England: Oxford (August - September)

CRI389Y0 Topics in Criminology: Rights, Freedoms and Responsibilities in Criminal Law: Historical Origins and New Directions in England and Canada

This course traces shifts in the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of legal subjects, as they have been defined in criminal law in England and Canada, beginning with the gradual emergence of the common law in England during the Medieval period, right up to the present day, including the history of approaches to political violence in England. Close attention will be paid to recent developments that challenge traditional doctrines. The English legal system has recently adopted a number of innovations and proposals that have not been tried in Canada, including new doctrines regarding police administration, antisocial behaviour, community policing, speech supporting terrorism and jury trials. In all these cases, there is significant modification of established legal doctrines regarding the relationship between the state and its subjects. The new Conservative government has modified some of these policies, partly in light of fiscal challenges. Canada has been at the forefront of other developments that modify that relationship, most notably regarding dangerousness assessment with a view to preventive detention, and the punishment of women offenders, where feminist theories have been influential. Students will have the opportunity to evaluate these developments in light of the history of legal rights, freedoms and responsibilities in the common law tradition. They will present their views of the nature, causes and validity of the developments in the written assignments. The course will be of special interest to students of Criminology, Political Science and History.

Prerequisites: none
BR=3
Exclusion: WDW389Y
CR389Y0 Course Outline - 2023

Field Trips

Excursions will include two trips to London. For one, students will visit the Foundling Museum, the British Museum, and the Tower of London, and will be taken on a guided “Jack the Ripper” walk. For the other London trip, students will visit sites of political violence in the city. Students will also meet with Oxford community policing services. The cost of these trips is CAD $550, paid to U of T for all fees and return bus transportation.

Instructor

William Watson received his B.Sc. from the University of Leicester, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His academic interests include the practice of forensic psychiatry, psychopathy, the provision of services to sub-populations of mentally disordered offenders who are identified, or self-identified, as having special needs, and the place of critical social science in public policy making. His publications include The Mentally Disordered Offender in an Era of Community Care: New Directions in Provision (co-edited with A. Grounds), and articles in Sociology, The International Journal of Comparative Sociology, History of Psychiatry, The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, and Social and Legal Studies. Dr. Watson has served as a consultant for the Ontario Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of the Solicitor General, Canada.

ECO250Y0: Big Data Tools and Applied Machine Learning for Economists 

The first half of this course explores unstructured data sources such as text files, webpages, social media posts, satellite imagery, and how economists harness these types of data. It offers a practical introduction to creating datasets from these types of sources (for example, via web scrapping), linking data sources, and managing and visualizing these data (for example, via geospatial visualization).

The second half of the course gives an overview of different concepts, techniques, and algorithms in machine learning and their applications in economics. We begin with topics such as classification, linear and non-linear regressions and end with more recent topics such as boosting, support vector machines, and Neural networks as time allows. This course will give students the basic knowledge behind these machine learning methods and the ability to utilize them in an economic setting. Students will be led and mentored to develop and solve an economic problem with machine learning methods introduced during the course.

Objectives:

- Learn to code in Python at intermediate or advanced levels
​​​​​​- Learn to search effectively and debug their code
- Learn coding skills most useful to economists such as GIS mapping, web scraping, and machine learning.
- Understand the process of doing applied Economic research
- Apply their coding knowledge to a real-world dataset
- Formulate a research question
- Understand and explain different machine learning algorithms and regression methods
- Apply machine learning tools to real economic data
- Create meaningful results and visual illustrations
- Compare and contrast different algorithms

Prerequisite: ( ECO101H1(63%),  ECO102H1(63%))/  ECO105Y1(80%)/  ECO100Y5(67%)/ ( ECO101H5(63%),  ECO102H5(63%))/ ( MGEA02H3 (67%),  MGEA06H3 (67%)); MAT133Y1(63%)/ ( MAT135H1(60%),  MAT136H1(60%))/  MAT137Y1(55%)/  MAT157Y1(55%);  CSC108H1/  CSC110Y1/  CSC148H1

Exclusion: ECO225H1, CSC311H1, ESC190H1,  JSC270H1,  STA314H1 

Breadth Requirement = 3
2023 Course Outline

Field Trips

Excursions will a visit to the University of Cambridge and to hear a lecture from guest faculty. Excursions will also include three trips to London. For one, students will be visiting London the Bank of England Museum in London. For the other two London trips, students will be visit Microsoft London and Microsoft Google for tours and workshops. The cost of these trips is CAD $550, paid to U of T for all fees and return bus transportation.

Instructor

Professor Nazanin Khazra is an applied microeconomist who has brought the field of Machine Learning and Economics together in her teaching and research. She has offered popular Tech-Econ and research courses at U of T and other universities. Professor Khazra has also created the Tech-Econference at U of T which happens again this Spring for the third year. The students who have taken this course before have been very successful on the job market and have been admitted into top graduate schools.

• Reviews from students:
  •  “just interviewed for a full-time ### role starting summer 2023 at ###, and EVERYTHING I had learned from you in this course, including presenting my project, was extremely useful!”
  • “the skills that I learnt that I leant in this course helped me get into the ### program. I know that my knowledge of Jupyter Notebook and Geopandas helped me stand out in the application process. This experience will also prove invaluable when getting jobs in the future and when applying to graduate programs, which I plan to do this year. Thanks again for helping me learn these skills”

ENG296Y0 Topics in English Literature: Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries

This course explores Jane Austen’s extraordinary mind and the culture that brought it about. Situating her work in dialogue with that of contemporaries in literature, philosophy, and aesthetics, we’ll read several of her novels closely as she traces the complex social dynamics of Georgian England and navigates a moment of global political upheaval whose effects are felt even to this day. We’ll also make a number of detours—in some cases, literally—into the texts, cities, and broader geographical spaces that informed her development as an author. In the process, students will learn to engage critically with the novel, develop some facility with the era’s thinking, and examine a number of classic accounts through which scholars have understood the period. 

Prerequisites: 1.0 ENG credit or any 4.0 credits
BR = 1
Draft Course Syllabus

Field Trips

An excursion to Bath will include visits to the Jane Austen Center, Bath Assembly Rooms (with rooms featured heavily in Austen's work) and Roman Baths. There will also be a trip to Warminster to spend a day and hike to the Stourhead Estates. The course will conclude with a trip to London, where students will visit the British Library, see a play in the city (title TBA) and participate in the Slavery City Walking tour. The cost of these trips is  CAD $970 paid to U of T for all fees and return bus transportation, and one night accommodation on the London trip. 

Instructor

Alex Eric Hernandez  is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and an award-winning teacher who specializes in eighteenth-century literature. His scholarship aims at an interdisciplinary approach to the period, and balances an attention to historical detail alongside theoretical frames that privilege affect, description, and anthropological curiosity. His first book, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press, and offers a groundbreaking reading of how tragedy developed in relation to the emotions of ordinary people. Other work has appeared in publications like Representations and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, with his most recent piece—on the way Austen is used in contemporary devotional practice— forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly. In 2021, he was awarded the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award. 

PSY306Y0 - LEC3001 Special Topics in Psychology Abroad: Disability: Culture and Inclusion

An interdisciplinary seminar on the life-long development of individuals with exceptionalities. Topics include controversial social and educational issues (e.g., inclusion vs. segregation), legal, family, and economic issues, disability across the lifespan, communication disorders, hearing and visual impairment, autism, and acquired brain injury. Special emphasis will be placed on the social and historical factors that play a determining role as to whether impairment leads to the psychological experience of disability.

Prerequisite: Enrollment in any Psychology or Social Science Major or Specialist and completion of 8.0 FCE
Exclusions (unofficial): UTM: PSY345H5, 442Y5 (please discuss with instructor)
BR=2

Course Syllabus (2023)

Field Trips

We will learn about institutionalization of children by visiting the Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability, and adults by visiting the Bethlem Museum of the Mind. We will learn about the development of medicine and the understanding of the causes of impairments by visiting the London Science Museum, and the Old Operating Theatre Museum. We will learn about disability images and stigma through the history of eyeglasses at the British Optical Association Museum. We will also visit the Freud Museum, will go on an accessibility walking tour of the University of Oxford and will hear presentations from UK experts on disability. The cost of these trips is  CAD $550 paid to U of T for all fees and return bus transportation.

Instructor

Dr. Stuart Kamenetsky is a veteran teacher with the Woodworth College Summer Abroad Program. He taught this course three times in Oxford, England; twice in Siena, Italy; and once online (during the pandemic) with ten international speakers. A Full Professor in the teaching stream, Kamenetsky served for many years as the Director of the Psychology Undergraduate Program as well as the Chair of the Academic Appeals Subcommittee of Academic Affairs at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He stepped down from most administrative duties to pursue teaching and research opportunities. He teaches several courses on disability as well as on childhood social development. He carries out research on the perception of disability images, student mental health, and disability accommodation in post-secondary education and related areas. As an advocate for people with disabilities he delivers public talks on social inclusion. He has spent many years supporting people with disabilities in a variety of social service agencies as well as the child welfare system. He is well connected with school boards, provincial residential schools and agencies where his students gain practical experiences in the field. Recently he has encouraged individuals to accept and share their own lived disability experiences – whether severe or mild – starting with himself: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/202201/my-gifted-shaky-hands.