Dr Christopher Blunt KSW.4.12 and Dr Jillian Terry KSW.4.11

All first year undergraduate students take one of LSE100A, LSE100B or LSE100C.

LSE100 is LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all first-year undergraduate students as part of your degree programme. The course is designed to build your capacity to tackle multidimensional problems through research-rich education, giving you the opportunity to explore transformative global challenges in collaboration with peers from other departments and leading academics from across the School. Before registering at LSE, you will have the opportunity to select one of three themes to focus on during LSE100, each of which foregrounds a complex and pressing question facing social scientists. In 2023/24, the available themes are:

• How can we transform our climate futures?
• How can we control AI?
• How can we create a fair society?

In the ‘How can we create a fair society?’ theme, you will explore contrasting understandings of fairness and how these shape our responses to inequality and injustice. While inflation outpaces wages for workers around the world, the combined fortunes of billionaires increase by $2.7 billion each day.   

As wealth and income inequality surge while gender and ethnicity gaps widen, we are urgently asking: is this fair? What would a fairer society look like? How do we conceptualise and measure the fairness of our political, economic and social systems? What do we owe each other, and whose responsibility is it to ensure an equitable approach?

This module explores the tensions between competing understandings of fairness and asks how we can draw on social scientific expertise to create a fair society. From across the boroughs of London to the precarious labour markets of the Global South, we will consider what fairness looks like in the 21st century and how we might achieve it. 

Throughout LSE100, you will investigate the ways in which systems are transforming and being transformed by complex questions of fairness. You will learn to use the tools and frameworks of systems thinking in order to analyse the impacts of inequalities, broaden your intellectual experience, and deepen your understanding of your own discipline as you test theories, evidence and ideas from different disciplinary perspectives.

7 hours and 30 minutes of seminars in the AT. 7 hours and 30 minutes of seminars in the WT.

90-minute seminars take place in alternate weeks. Students will attend an LSE100 seminar in either weeks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 or weeks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 of Autumn Term, and weeks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 or weeks 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 of Winter Term.

AT: Seminar – 5 x 90min

WT: Seminar – 5 x 90min

In addition to seminars students will engage with bespoke video lectures featuring academics from across the School (approx. 20 minutes per seminar).

In seminars throughout both terms, students will practice:

1. analysing quantitative and qualitative data
2. using systems thinking and systems change tools
3. constructing and communicating evidence-based academic arguments

Teachers will provide feedback during seminars and in post-seminar communications to groups and individuals.

During the Winter Term, groups will have the opportunity to submit and receive formative feedback on a project brief, summarising their research project. Students will also try out the tools of systems thinking and systems change that they will use in their summative group research project.

The following readings are indicative of the texts students will be assigned. The total amount of reading assigned for each seminar will be a maximum of 20 pages.

• Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo (2019). Good economics for hard times: better answers to our biggest problems (London: Allen Lane)
• Minouche Shafik (2021) What we owe each other: a new social contract for a better society (Princeton University Press).
• Janna Thompson (2010), “What is Intergenerational Justice?”, Future Justice, 2010:5-20
• Paul Lewis, et al. (2011) Reading the riots: investigating England's summer of disorder. (London School of Economics and Political Science and The Guardian: London, UK)
• Thomas Piketty (2015). The economics of inequality. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press)
• Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2010) The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone (London: Penguin)  
• Michael Sandel (2010). ‘Justice and the common good’, in Justice: what is the right thing to do? (Penguin).
• Oran R. Young (2017). ‘The age of complexity’ in Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene (MIT Press)

Coursework (50%, 1000 words) in the AT.
Project (50%) in the WT.

Summative assessment will include an individual written assessment in the Autumn Term (50%) and a collaborative research project in the Winter Term (50%).