. Euler realised that the problem could be rephrased in terms of a graph whose vertices corresponded to the four regions of the city, and whose edges corresponded to the seven bridges each joining a pair of the regions. With this rephrasing, we can view this problem of walking through Königsberg as a (significantly more tractable) problem of navigation in the corresponding diagram (or graph), which is straightforward to resolve. Graph theory is a stand-alone branch of mathematics that has links across the mathematical spectrum, from parts of pure mathematics such as abstract algebra and topology, to parts of mathematics focusing on applications such as operational research and computation, through to other areas of science such as chemistry, biology and electronics. In this module, we introduce the basic concepts of graph theory, focusing primarily on finite graphs. These include numerical invariants of graphs and methods for calculating them; how to navigate through graphs (including the method that lies behind the resolution of the Königsberg problem discussed above); vertex and edge colourings of graphs and other numerical invariants of graphs; the conditions under which a graph is planar; and the introductory elements of the theory of random graphs.
This module is designed for MMath and MPhys students in their fourth year, and builds directly upon MATH3006 Relativity, Blackholes and Cosmology. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in space-time, first predicted by Einstein himself in 1916. These "wrinkles in the spacetime curvature" carry information from the most violent events in the Universe - from colliding black holes, collapsing stars, to the birth of the Universe itself. Exactly one hundred years after Einstein’s prediction, after many decades of searching, scientists announced that they had finally detected these waves, from two black holes colliding at a distance of over one billion light years from Earth. This module aims to introduce you to the many issues involved in understanding gravitational waves and their generation from astrophysical sources. It will give you an insight into one of the hottest topics in modern research, and an insight into what has been described as the “greatest scientific achievement of the century.”
