Study Abroad in London: Courses
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Courses are divided by session and then grouped by broad academic discipline. Class timetables are available in May, but students should expect to be in class during the day Monday through Friday and have assessment on the final Friday of each session.
For summer 2021, UCL have reduced the number of courses they plan to offer in London. Courses available are as follows:
3-Week Courses, Session 1
Crime and Security
ISSU0017 (4) | Understanding and Countering Radicalisation and Terrorism
This module will provide an introduction to the phenomena of radicalisation and terrorism; including key definitions, causal accounts, empirical trends, past and present manifestations, current groups, and tactics.
Through successive case studies, students will familiarise themselves with the following five approaches to prevention and disruption: Efforts to anticipate and prevent terrorism acts through situational measures; enforcement measures used to disrupt, disable or suppress the activities of terrorist networks; interventions aimed at the individual actor, their risk factors, belief systems and pathways out of terrorism involvement; removal of the economic basis for terrorist activities by attacking organised crime; and strategies which focus on the "root causes" of terrorism and radicalisation.
Culture, Literature and the Arts
ISSU1011 (4) | Literary London
ISSU0094 (4) | Public Art, Graffiti and the Right to the City
This module is an introduction to creativity and crime in cities, with a focus on graffiti, street art and other types of public surface communications. Throughout the three weeks, the module will introduce concepts and methods that enable us to understand contemporary urban environments, as they are shaped through architecture, creativity and the maintenance of order. We will examine different visual languages from graffiti to public art and hostile architecture, to understand who uses and produces the city, and who urban spaces belong to.
The module will start with an overview of contemporary urban theories and introduce an international history of graffiti and street art, to examine how these practices produce conversations about publicness and privacy, art and crime, transgression and the law. Students will be taken on journeys across the city and will debate the role of graffiti in claiming and shaping public spaces, within a context of a rapidly developing and increasingly exclusionary London.
ISSU0074 (4) | The Birth of Feminism: UCL, Bloomsbury and Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism
This module explores the rise of feminism in England from the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to World War I, when London was a hot house of radical thinking and the temporary or definitive home of a variety of brilliant cosmopolitan thinkers and writers who converged here attracted by the infinite opportunities for debate on the most varied ‘isms’: positivism, liberalism, socialism, trade-unionism, Ibsenism, Freudianism, vegetarianism, pacifism, secularism and, last but not least, evolutionism. Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection and his views of the place of woman in the evolution of the human species had a wide and deep impact on the debate on the Woman Question. They were received and appropriated in different ways by New Woman writers, but none of them escaped their influence.
UCL had a prominent place in these exciting debates also because of its deep connection to Darwinism through figures such as Francis Galton, Edward Grant, Edwin Ray Lankester and Karl Pearson, so this is the right place to explore Darwinism’s fundamental ontological implications for the cultural and literary discourse of the fin-de siècle.
Geography and the Built Environment
ISSU0005 (4) | Global London: Contemporary Urbanism, Culture and Space
London is truly a global city. An international centre of culture and art, business and finance, education and research and tourism: the city is also home to people from all over the world who help shape and characterise its diversity. Despite its status as a global city, London must also be understood as an ordinary city; one of the hundreds of large cities around the world where people negotiate their daily routines of living, working, travelling and sharing space with others. This course will use London as a springboard to explore ways that contemporary cities are being theorized, experienced and understood.
A mixture of seminars and fieldwork will introduce you to a range of interdisciplinary themes within urban studies and provide you with the opportunity to encounter and learn from what the city of London has to offer as well as the contradictions it produces. Giving you the opportunity to think critically about and through your temporary stay in London, the course aims to challenge you to consider your own relations to, and place within, an increasingly urbanised world.
ISSU0077 (4) | Energy and Future Cities: Innovating London’s Architecture
Economics/Health
ISSU TBC (4) | The Political Economy of Health
The recent policy reforms launched in the UK National Health System coupled with the challenges faced by health systems globally with the Covid-19 pandemic, emphasise the need for a better understanding of how healthcare systems function, how they are financed, and how strategic policies are developed to ensure the provision of care to the highest quality standards. In this module, students will understand how the state and other private and public health-related institutions and processes influence health systems' performance. Moreover, the module will explore the demographic and socio-economic challenges faced by healthcare systems, particularly in terms of power and resources contested in the health sector. The module is intended to address the gap in health economics that often ignores the developments of the political economy in health systems. This module is relevant for students from several backgrounds, as the focus will be both on politics and economics and their interface in terms of health and healthcare.
The module will use extensive links to government, the NHS, charities, and the private sector to support students’ learning.
3-Week Courses, Session 2
Economics
ISSU0092 (4) | Economics for Sustainability: Climate Change and Social Inequalities (Level 2)
Culture, Literature and the Arts
ISSU0089 (4) | Modern and Contemporary Art in London
History and Philosophy
ISSU0021 (4) | An Archaeological History of London
If you are studying on a customized, faculty-led program through your home institution, please visit AIFS Customized Faculty-Led for details.