Available Courses

The aim of this module is to provide students with the opportunity to broaden their cultural horizons and raise their international awareness and sensitivity to UK culture; enhance academic skills from innovative note-taking techniques to refined presentation skills and academic writing; and develop an understanding to recognise key employability skills (based on York Strengths Employability Skills Programme – https://www.york.ac.uk/students/work-volunteering-careers/skills/york-strengths/) and presenting them to future employers. It will include local excursions.

This module will provide you with a fundamental understanding of the media assets that comprise interactive media experiences and how they’re made. In lectures you’ll learn how digital images, videos, sounds and 3D models work from a scientific and technical perspective. You’ll also learn professional techniques and workflows for creating your own media assets. In practicals you’ll put this knowledge into practice, while creating your first media assets in industry standard software.

This module will introduce students to the centrality of story and story-telling to cinema and television. It will identify and explore certain dominant forms and traditions of cinematic and televisual story telling. It will examine how films and television programmes tell a story by introduce and examine key principles such as narrative premise, structure and development; the dynamics and interrelation of plot, character and dialogue; the relationship between audio visual text and audience; the function of key aesthetic properties including visual style, performance and sound design in relation to storytelling; and the key principles of literary adaptation. The module will also consider certain institutional factors that inform and constrain storytelling for specific audio-visual media.

To introduce students to the theories and practices of business ethics and social responsibility in national and global contexts and the personal, ethical dilemmas, which people in organisations can face within such contexts. Please note that this module is provisional and subject to changes.

The world of politics is complex, dynamic, and can seem to defy explanation. Political Analysis supports students to develop rigorous and compelling accounts of political phenomena. The module introduces foundations of both ‘positive’ analysis that seeks to precisely describe, compare, or/and identify causal drivers, and ‘normative’ analysis that offers evaluation of political practices and institutions against ideal-type conceptualisations. Please note that this module is provisional and subject to changes.

Social, personality and abnormal psychology address questions fundamental to our experiences of self and relationships. These topics examine various influences on our attitudes, opinions, feelings, and behaviours. Responses to these influences can vary to the point of being maladaptive. Abnormal psychology is concerned with extreme ends of these responses. Therapeutic interventions are evaluated in the context of known causes of these problems.

Everything that goes on in the mind, the way we see, feel, remember and act, is constrained by the way the brain works. The aim of this module is to provide a framework for understanding the link between the brain and behaviour. The module will begin by outlining the principles of neuroscience and their importance in studying cognitive functions in the healthy brain and their deterioration in dementia. The later part of the course aims to introduce students to the neuroscience of developmental disorders and the techniques and methods used in the study of the brain.

Life on Earth covers all the most exciting and fundamental aspects of the biosciences in the context of the world in which we live. This module explores key concepts in biology through the diversity of organisms, processes and interactions at all levels of the ecological hierarchy, from individuals and populations to ecosystems and biomes. Students will go on a journey through time and space to learn where life came from, what it looks like now, how and why it functions, and what might happen next.

This module will introduce students to modern economic theory and analysis and show how this theory can be applied to real economic problems. To enhance understanding of modern economics by using it extensively to explain how scarce resources are allocated and distributed in practice and especially as a means to underpin policy recommendations.

This module offers a detailed and comprehensive introduction to the important elements involved in the understanding of marketing philosophy, principles and practice. Key areas are integrated to provide a strong base on which to build, to enable students to develop an understanding of the important role that strategic decision-making in marketing plays for organisations.

The module introduces students to the core conceptual debates and key issues that have shaped – and continue to shape – the field of Comparative Politics. It provides an overview of its dominant basic questions, theories, and empirical research. While international politics concerns itself with the study of political phenomena that occur predominantly between countries, Comparative Politics concerns itself with the study of political phenomena that occur predominantly within countries. The module focuses both on the study of democracies and autocracies. The module will analyse the concept and organisation of the state, political parties, institutions, social cleavages, electoral systems and elections, presidentialism and parliamentarism.

This module explores a range of contemporary global challenges, by combining empirical research and theoretical (normative) analysis. Students will reflect on the challenges and barriers to progress, and develop critical, analytical skills to help them propose solutions. Please note that this module is provisional and subject to changes.

This module offers an understanding of how global processes, such as globalisation, neoliberalism, and gentrification, have changed the society we live in today. It will provide a strong foundation for exploring and investigating how different development theories and policies have changed the socio-political, economic, and cultural systems. Drawing on relevant case studies, policies and initiatives that have emerged from these processes and theories will be analysed. 

This module introduces fundamental sustainability concepts, theories and strategies for managing the environment.

This module aims to enable students to develop their perspective on the role of economics and management in human and social relations. It introduces the philosophical study of the relation between humanity and economic models and practices, with a specific consideration of the risks and challenges presented to the future of human society by global and environmental threats. It aims to develop sensitivity to the foundational considerations that inform management practice.

This module introduces students to the fundamentals of computer programming by teaching the key concepts and principles required to implement interactive systems. Students learn how to design programs that are well structured and get lots of experience in debugging and problem solving. Students also work on creating programs that use hardware peripherals to control interesting visual and auditory outputs.

Students will learn about fundamental storytelling elements, such as plot, character, genre and world-building, as well as storytelling approaches, such as adaptation, in order to understand the components of effective and successful stories. In view of the universality of story, students will first learn about these elements as applied across a wide range of media forms, including cinema, animation and television.

This humanities module furnishes students with a toolkit for analysing audio-visual media. We explore the way in which elements of form like cinematography, editing, performance, and more shape a viewer’s experience of a text, considering these elements across a range of contexts (film, television, shorts, music videos, and more).

This module will introduce students to the key production techniques and technologies that drive the screen side of the creative industries. Students will learn to shoot and record sound on location in single camera film-making; to work inside a team in the multi-camera TV studio; and to design, edit and produce content for delivery to audiences.

This module will acquaint students with some of the key ideas that drive the creative industries at the centre of this degree programme: cinema, television, theatre and interactive media. Students will encounter major works from screen, stage and computer device which have defined their respective industries in the past and which represent launching-pads for creative innovation in the future.