Engineering and Education: Practice Innovation and Leadership (EDPS0220)

The module is structured around eight critical themes and problems affecting Engineering and Education in the 21st century. After an introductory framing session, the next eight sessions focus on these themes one by one. Between them, these themes: (i) provide an overview of the global context of engineering, including its changing skills needs, and of national and transnational policies to support the development of engineering in Further and Higher Education; (ii) introduce a number of perspectives on the concepts of curriculum, knowledge and learning; and (iii) raise complex questions and issues for Engineering and Education in to the future. In the final session participants select one of these eight themes and use the new understanding they have developed to critically appraise or rethink work practice in engineering in relation to their selected theme, as preparation for writing their assignment.

Today ‘empire’ and postcoloniality are central to how we engage with the world. From debates surrounding globalization, to the ways in which we are...

Postcoloniality, Colonialism and Art in the British Empire (HART0107)

Today ‘empire’ and postcoloniality are central to how we engage with the world. From debates surrounding globalization, to the ways in which we are rethinking Britishness, imperialism and its troubled legacies continue to occupy our political landscape and to inform the entanglements of British and non-western art. As leading anthropologist Nicholas B. Dirks warns, ‘in calling for the study of the aesthetics of colonialism, we might end up aestheticising colonialism, producing a radical chic version of Raj nostalgia’. With this cautionary agenda in mind, the aim of the course is to problematise the aesthetic and political underpinnings of these cultural encounters. In so doing, this module will provide an alternative history of art in the British Empire. Instead of focussing only on ‘conquest’ and racial subordination, it will also emphasise cross-cultural exchange and a range of indigenous techniques for resisting British art. Its agenda is to make you aware of the critical intervention of other cultures in the formation and subversion of imperial artistic identity. In so doing, you will engage with contemporary debates preoccupied with postcoloniality and British visual culture. The focus of this course is the relationship between Britain and South Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, although you will also be encouraged to contextualise this colonial experience with other spaces of empire. Material covered includes graphic media, Mughal miniatures, Anglo-Indian architecture, Bengali folk art and performance, ‘picturesque’ landscape paintings, caricatures, history painting, indigenous photography, ethnographic sketches and creole portraiture. An effort will be made to understand the phenomena of colonial and metropolitan collecting, “the exhibitionary complex” and the cultural underpinnings of imperial and vernacular museums.