There are many benefits to studying abroad, but why should you choose LIS? ‘Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods’ delivers a truly exceptional learning experience — the first of its kind in the UK.
You'll become part of our unique problem-based learning community, learning to connect a wide range of disciplines in order to delve into real-world complex challenges.
You'll develop an Interdisciplinary mindset, which will prove invaluable in your future academic and professional endeavours.
In a world faced with ever more complex problems, it’s never been more important to find new ways of thinking and doing. At LIS, we’ll show you how.
For the 2023/24 academic year, Term 2 offers a range of 15-Credit modules. Students typically study three modules per term, but you can opt to study less or more. Your module choices are subject to approval depending on available places and your academic background.
Prior to enrolling at LIS you will have a call with one of our advisors to talk through your study plan. You'll also join a coaching group and engage in weekly coaching sessions with peers and an academic tutor.
This module introduces more concepts and skills that students can use to tackle complex problems. The problem area is global environmental change. Students work in groups to research a specific environmental and/or climate-related problem in their local area, in collaboration with a company, non-profit, or public sector institution.
They interview their ‘client’ about the different people and organisations involved, and then choose two disciplinary perspectives from four (currently Environmental Studies or Materials Science, and Politics or Law) to explore their research questions and write a consultancy report.
Knowledge and skills:
Problems 2b focuses on problems surrounding urban futures. What sort of future should we be enabling for our cities? How, why, and when? This module will move you from developing hypotheses to focusing on the design of interventions.
Through workshops and off-site urban exploratory walks and prototyping projects, you’ll be able to test and measure the impact of collaborative and interdisciplinary interventions to further the opportunities of urban futures.
Knowledge and skills:
Natural language processing (NLP) explores how language can be manipulated using computational tools. NLP sits right at the heart of contemporary developments in AI and machine learning, so knowledge of it is crucial if you are to understand present-day and future technologies. Starting with fundamentals, you will learn to curate, analyse, and generate language at speed and scale, including language from social media and other ‘big data’ sources. You will also learn concepts from linguistics and information theory that help understand how language works. Most importantly, you will gain the confidence to teach yourself new developments in this fast-growing field.
Knowledge and skills:
Network science is an important mathematical tool in today’s world, as many of our day-to-day environments are made of networks. In this module, you will learn to represent networks mathematically as ‘graphs’ and study how to find the shortest paths, cycles, tours and colourings. You will learn about equilibrium and dynamics in networks, and how to apply this to model epidemics.
Then, you will study matchings in graphs, which are related to mechanism design for allocation of indivisible resources. We will move on to game theory and how this is used to analyse strategies and choices in real-world situations in politics, economics and business. You will study strategic form games (e.g. prisoner’s dilemma, the commons problem), dominant strategies and Nash equilibria.
Knowledge and skills:
In the world where everyone is competing for your attention, how can we tell the story of a complex issue like climate change? This module looks at the forms and structures which storytellers use from a five act play to a podcast and on to a Virtual Reality platform. Along the way we consider the business models which support today’s media organisations. At the end of the module, you’ll put together an authentic multi-media campaign strategy which draws on everything you’ve learnt.
Knowledge and skills:
Writing is a thinking habit. Wording thoughts in written form affords insight and structure, and it allows you to communicate clearly. Thinking through Writing is an advanced qualitative-method module aimed at enhancing the ability of students to analyse interdisciplinary texts and reproduce features of the texts’ constitutive registers in their own writing.
Historically, styles of writing and genres are associated with different mindsets and disciplinary bodies of knowledge. Yet, more than any other genre in the history of written communication, the art of manifesto making captures and exemplifies the nature of interdisciplinary thinking. Manifestos mix elements of different registers – the critical, the performative, the metaphorical, the utopian, etc, into powerful new syntheses of purpose and action. By engaging with a sample of manifestos, students will learn to recognise, cultivate, and switch between disciplinary mindsets, thus improving their capacity to read and reproduce registers across written texts.
Knowledge and skills:
What does it mean to say a system is complex? And how can we model such systems? While everyone shares an intuitive sense of what complexity means, various academic disciplines have deepened our understanding of complex phenomena.
This module will give participants a scientifically rigorous introduction to the concept of complexity. Specifically, it will explore how mathematics and the wider sciences have generated conceptions of complexity that have been influential across a variety of contexts. This will include mathematical fundamentals needed to engage with these concepts of complexity, as well as example applications where these concepts are applied to real-world systems.
Knowledge and skills:
This module invites you to consider ethnography as not just a method, but also as a mindset - a powerful tool for innovation and creative problem-solving that prioritises the needs of the participants. We will explore the ethnographic practice through a range of perspectives and industries, including the digital landscape, urban planning, academia, decision-making science, technology and design. But before we go there, we will think through the insights and implications of ethics. Ethics can sometimes be perceived as a hurdle, a chore or an afterthought in research, relegated to a tick-box exercise.
Throughout this course, we’ll aim to change that perception and strive to leverage ethics as an insightful lens to bolster empathy and our understanding of the cultures and behaviours we aim to study.
The course will have two complementary pursuits: we will engage practically with sub-genres of ethnography (such as urban ethnography and digital ethnography) and couple this with theoretical insight of key ethnographic themes such as kinship, space, place and gentrification.
By the end of the course, you should have an arsenal of ethnographic techniques coupled with a renewed appreciation for the ethical process, seeing it as a companion to impactful problem-solving.
Knowledge and skills:
In this module, you will work in small groups to design and implement a campaign of importance for a community of which you are a member. You will be encouraged to deploy appropriate qualitative methods to understand the needs of your community, for example participant observation, interviews, focus groups, surveys, cultural probes and creative practice.
You will be exposed to and encouraged to deploy appropriate campaigning tools, such as events management, guerrilla marketing, media relations, and social media marketing. Finally, you will deploy methods for the analysis of successful campaigning, for example close reading, visual literacy and narratology, and be encouraged to deploy the lessons of their analysis in their campaigning.
Campaigning can be a powerful means of achieving social change, whether understood in traditional political terms (e.g. the Obama campaigns) or as protest movements (e.g. Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Black Lives Matter). Meanwhile, the skills involved translate into various ‘real-world’ areas of practice, such as media, marketing, and local and national government.
Knowledge and skills:
This module will introduce methods from the arts, social sciences, and natural sciences that can be used to understand ecosystems and environmental change, mainly focusing on local habitats and species. It starts by introducing the complex interactions between 'social' and 'natural' systems, as well as discussing how to analyse and interpret secondary ecological data (e.g., climate metrics).
This is followed by alternating blocks of ecological methods (collecting scientific data) and ethnoecology methods (collecting data on people's insights) about species and habitats, respectively. Working at the species level, you'll learn the skills of observing, measuring, estimating, and recording, as well as understanding how people recognise, classify, and use different species. At the habitat level, you'll learn to measure water pollution, air pollution, and soil pH levels, and work with people to understand how they experience their local places through participatory mapping and transect walks.
The module also introduces elements of journaling and ecologically inspired creative practice (eco-art, poetry, song, and storytelling) to reinforce a ‘sense of place’ and an emotional connection with the wider community of life on Earth. You'll learn to listen to marginalised voices, reflect on shifting power dynamics, and hone your intuition to develop new (and ancient) ways of relating to land, flora and fauna.
Knowledge and skills:
Study abroad students can join us for a full academic year, or for 1 or 2 terms; the Autumn (Fall) term and/or the Spring term.
Find out more about our course fees, financing options, and support available through scholarship and discounts.
These are the fees for the 2024/25 academic year.
Scholarships and discounts available on a case-by-case basis.
We are currently taking applications for the Spring term 2023/24.
Every study abroad applicant will be contacted by a study abroad advisor within 5 working days of their completed application to talk through their intended study plan and next steps.
Apply now
IELTS 7.0 or equivalent
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Spring term 2024
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Apply online
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Starting from £8,000
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London
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Full-time
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Feel free to get in touch with us to organise a campus tour, or even to set up a call with one of our team.
We're always available to answers any questions you might have during your application process.
Contact us