In present-day Europe most of us consider religion a matter of personal choice and private conscience to the point that many are hardly religious at all and our society is increasingly secular. This module will explore how the opposite was largely true in the medieval West: orthodox religion was compulsory and affected all aspects of public and private life. The module will focus on sin, wrongdoing that violated religious norms, and how it was defined and disciplined. The module is wide-ranging and will cover such topics as sexual behaviour, violence (including warfare and murder) and heresy (religious dissent), and explore both the Church’s teachings on such issues and how these shaped social attitudes and behaviour. The module will draw on a rich variety of sources, including Dante’s Inferno and religious art.
Students will gain an understanding of the components and optical pathways used in core biological imaging systems which will enable them to efficiently operate advanced microscopes and to understand the theoretical concepts, capabilities and limitations of core biological imaging modalities and their associated techniques and applications. Lectures will be accompanied by practicals, some of which involve the use of animal tissue, with alternatives in place if required to meet minimum learning outcomes.
Skills in the molecular biosciences are rapidly developing. This course will prepare students for several common techniques, giving them a grounding in experimental design so that they can use these new skills in their current and future research career.
Student will acquire a foundation in the theory underpinning a range of biophysical techniques used to study structure and function of biomolecules. The students will have the opportunity to learn at a practical level how these techniques are employed, learning how to prepare relevant samples, conduct basic experiments, and the basics of the data analysis. The students will be expected to interpret the results in the context of the structural/biological significance.
This module explores themes and questions related to the many complex histories of slavery, abolitionism and emancipation. Slavery was once at the heart of the British colonial experience. By 1770, sugar-producing plantations worked by enslaved labourers from Africa had transformed the Caribbean, revolutionised British habits of consumption and lay at the centre Britain's lucrative colonial enterprise.
This module examines the slave systems of the British Empire and the processes by which these were dismantled. Enslaved people had always resisted slavery, but from the late eighteenth century, the system also came under attack from some within British society. By the 1830s, following mass campaigns, the system was discredited and in the process of being dismantled. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, anti-slavery was one of the mainstays of the British colonizing mission. This, however, was not the end of the slavery story: former slaves struggled to make freedom meaningful in the years after emancipation, and their descendants still endure racist barbs originally mobilised to oppress their ancestors.
The aim is to provide you with an overview and a broad understanding of methods of small area estimation, their motivation and applications.
This unit aims to offer students the opportunity to conduct a practically relevant, real-world small scale research project. Through small group supervision meetings trainees design a research project, and gain approval for their project from the University of Southampton Ethics and Research Governance Office and any Local Authority ethics committee as required. Following ethical approval, trainees then gain valuable experience conducting research, collecting and analysing data, and writing up the findings in an academic style at doctoral level. Trainees are encouraged to develop a research question and implement a project that generates new knowledge in a specific area in the field of educational psychology and serves to extend the discipline. Publication in academic or practice journals is encouraged and well supported by research staff (See PSYC8039 Dissemination and User Engagement Module). There is a focus in this module, where possible, on research with underrepresented groups and active engagement of service users.
Social neuroscience supposes that all human behaviour is in some way biological based and proposes that the best way to understand complex social behaviour is through the integration of social and biological approaches. Accordingly, this module will focus on how biological approaches aid in our understanding of complex social processes (e.g., theory of mind, emotion, stereotype & prejudice, aggression). Research discussed in this course will typically utilize the following biological approaches: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Electroencephalography (EEG), Event-related potentials (ERPs), Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
Humans are adapted to be highly social. We interact with a number of other people everyday, and successful social interactions depend on the ability to infer other's mental and emotional state from limited cues. Social and affective neuroscience applies the methods traditionally used in neuroscience (e.g., neuroimaging, brain-stimulation methods such as fMRI, EEG, TMS) to better understand neural and psychological mechanisms underlying human social behaviours. This module will address from a cognitive neuroscience perspective a range of research questions relating to human social and emotional behaviour including social reward and punishment processing, prejudice & stereotype, and the abilities to experience empathy and to understand other people's intentions.
This module will help you to develop graduate attributes, including: - academic attributes – ability to critically appraise knowledge claims based on qualitative and quantitative methods; and - communication skills – ability to communicate research designs and findings, using evidence to illustrate and develop an argument. This module will help you develop the following employability skills: - team working - respecting others, co-operating, negotiating, contributing to discussions, and awareness of interdependence with others; - communication and literacy – application of literacy, ability to produce clear, structured written work and oral literacy – including listening and questioning; - problem solving– analysing facts, opinions, values and situations and applying creative thinking to develop appropriate solutions; and - application of information technology – basic IT skills, including familiarity with word processing, presentation programmes, file management and use of internet search engines.
This module is designed to enable and encourage students to apply social psychological and related methods and theories to various aspects of sexual health, including both psychological and physical aspects.
Contemporary debate in social theory includes the claim that globalising processes have created a world that is chaotic, disorganized, and difficult to control. Exacerbated by the rise of digital technology/communications and the environmental crisis, this has generated new forms of social risk, fragmentation and powerlessness which existing governance arrangements and political/social movements are ill-suited to address. Pressing debates ask: How far are these processes rooted in the national and global inequalities of the modern era? Is globalisation primarily a neo-liberal project, the main consequence of which has been to concentrate and extend pre-existing divisions? What does social action look like in this context: must it be built on traditional sources of resistance (e.g. the labour movement, social movements etc.) or is a new intersectional and post-colonial framework needed to understand it?
The aim of this module is to introduce the fundamental concepts and computational techniques used in social computing. In a broad sense, social computing is about building computational systems that harness the collective intelligence of people, using techniques and insights from artificial intelligence and economics. More specifically, in this module we will focus on four main areas: crowdsourcing, online auctions (including online advertising), recommender systems and rank aggregation. The module has a large practical component where you will learn how to solve a real-world social computing problem and how to set up experiments in a principled manner to evaluate your system. In addition, you will learn about technologies such as auctions, algorithms for recommender systems, quality control mechanisms in crowdsourcing and incentive engineering. Note that this module does not cover social networking, as this is covered elsewhere.
This is an interactive and practical module aiming to inspire students to social enterprise and entrepreneurship by giving them an experiential introduction to human centred design processes. The emphasis in this module is on the translation of knowledge into action and the development of enterprising skills such as identifying user needs and addressing these needs through collaborative co-design and action, being resourceful and leadership. A secondary aim is to develop students’ confidence in developing a personal brand using blogging and social media. A third aim is to raise an awareness of the support available to students for social enterprise activities at the university (both financial and non-financial).
Societies are increasingly diverse nowadays. This module aims to explore the complexity of the concepts of social justice and inclusive education and how everyone can contribute towards the development of a more inclusive world. This will be achieved by exploring critically the policies and practices in relation to individuals or groups of learners who have been traditionally marginalised such as those defined as having special educational needs, ethnic minorities, travellers, those from low socioeconomic backgrounds etc. There will be a special focus on how research can promote inclusion and social justice.
The second generation of web sites that came along in the mid 2000's included many of the social media sites that are now household names (YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, etc.) These sites (known at the time as Web 2.0) focused on content that was generated by users, rather than the site's owners, and thus shifted the balance of power on the Web from a technical few to the masses. We now live in a world where social media is a powerful influence. In this course we will look at the science that is attempting to analyse its use, see how conceptualising social media as networks allows us to use techniques from network science as part of that analysis, and explore some of the personal and social issues that have arisen and the technologies that might address them. This is a course that empowers you to meaningfully engage with the many issues that we see everyday in the news and media, and we hope that it will capture the excitement and concern that exists around Social Media. This is our Guttenberg, let's make it work for us.
