Global Challenges (Planetary Health) BASc

The Core Spine encourages you to think boldly about global challenges in a creative and transdisciplinary manner. It will build skills in creative thinking, the use of creative research and development methods, as well as scaffolding a range of essential individual and team-based skills needed for the workplace and for effective agency as an engaged member of society and your community.

The core spine is made up of four elements:

• A transdisciplinary approach to global challenges will introduce you to key thinkers and approaches across a range of natural sciences, humanities and social sciences. You will also learn how to think across these boundaries, in a transdisciplinary, problem-focused way, and go on to apply transdisciplinary thinking to a range of real world problems.
• Creative thinking with be developed in a weekly ‘ideas lab’ where you will learn about creative ideas that have challenged and changed traditional modes of thinking. You will develop your own creative thinking skills and apply these to project work, stakeholder engagement, and communicating and disseminating project findings.
• Creative research methods will introduce you to the basics of quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, and to the philosophy of natural and social scientific methods. Having learned these building-blocks you will then advance to learning creative research methods, such as programming and data manipulation, transformative methods such as community engagement and participatory research, arts-based research,visual methods, and how to use mixed-methods approaches. You will also learn and apply creative forms of engagement and presentation of data.
• Skills development will build your capacity to work effectively in teams, and you will develop skills in project management, client management, making a business case, presentation skills (including team pitches, blogs, vlogs, policy briefings, press releases and project reports), and preparing for the job market and job interviews.

The third year Enterprize Project will bring all these skills together in a stakeholder-defined global challenges group project.

Planetary Health: This strand addresses the connectedness between environmental change and human health outcomes. The scope of the strand includes environmental, health and social sciences.

Level 1 (first year)

• Addressing Global Challenges
• Introduction to Global Challenges
• Foundations of Planetary Health in Practice - This study block aims to introduce students to the fundamental aspects of environmental studies and health and social sciences needed in order to be able to address Planetary Health issues, bringing together contributions from environmental, social and public health sciences into an integrated transdisciplinary approach.

Level 2 (second year)

• Addressing Global Challenges
• Addressing Contemporary Global Challenges
• Ecosystem Transformations and Health Impacts - This study block aims to equip students with a ‘planetary health lens’ through which they may look at and understand the connectedness between environmental change and human health outcomes, examine ecological and social determinants of human health and predict the likely health consequences of certain types of environmental change. We aim to help students understand that how humanity manages Earth’s natural systems will be a primary determinant of future global health.

Level 3 (third year)

• Arts and Sciences Dissertation in Global Challenges
• Global Challenges in Practice
• Healing the Planet in Practice - To give students knowledge and understanding of technologies, political economic and social management strategies that are used in managing environments and optimizing human health as well as methods that can reduce potential ecosystem transformations (e.g. climate change) and cope with the inevitable changes (adaptation).You'll gain an understanding of the concepts and processes involved in sustainable development. Furthermore we will guide students through the process of self-directed learning and synthesising ideas in the field of planetary health to provide solutions.

Read more about the structure of undergraduate degrees at Brunel