English

This course explores the intersection of Digital Media, Design Thinking, and AI, guiding students to transform creative ideas into meaningful and impactful applications. It first builds a strong foundation in digital media ecosystems and business models, then dives into the core design thinking abilities of Noticing, Sensemaking, and Experimenting. Students learn to integrate AI tools into the design thinking process — for ideation, synthesis, and rapid prototyping (no coding required) — bringing ideas to life faster and smarter. This course emphasizes applying core design thinking abilities to real-world challenges in the digital media world. The course includes reflection journals, hands-on workshops, and a final project where students design, test, and pitch their own Digital Media Design and Application Project, demonstrating how design thinking and AI can shape new possibilities in digital media.

The course consists of two parts: General and Thematic. The general part, will answer the question "What is global history?" and will critically discuss the methodological approaches that belong to the realm of global history. Specific topics will be examined from this perspective, including labor, social and women's movements, migration, empires, cities and global events such as the First and Second World Wars but also the 1968 and 1989. The thematic party, focuses on part on the global history of genocide, mass crimes, and war crimes in order to understand the dynamics, differences and complexities of mass violence in the 20th century. The first section of this part will be devoted to the “invention” of the concept of genocide, its difference with war crimes and mass crimes, while the second section will be devoted to an in-depth study of some case studies. 

This course introduces the basic theories, design, and evaluation techniques required in future architectural practice, focusing on thermal environmental factors.   

The field of architectural environment refers to the technical area that deals with the physical performance of buildings, which must be considered throughout the process of producing architectural structures. The physical performance of a building depends on the spatial elements, thermal/light/sound environment factors, indoor air quality factors, and the architect's knowledge and experience related to the integration of these elements. 

The course prepares students to create comfortable indoor environments, as well as to design environmentally friendly and energy-efficient buildings. This course covers architectural sustainability, environmental control and passive design in architecture, and the basic principles and performance evaluation methods for building environmental systems: heating, cooling, lighting, and energy. 

This course has two components, each exploring a different topic in philosophy.

Component 1: Transformative Experience. This course explores several challenging philosophical questions regarding transformative experience. Considering becoming a parent, getting married, going to university, choosing a career, or emigrating to a new country involves major life decisions that are typically transformative choices. They concern transformative experiences that change who people are and what they care about, and it may not be possible to know what it would be like for at the time of choosing. But, if so, how can a rational decision be made to become a parent, for example, if doing so changes what is cared about, and it is only possible to know what it would will be like once it occurs? Would it be wrong for a friend, family member, or romantic partner to try to stop someone from making a transformative choice, such as getting married? What role do transformative choice and experience play in other dimensions of life, such as art, religious experience, and social identity, as well as in broader philosophical debates over skepticism, the possibility of moral knowledge, and medical ethics?

Component 2: Emotion and Rationality. This course examines a few philosophical theories of emotion, drawing where appropriate on work in cognitive science, to enrich the philosophical investigation. An ancient picture of our psychology contrasts rationality with emotion. Both are central to human life. To be rational involves, in part, being sensitive to reasons on which people reflect and deliberate. But what is it to have emotions like fear, anger, joy, guilt and so on? How do they relate to other states of mind like belief, pleasure, intention, or desire? What’s the point of having various emotions? Do emotions inform people in some way about the world? Are emotions themselves rational or justified, and can they contribute to making certain actions rational? Or are emotions a distorting form of interference in an otherwise orderly psychology? Confronting these questions about the nature of emotion sheds light on and forces people to consider issues about the nature of rational agency.

The course provides a general overview of the most important natural hazards affecting the Earth and human societies in the past, at the present and possibly in the future. It covers the natural processes that impact the Earth system as hazards, disasters, and catastrophes instantaneously changing the environment and – in modern times – adversely affecting humans. Topics such as tsunamis, river flooding, sea level change, earthquakes, and mass wasting are discussed with focus on their origin, course, documentation left in the geological record and, when relevant, impact on past and modern societies, including economic and social impacts.

This course examines anthropological engagements with "nature" and the more-than-human world. It explores how ideas about "nature" have been theorized and critiqued within anthropology, how such ideas are put to work in different world-making projects, and how rethinking human relations with the more-than-human world might offer insights into navigating uncertain ecological times.

This course introduces the basics of text-generative AI, including what is a large language model, how chatbots like ChatGPT work, what ethical questions are raised by the new technologies, and what people use AI tools for. It also introduces the field of sociolinguistics, the study of social worlds through language. It considers the central theoretical concepts and methods in this field and how can they be used to study how AI is transforming language, text and social worlds in contemporary society. The course is based on the AI-UNI research project, which explores how generative language technologies are used as part of academic practices. Using this research project as a starting point, the course explores how AI tools are changing the sociolinguistic landscape in various societal domains. The emphasis is on language use in educational settings and research, but it also looks at the role of AI in other contexts – from intercultural communication in healthcare settings to text production in translation companies.

This course focuses on the surprisingly long history of facts and truths in the public sphere. Study how politicians and philosophers devised ways to counter populism without touching the vital democratic principles of freedom of speech or the right to vote.  In this course, conduct a research project that explores the intricate relationship between press (media) and politics through analyzing the power of rumor, researching how representative political systems in the past have tried to avert the dangers of fake news and information, and researching news media in all ages in digitized collections across the globe or in the physical archives in The Netherlands. The course answers questions such as what is public opinion? Where and when does it take shape? If freedom of speech is a necessary condition for representative democratic systems, does it automatically breed populism? Did people in the past assess the information that they had to base their political opinions on differently than we do today? The course has entry requirements. 

This course focuses on the basics of nutrition and exercise for health and wellbeing, teaching the fundamentals of designing exercise and physical activity programs and using nutrition to enhance exercise and sports performance. It develops an understanding of how exercise and nutrition relate to health outcomes, including the role of diet in chronic disease and obesity. 

This course deals with reception and heritage, and the ways in which ideas of the historical past are constructed and changed to fit into new contexts. The focal point of the lectures and readings is the Nordic world, particularly the so-called Viking Age. The Viking Age is a pertinent case because of the multiple ramifications of that period across time and space. The course presents different theories and perspectives of relevance for reception and heritage (e.g., theories about memory, media, adaptation and heritage tourism; antiquarianism, medievalism, etc.). The course engages with (in principle) all kinds of reception, such as literary, religious, political and cultural, in Scandinavia, Europe and the wider world, and with textual, visual and material representations from the Middle Ages to our contemporary times. Among the topics to be discussed are, firstly, the stereotypes and images of the Viking Age and the appropriation of Norse stories and legends that circulate in popular culture and contemporary media; and secondly, the relevance and function of the Viking Age as a central component in the cultural memory of groups of people. It asks questions such as: When, and where, did the idea of the Viking Age and the Vikings take form? Why is there such a widespread interest in the Viking Age, for instance, in North America? For whom, when and in which contexts has the Viking Age functioned as an identity forming factor? How are medieval Icelandic sagas and Old Norse myths adapted in, for example, literature, film and music? Is Viking heritage tourism a national or an international phenomenon? To what extent is the Viking Age an integral phenomenon that connects cultures, and to what extent does its uses create boundaries?