The Social Psychology of Risk (PSYC0025)

Aims: This module examines the public response to risks and hazards ranging from emerging infectious illnesses to nuclear energy, from earthquakes to climate change. It explores the range of cultural, social and individual factors that forge such responses. Cultural factors include levels of fatalism in relation to earthquakes; social factors include media treatment of emerging infectious illnesses and its link to people's conceptualisation of the risk. Such responses can vary across individuals both at the level of representation and behaviour and appropriate theory is drawn on to understand this. The module also delves into what ‘works’ in terms of the communication of risk, in campaigns devised to engineer change in risk behaviours. Objectives: The module equips students to focus on forces that shape people's responses to risks, including how they conceptualise such risks and how they prepare for them. The lectures provide guided reading with the intention that students develop their own interests within the field. Summary of module: The focus of the module is on how people in different cultures think, feel and behave in relation to the range of risks that face them.

MACROMOLECULAR STRUCTURE|DRUG TARGETS|SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY|MOLECULAR MODELLING

The module includes:

 Introduction to the molecular basis of disease, identification and validation of drug targets

 The molecular basis of disease is...

The Process of Drug Discovery (PHAY0020)

This taught postgraduate module provides an in-depth insight into the ways in which feminist life writing and performance has shaped, challenged, and subverted...

Feminism and the Medical Self (CMII0151)

This taught postgraduate module provides an in-depth insight into the ways in which feminist life writing and performance has shaped, challenged, and subverted contemporary understandings of the medical subject. We will consider how feminist artists in the past 50 years have told stories about their own bodies in relation to medical power. In the first half of the course, we will consider feminist representations of trauma, sexuality, reproductive health and mental illness in the late twentieth century. We will understand the role that second wave feminism played in the creation of diagnostic categories such as PTSD, and investigate the relationship between activism and art.

In the second half of the module, we will examine contemporary feminist approaches to the medicalisation and quantification of the self. We will learn how feminist theory, gender theory, and critical disability studies have interacted to provide complex ideas about the relationship between medicine and the self. We will explore what feminist life writing and performance today reveals about the current state of healthcare, addressing issues such as the responsibilisation of healthcare, wellness culture, austerity politics and reproductive justice.

Writers and performance-makers on the course may include Sue Mclaine, Audre Lorde, Karen Finley, Sarah Daniels, Bobby Baker, Sarah Kane, Roxane Gay, Esme Weijun Wang, Juliet Jacques and Katherine Angel.