War, famine, drought, disease, economic crises and natural disasters have disrupted and radically altered all societies including our own. They also seem set to continue to do so.

You’ll explore case studies from the ancient world to the present to understand the future. You’ll study how societies have dealt with major crises and catastrophes in the past, such as: the destruction of states from the Romans to the Mongols, Indigenous population collapse under iimperial expansion, the Black Death in Asia and Europe, The Spanish Flu, and the Global Great Depression, to name a few. This will equip you with the knowledge to assess which social and political strategies could work, or will fail, in the future.

This topic examines the global challenge of human caused climate change. You’ll explore: allocating the burdens of climate action between developed, developing and underdeveloped nations; our responsibilities to future generations; understanding the place of human beings in relation to the rest of the natural world; our psychological attitudes towards climate change; the critical assessment of various notion of progress and related notions of human mastery over the natural world.

This Grand Challenge presents an opportunity to rethink the concept and measurement of societal progress to reflect these emerging challenges, and to contribute to a second paradigm shift involving sustainable development.

You’ll explore the inroads into creating a bridge between the human-centred development paradigm and the ambitions of the United Nations: Global Sustainable Development Goals for a more sustainable world, not just environmentally but also socially, financially and in other ways.

How will we survive the 21st century? Human beings are facing major challenges and we need to imagine how they can be met.

You’ll explore climate change and environmental destruction, the massive inequalities between people and nations, social and economic systems that are rooted in exploitation, cities that are for many unhealthy and unsafe, sharp tensions between individual freedoms and state surveillance and the everyday challenges of maintaining physical, mental and spiritual health.

The birth of the modern age in the West placed the human at the centre of all understanding, as both the agent of inquiry and the object of study. And yet, history shows that the status of the human is anything but transparent.

Some suggest we are entering the age of the ‘post-human’, as these various challenges show the limitations of the category. You’ll consider the human not as the source and summit of our understanding, but as a contested concept that is embedded in a context that is natural, cultural, and political – in a word, global. With life on the planet increasingly at stake, the future of humanity depends on modes of understanding that are essentially pluralistic.