English

This course provides an introduction to interdisciplinarity and in particular, its role in breaking down traditional boundaries and creating new kinds of knowledge. The course addresses issues facing those conducting interdisciplinary work and look into how they play out in practice. Students examine how and why disciplines exist alongside issues that can impede the integration of different disciplinary perspectives through, for example, different conceptions of truth, power and evidence. The course combines this with looking at different ways of overcoming these issues including by means of '‘superconcepts."

If the ‘everyday' refers to the mundane, the unremarkable – to the forms of life routinely taken for granted – it is also through the practices of everyday life that we experience who we are, how our lives are invested with meanings, and how we engage with change. In the modern world (especially in the developed north), it's difficult to think about cultures of everyday life without also considering the media and its contribution to the structuring of daily life, its varied use in daily life, and its discursive construction and engagement with aspects of everyday life. In this course, students explore critical approaches to everyday life, including those engaging with media.

In many situations, economic actors need to make decisions while knowing that the final outcome also depends on the decisions of others. Such situations are called games, and the actors involved are called players. In order to reach a good decision, it is important for a player to reason about the decisions and motivations of their opponents. This course teaches how to reason about your opponents in game theoretic situations, and how to use this reasoning to make good decisions. The theory is applied to various economic situations of interest.