Running in an innovative studio format across 5 weeks, this module will provide learning through practice by setting you a live brief which you will work towards in group projects. Offering learning in project management and practice at an advanced level, projects will centre on how interdisciplinary humanities approaches can be applied to contemporary place-based challenges.

You will apply learning from your specific topic of expertise (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Society and Global Challenges, Global Affairs, Sustainability and Environmental Futures, Global Medical and Health Humanities) to address these multi-dimensional challenges through multifaceted approaches.

Projects may be based on academically significant topics, thereby enabling you to become exposed to areas of contemporary research. Alternatively, they may be linked to ‘real world’ issues and external clients, thereby developing 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.

Running in an innovative studio format across 5 weeks, this module will provide learning through practice by setting you a live brief which you will work towards in group projects. Offering learning in project management and practice at an advanced level, projects will centre on how interdisciplinary humanities approaches can be applied to contemporary global challenges encompassing multiple locales and contexts.

You will apply learning from your specific topic of expertise (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Society and Global Challenges, Global Affairs, Sustainability and Environmental Futures, Global Medical and Health Humanities) to address these multi-dimensional challenges that require multifaceted approaches.

Projects may be based on academically significant topics, thereby enabling you to become exposed to areas of contemporary research. Alternatively, they may be linked to ‘real world’ issues and external clients, thereby developing 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.

This module equips you with a range of practical skills required to lead the development and implementation of innovative solutions to global challenges within education, academia, business and society. 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, and partnership building.

A critical, decolonial lens is applied throughout, enabling you to reflect on your own positionality and prior learning and experience and connect these with discourses of leadership (and leadership ethics) in a range of contexts. Emphasis is placed on a humanities-led approach to leadership, grounded in critical, creative and collaborative skills, a holistic approach to the role of leadership in society, and humanistic thinking.

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 employment outside of academia. You will participate in workshops and work in self-directed Action Learning Sets which meet independently on a regular basis outside of the classroom.

This project module is a core component of the MA programmes in the School of Global Affairs. Students will be encouraged to explore and experiment with topics, ideas and methods during the core modules of their programme in order to devise and design their project. The project will normally be realised as 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. The School of Global Affairs will support students in working collaboratively and identifying external partnerships through which to develop the project. Students will be expected to draw on the multi-disciplinary aspects of their MA programme to devise critical, creative and future facing work.

This core module will introduce you to the programme and to its emphasis on creative interdisciplinarity. We will explore and engage with a range of ideas through which environmental change, climate catastrophe and sustainability are researched across different disciplines, in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The seminars will examine a series of case studies relating to environmental and climate change through which you can develop your own grounded approach to environmental futures.

In seminars, 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. You will 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.

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 Anthropocene-s

Current debates over issues such as plastic and food waste, fracking, loss of biodiversity or climate justice – and the protest movements and campaigns that have arisen in response – provide tangible evidence that the relationship between society and the environment is a difficult and often controversial one. This module examines the role that sociology and social theory can play in helping us to understand that relationship better and explores the range of approaches that have been developed in environmental sociology. Studying the environment sociologically opens up a host of interconnected social, cultural and political issues. Whose knowledge counts? How can we handle unquantifiable risk? What role should technology play? And what about democracy, freedom, diversity and justice? Using lectures and seminar discussion, the module will lead you through the resources of sociology and social theory to enable you to think through these questions in relation to some of the most urgent environmental issues facing societies today.

In times when hope and fear about the environmental crisis alternate in our minds, when social and political change play havoc with our interpretation of the historic worlds we inhabit, it is crucial that we examine critically and creatively the ways and means by which such a crisis has come into existence. To do so, the module builds bridges across disciplines.

The module combines a place-based approach (Lancaster, the Morecambe Bay, and the Lake District) and an analytical focus centred on the dissonance and convergence of temporal scales. We seek to answer two questions in close dialogue with students:

• To what extent is the dissonance between the different timescales of the Earth system, the social and built environment, and the human imagination a contributing factor to political inaction and cultural indifference?
• In what ways can we better integrate these timescales while retaining the rigour, criticality, and creativity of the disciplines used to study each?

The module will explore topics such as tidal systems, coasts and estuaries; floods; the rise, fall and rebirth of particular narratives of change; ruins and memory; risk and CO2 trading; glacial archaeology and informality and hope.

In the age of the 'anthropocene', the devastation of the natural environment, loss of biodiversity, global warming and pollution can no longer be ignored. At the same time, the solutions to the environmental crisis have not yet materialised.

This module introduces you to the challenges the environmental crisis poses to a multitude of actors, including international organisations, governments, political parties and individuals. It will discuss the way in which institutions, ideas and interests shape environmental politics, and will provide a comprehensive introduction to environmental activism and green politics at local and international levels.

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. This interdisciplinary course examines how communication is affected by different values, attitudes and beliefs, in the context of our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment.

The ability to effectively interact, work and develop meaningful relationships with professionals across different cultures and social groups is essential in a global workforce. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, this course will provide you with the necessary awareness, know-how and practical skills needed to become more effective at intercultural interactions. You will draw on various models to analyse your own experiences in order to develop a personal development plan to address effective interactions at work in the face of significant challenges. Studying intercultural business communication fosters an understanding of your own cultural, linguistic and communication related background. This may benefit future careers that operate within a multicultural context.

This module will give you the opportunity to study a language formally, in a way that will support any learning that you may have undertaken / be undertaking alongside your studies. You can enrol either as a beginner or as a more advanced student, building on existing knowledge.

Spanning over two terms, the module will help you develop transferable communicative skills and reflect on cultural and linguistic challenges which are relevant to your postgraduate studies and beyond, whether you intend to 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. 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 in the university, such as our weekly lunch clubs.

In the seminars & workshops, as well as through a series of optional drop-ins offered in the second term, this module will also give you the tools to approach materials which are relevant to your own academic and work interests.

In this module, you will be in control of your language learning and how you apply these skills to your studies / future work, which is reflected in the optionality offered for your final assessments.

This module equips you with an understanding of key theories and practices that underpin the use of theatre and performance as a tool for social and environmental change. Topics to be explored might include, for example:

• environmental practices
• activist performance
• theatre for development
• theatre in education
• prison theatre
• refugee theatre
• live art
• site specific theatre
• environmentally-engaged postdramatic theatre
• intergenerational theatre