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 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 Intellgience, Society and Global Challenges, Global Affairs, Sustainability and Environmental Futures, Global Medical 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 module explores central histories, theories, and methodologies of the Medical and Health Humanities, bringing together interdisciplinary approaches to health, illness, and healthcare across culturally and socio-historically diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

The approaches explored on this module situate the Medical and Health Humanities within both global and local contexts, and throughout this module you will be connected to the surrounding research and healthcare environments at Lancaster as well as engaging with major healthcare challenges across the world.

This module will equip you with wide-ranging knowledge and experience within the Medical and Health Humanities and provide you with the critical tools to work individually and collaboratively to develop innovative and transcultural approaches to health, illness, and healthcare.

Interdisciplinarity, criticality, collaboration, and creativity are the key values of this module. You will encounter a diverse range of approaches that will prepare you to undertake research and engagement within the Medical and Health Humanities exploring a wide range of topics that might include:

• Global histories and philosophies of medicine
• Transcultural, global, multilingual, and decolonial approaches to the Medical Humanities and Health Humanities
• Local and planetary histories of medicine and healthcare: between Lancaster and the global
• Illness narratives, narrative medicine, and artistic expressions of illness, trauma, pain and healthcare
• Environments, spaces and architectures of healthcare
• Critical disability studies
• The medical-environmental humanities and sustainability in healthcare
• Mental health
• Healthcare and inclusivity: race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, religion
• LGBTQIA+ healthcare and Queer Medical Humanities research
• Global healthcare activism

This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness.

Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge.

The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.

In recent years, the history of the body has emerged as an important framework for re-thinking the relationship between individuals and the state in war. While histories of war have for a long time focused on the political causes, course, outcome, and legacies of wars, ‘new’ military histories now seek to better understand how warfare has been experienced ‘from below’ – both by those mobilised as combatants as well as by civilians who came directly into contact with the apparatus of war.

This module embraces such developments in the history of war, using a focus on the body which will enable you to re-evaluate the impact of conflict on those who participated in it. Structured around four broad themes—medicine, the body, sexuality, and the mind—this module will consider the bodily legacies of warfare in a wide range of times and places. The module thus ranges from topics such as the role of the military in the emergence of clinical medicine in the 18th century to the medical impact of widespread disability on medical and social care practices following the American Civil War; or from the long history of rape as a ‘weapon of war’ to the surprising story of the use of methamphetamines by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War.

Drawing on a large range of sources, including diaries, memoirs, medical texts, engravings, photographs, and wartime propaganda, this module will thus give you the opportunity to explore the changing ways in which people experienced conflict and its aftermaths through their bodies.

What moral obligations do we have towards future generations – to people who are yet to be born, and to merely possible people whose existence (or non-existence) depends on how we decide to act now?

In this module, we explore this question in detail by examining both a series of case studies and some of the main concepts and theories that philosophers use when thinking about these issues.Questions considered normally include:

• Is there a moral obligation to refrain from having children (e.g. for environmental reasons) and what measures may governments take to encourage or enforce population control?
• Should we use selection techniques to minimise the incidence of genetic disorders and disabilities in future populations?
• Should parents be allowed to use these techniques to determine the characteristics of their future children? How should we weigh quality against quantity of life?
• Would a world with a relatively small number of ‘happier’ people be preferable to one with many more ‘less happy’ ones?

What moral obligations do we have towards future generations – to people who are yet to be born, and to merely possible people whose very existence (or non-existence) depends on how we act now? This special subject explores this question by examining both a series of practical case studies and some of the main concepts and theories that philosophers use when thinking about these issues. Questions considered normally include:

• How should we weigh quality against quantity of life? Would a world with a relatively small number of ‘happier’ people preferable to one with many more ‘less happy’ ones?
• Ought we to try significantly to extend the human life span (to 150 years or beyond)?
• Should cryonics be permitted and what ethical issues does this raise?
  • Is there a moral obligation to refrain from having children (e.g. for environmental reasons) and what measures may governments take to encourage or enforce population control? Conversely, might there be a moral obligation to have (more) children?
  • Should we use selection techniques to minimise the incidence of genetic disorders and disabilities in future populations?
  • Should parents be allowed to use these techniques to determine the characteristics of their future children (e.g. choosing their child’s eye or hair colour, or sex selection)?
  • When considering the future, how should the interests of non-human creatures be weighed against those of humans? How strong are our moral obligations to prevent extinctions, and to preserve wildernesses?
  • When considering long-term environmental issues (e.g. climate change, nuclear power) and long-term financial issues (e.g. national debt and pensions) how should we balance the interests and rights of people who exist now against those of future people?

How are gender, sex and bodies understood in contemporary sociology and feminist theory? How do feminist theorists and social scientists address questions of difference, representation and performativity in their research?

In this module, we engage with the work of particular theorists (enabling you to acquire skills in close reading and critical discussion), critically evaluate relevant empirical findings, and explore current issues of importance to sociology and feminism. Topics include medicalization and health, race and racism, sex and sexuality, bodily autonomy, and reproductive choice. The essays you write then give you scope to follow your own interests in more depth by using the reading lists provided and undertaking independent research.