Categories

The normative questions politics cannot avoid: what makes authority legitimate, what justice requires, and why anyone should obey. The philosophy department's half of the ground political theory works from the other side.

The psychology behind political behaviour: identity, ideology, prejudice, persuasion and how people actually reason about politics.

The study of politics: how power is organised and contested, how states and institutions work, and how they might work better.

The social foundations of politics: class, status and group membership as the ground beneath power, movements and the state.

The political science subfield that works on concepts and canon: the history of political thought, the arguments about power, order and freedom, and the theoretical models the empirical subfields borrow. Overlaps heavily with political philosophy, which asks the same questions from inside philosophy.

How large chain molecules are made and what they do: polymerization mechanisms, chain architecture, and the properties that follow from both.

How allele frequencies change in a population under selection, drift, mutation and migration. The mathematical core of evolutionary theory.

Well-being studied on its own terms rather than as the absence of illness: what makes a life go well, and how far it can be measured.

Generating, transmitting and distributing electrical power: grids, machines, protection, and the stability of a network that must balance every second.

Meaning in context: implicature, presupposition, deixis, and the rest of what a speaker conveys without saying it.

Stopping disease before it starts: risk factors, screening, immunisation and the behaviour change that is harder than any of them.

Primates: their behaviour, social organisation, cognition and ecology, studied both for their own sake and for what they say about human origins.

Which country's law governs a dispute that touches several, which court may hear it, and whether the resulting judgment travels.

The mathematics of uncertainty and random processes, built on measure theory.

How a court gets from a claim to a judgment: jurisdiction, pleading, proof and appeal. The rules about the rules.

The design, semantics and type systems of programming languages, and what a language guarantees about the programs written in it.

Temporary organisations with a deadline: planning, risk and control, and the research on why large projects overrun so consistently.

Ownership and the lesser rights that sit alongside it: possession, transfer, security interests and the limits a state puts on all three.

The full set of proteins a cell makes, measured at scale: their abundance, their modifications, and how both shift with conditions.

The medical treatment of mental illness: diagnosis, psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, and the long argument about where the boundaries of a disorder lie.