Develop your project management skills and practice at an advanced level.

In this innovative studio format, you will be given a live brief, and through hands-on learning, you will work with others in a group project to meet this brief. Your task will centre on how interdisciplinary humanities approaches can be applied to contemporary place-based challenges.

You will address these multi-dimensional challenges through a range of approaches, applying learning from your specific topic of expertise such as:

• Artificial intelligence
• Society and global challenges
• Sustainability and environmental futures
• Global medical and health humanities

Projects may be based on academically significant topics that will expose you to areas of contemporary research. Alternatively, they may be linked to ‘real world’ issues and external clients enabling you to develop your abilities in professional practice.

This project-based module will incorporate studio sessions with lectures from a range of disciplinary experts and external stakeholders, workshops to support practical skills and student-led group working in the studio space.

In this second studio format module, you will build on your first applied learning experience. You will move from contemporary place-based challenges to a focus on how interdisciplinary humanities approaches can be applied to global challenges that encompass multiple locales and contexts.

You’ll continue to develop project management and practice at an advanced level working on a live brief. Through further hands-on learning, you will work with others in a group project to meet this brief.

These multi-dimensional challenges will be addressed through a range of approaches as you apply learning from your specific topic of expertise such as:

• Artificial intelligence
• Society and global challenges
• Sustainability and environmental futures
• Global Medical and Health Humanities

Projects may be based on academically significant topics that will expose you to areas of contemporary research. Alternatively, they may be on issues put forward by external clients, enabling you to develop your abilities in professional practice.

This project-based module will incorporate studio sessions with lectures from a range of disciplinary experts and external stakeholders, workshops to support practical skills, and student-led group working in the studio space.

In this module you’ll gain a range of practical skills that are required to lead the development and implementation of innovative solutions to global challenges within education, academia, business and society. You will participate in workshops and work in self-directed Action Learning Sets which meet independently on a regular basis outside of the classroom.

Applying a critical, decolonial lens, you will reflect on your own position, prior learning and experience and connect these with ideas of leadership (and leadership ethics) in a range of contexts.

Our focus is a humanities-led approach to leadership, grounded in critical, creative and collaborative skills. You’ll be encouraged to take a holistic approach to the role of leadership in society, and humanistic thinking.

As well as theories of leadership and followership, you will learn skills for leadership and collaboration, which may include:

• Project and self-management
• Entrepreneurship
• Research and information literacy
• Communication
• Partnership building

The teaching and learning are designed to be flexible and prioritise self-directed study, enabling you to develop your own unique set of leadership skills and traits which will prepare you for a wide range of leadership roles, further study or a range of careers.

Explore and experiment with topics, ideas and methods which you will devise and design. The project will usually be a piece of individual work and can take a number of formats, which may include:

• A long form written dissertation
• A multi-media formatted project
• A creative intervention or a policy document

You will be supported by The School of Global Affairs to work collaboratively and to identify external partnerships through which to develop the project. You’ll be expected to draw on the multi-disciplinary aspects of your programme to devise critical, creative and future facing work.

An introduction to the creative, interdisciplinary emphasis of the subject. You will explore and engage with a range of ideas such as environmental change, climate catastrophe and sustainability, and you will learn how these are researched across different disciplines, in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

In seminars, you will examine a series of case studies relating to environmental and climate change and through these you can develop your own grounded approach to environmental futures.

You’ll be encouraged to think carefully about the systems and scales involved in defining what is, or could be, sustainable in different contexts. This will involve examining the extraordinary range and flexibility with which the terms ‘environment’ and ‘sustainability’ are used and thinking creatively about how we might refine and develop solutions to contemporary challenges. You will consider and seek to reconcile the very different scales, both temporal and spatial, and implications of environmental change.

The seminars will introduce some of the key intellectual approaches to environmental transformation and encourage you to develop your thinking in relation to a range of environmental challenges and to imagine, and implement, potential futures.

Seminar topics may include:

• The unsustainable present and elements of hope
• Planetary boundaries and systems thinking
• Sociological approaches to ecologies
• The new economies of climate change
• Translating the anthropocene: language, thinking and change
• Creative responses: writing endings/writing hope
• The distant future and the disappearing now
• Local environmental futures: The Morecambe Bay Curriculum
• Conservation humanities: Wetland Times
• Technology and sustainability futurisms: Neom, Saudi Arabia
• Sustainable lives at the margins
• Avian anthropocenes

Explore the complex relationship between people and the environment from the Middle Ages to the present. This module examines how humans have shaped ecosystems and vice versa to offer new perspectives on crucial historical developments, such as:

• Climate change
• Landscape changes
• Animal diplomacy
• Resource depletion
• Industrialization
• Colonization
• Environmentalism

The module is organized around case studies that span Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, and so you will gain an appreciation of the natural world’s historic diversity, as well as the ways that differing peoples across history have understood, exploited, and preserved the environment.

In addition to investigating historical phenomena that have profound contemporary relevance, you will also read deeply in the vibrant field of environmental history. You’ll emerge from this module with a nuanced understanding of how humans have altered the environment, the importance of the environment for shaping world history, and the ways that historians have studied environmental history.

Intercultural business communication plays a key role in the global economy and world commerce as it considers cultural differences between international business partners and clients. On this interdisciplinary module, you will examine how communication is affected by different values, attitudes and beliefs, in the context of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments.

You will learn how to effectively interact, work and develop meaningful relationships with professionals across different cultures and social groups: essential skills in a global workforce.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research,you’ll gain the necessary awareness, know-how and practical skills needed to become more effective at intercultural interactions. You will use various models to analyse your own experiences and develop a personal development plan to address effective interactions at work in the face of significant challenges. Studying intercultural business communication will foster an understanding of your own cultural, linguistic and communication related background. This may benefit future careers that operate within a multicultural context.

Study a language formally in a way that will support your learning. You can enrol either as a beginner or as a more advanced student where you will build on existing knowledge.

In the seminars and workshops, as well as through a series of optional drop-ins offered later in the module, you’ll get the tools you need to approach materials which are relevant to your own academic and work interests.

You will be given opportunities to practise in your chosen target language, building on materials posted on the learning space (flipped classroom videos, self-study links) as well as other events organised for the community of linguists and language learners in the University, such as our weekly lunch clubs.

On this module you will develop transferable communicative skills and reflect on cultural and linguistic challenges which are relevant to your postgraduate studies and beyond.

You may use these skills to research matters relating to intercultural and/or interlinguistic issues, work with archives, develop an international research network, or simply add them to your CV.

In this module, you will examine the methodological and ethical considerations involved in researching environmental issues through a social and cultural lens.

You will address ecological challenges through ideas and methods, such as:

• Research design
• Ethical frameworks
• The role of social sciences in interdisciplinary environmental research
• Qualitative approaches
• Reflexive practices
• Culturally grounded methods
• Case studies

You’ll explore decolonising methodologies and show how power shapes who gets heard and whose knowledge counts. You will learn to evaluate, select and apply appropriate methods in your own work, leading to the production of a project presentation.

In this module, you will explore how global development and environmental policies are shaped and debated. You will explore key ideas such as “development”, “poverty” and “nature” and how their meanings are political and contested.

You will examine how historical challenges, especially colonialism and capitalism, have impacted the practices of sustainable development. You will engage with a wide range of issues through case studies from regions such as Latin America and Africa.

You will explore a range of topics, such as:

• The evolution of the concept of development
• The development regime and foreign aid policies
• North-South relations and global environmental governance
• Environmental justice and global inequalities
• International climate politics and policies