Undergraduate Course: Currents: Understanding and addressing global challenges (EFIE08001)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 8 (Year 1 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course is about reimagining the future and seeing ourselves as part of this future. Each year, this course will examine a single, highly current global event or challenge. It will explore the broader social, economic and environmental issues which have driven the challenge and how the impact of the event or challenge is shaping the future. From COVID-19 in 2020, it may move in later years to the currents of climate crisis, financial recession, democracy or unrest, allowing students to explore and identify sustainable solutions to complex global challenges.
Alongside stimulating lectures given by leading academics and other professionals from industry, government and third sector, it will include threads on the role of data in understanding and responding to complex challenges. At the heart of this course is seeing how a globally significant event or challenge changes who we are, what we are, how we live, and what we believe. We will look at how different types of data, and the ways in which data is represented from different disciplinary perspectives to offer critical new insights into how we respond collectively. We will focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by the revolution in data, digital and artificial intelligence, and the role of data for social good.
The course will be contextualised by the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda (2015-2030), and its vision of a world shaped by the common good, where no one is left behind and in which the needs of humanity are balanced with the preservation of the Earth. |
| Course description |
Academic description:
'Currents' will examine the current happenings and events that profoundly shape our lives for better or worse, exploring through different data sets and data approaches the ways in which the world is being reframed and reimagined. Students will learn how different academic disciplines approach complex challenges and wicked problems, and how different theories, data and methods from these disciplines are used to understand the current, while mapping a path for the future. The course will reflect on the causes and drivers of these challenges - the sparks that lead to global fires that change world outlooks and shake world orders.
The course not only explores the journey of multiple sets of knowledge and actions as they comes together to respond to a global event or challenge, the course is a journey of rethinking what this means on an individual, community, societal level for the future.
By examining different data sources through interdisciplinary approaches and multiple lenses, the course will provide opportunities to understand the events of the immediate moment, and the currents that drive the systems in which we live. Students will learn about the different types of insights that different types of data provide, helping to develop the skills and knowledge needed (e.g. creative capacities, data and inquiry skills and critical thinking) to successfully navigate a rapidly evolving and technologised world.
The course will take a transnational perspective, exploring why, how and what drives an event from the local to the global. It will seek to understand the intended and unintended consequences of global and local interactions and examine the associated risks, drivers and impacts.
Outline content or syllabus:
Each instance of the course will explore different content from various disciplines - linking the arts, humanities and social sciences together with medicine, natural sciences, engineering and data science. For example, in 2020 it will cover the COVID-19 pandemic, the various global strategies that were put in place to manage it, the ways that society and planet responded, and its implications for a new world order. Indicative themed weeks, subject to change, are as follows:
Week 1: Introduction - Our planet, our health, our future and Covid-19
Week 2: The systemic nature of risk: COVID-19 as a large scale dynamic risk for the future
Week 3: Why pandemics happen and responses
Week 4: How and why can a virus change world order
Week 5: The geopolitics of pandemics
Week 6: An economy focused on well-being
Week 7: Representation of disease, illness and health - COVID and the arts
Week 8: Inequity and Inequalities - what COVID-19 reveals about systemic inequity
Week 9: The gendered face of COVID-19
Week 10: Imagining the future - why we need to focus on children and young people post COVID-19
Week 11: Our place in the planet - our reimagined future
Student learning experience:
Through this course students will encounter live issues impacting the world. They will have the opportunity to listen to weekly key addresses from global and national leaders, offering students insights from many different disciplines, professions and traditions. In addition to these keynote lectures, students will listen to a weekly discursive lecture from two or more colleagues at the forefront of their field from disciplines across the University.
A series of short podcasts on methods of using and analysing data will accompany the lectures, to enable students to better understand different data types and disciplinary methodologies, the different types of insights that different types of data provide, and how these differences underpin decision making processes.
Each week students will meet in online tutorial groups to discuss the topics and questions raised in the lectures and podcasts. Discussions will look at the multiplicity of information, and the exciting ways that information can be channelled and used to bring about change. Students will be encouraged to see how their own disciplines contributes to the way the future can be reimagined and how a major global event or challenge is a moment of change. Tutorial groups will have around 10 students, and they will prepare for these in autonomous learning groups by sharing readings and other resources.
The assessment will take the form of a created object, an 'asset', in a medium of the student's choice through which they reflect on their experience of the theme covered, in the context of the global response to the theme explored during the course. This asset may be written, coded, painted, recorded, made or built. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their asset ideas with peers and teaching staff during a dedicated feedback session. Where appropriate these assets will be published and made available to the wider University and Edinburgh community. The asset can be viewed as an initial marker of the student's university journey, a gift to the wider community but also something that can be reflected back on during their time at Edinburgh.
By the end of the course, students will have developed a critical understanding of a current world event and will have built knowledge and skills to help them better understand the complexities of their relationship to it.
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Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate how they have actively developed their understanding of the challenge and its impact
- Draw on and apply a range of relevant skills and disciplinary perspectives in order to understand the challenge
- Analyse and interrogate different interdisciplinary datasets to understand the impact of global challenges
- Evaluate and critically reflect upon their approach, learning and development throughout the course
- Communicate their understanding and lived experience of the challenge
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Reading List
| The reading around the subject area is evolving rapidly - the course will also use readings recommended by the World Health Organisation, and a final decision on the reading list will be made using the best current evidence before the course goes online. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Undertaking this course will enable students to develop their abilities in self-critical reflection, organisation and time-management, application of learning in a defined context, and provide opportunities to further develop analytical and presentation skills. |
| Keywords | Data,global challenges,crisis,global legacy,creative assets |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Liz Grant
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Agata Gibczynska
Tel:
Email: |
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