English

This team-taught course introduces students to a range of texts, authors, and issues in Irish writing. Students work across genres and forms, encountering canonical and less often studied works. This is an innately comparative course which proposes and encourages various ways of thinking about Irish texts, while at the same time providing a sound knowledge of the social, cultural, and political conditions in which these texts were written and read.

Natural hazards result in high losses in human life and welfare, property, resource productivity, and infrastructure. Often human interactions with the landscape increase the probability of potentially hazardous situations. The course covers the prediction, prevention, mitigation, and response strategies for various hazards. Various types of natural hazards, including landslides, debris flows, volcanic hazards, earthquakes, fire, tsunami, typhoons, floods, tornadoes, and wildfire are highlighted with respect to inherent forms and processes. Examples are presented from regions throughout the worldwide. Land management issues and effects are emphasized, particularly within the context of the Pacific Rim.

Human population growth is causing irreversible change to almost all environments on earth. The extent of human change has been so great that a new geological epoch, the anthropocene, has been defined. Global warming, the introduction of pollutants and excessive use of nutrients are stressors affecting the biodiversity and resilience of ecosystems, and pose threats to human and environmental health. These human impacts carefully need to be monitored to guide appropriate management of urban, natural and agricultural systems. This course covers transport pathways of pollutants, bioaccumulation, environmental toxicology (e.g., LD50 values), environmental monitoring and remediation techniques. Through lectures, laboratories and group work, concepts and methods of environmental monitoring are illustrated and discussed including findings from the latest research.

The mobility of people within and beyond national borders, both in real and virtual life, has created the need for people to understand and interact with others who have a different (cultural) background. In these new situations, individual identities and established “recipes” for (intercultural) interaction are challenged and contested, often requiring (re)construction and (re)negotiation, or even abandonment. Individuals must develop new ways of learning and interacting, and skills of adaptation and adjustment, to engage competently in intercultural encounters. This course develops students' knowledge about and experience in dealing with interculturality and intercultural communication. Students learn about the role of culture, language, and power and how they impact human communication, the complexity of identity, the causes and consequences of processes such as stereotyping, and how people manage intercultural communication processes in these new situations. However, competent intercultural communication is not only obtained for knowledge, students must experience directly how people act, interact, and communicate – from their perspective. In this course, students get opportunities to learn through experience. Class discussions, student-led case presentations and activities such as games are complemented by the critical analysis of traditional media and social media, enhancing awareness of values, norms, and biases. This prepares students to engage with “Cultural Others” through a virtual exchange project. This project is an international project called CONNECT GLOBAL. Finally, students learn to critically self-reflect on, and evaluate, their own intercultural competence. They reflect on intercultural exchanges and encounters in a reflective paper in which critically links the theories and notions learned in the course to personal experience.

This course introduces the idea of intersectionality in gender studies— in which the starting point is the idea that gender itself is largely a cultural construction and a phenomenon that intersects with other cultural constructs that societies have about race, age, nationality, body, sexuality, desire, ability, privilege, power, science and many other discourses. Indeed, gender is embedded so deeply in nearly everything we do and think that it is quite difficult to become conscious of the ways in which we literally gender our world and create hierarchies that empower some people and marginalize others. This course lends an awareness of how studying gender is essential to understanding society and making meaningful change in the world, and offers tools and language to analyze and critique gender and power in everyday life. "Gender Studies" itself is a very broad field—the approach we take is built on feminism, masculinities studies, and queer studies, and thus focus is especially on equality and being inclusive. Throughout the course, themes of bias, equality, hegemony, marginalization and minorities, social justice and human rights are examined. We also look especially at how gender studies is useful in thinking about Japanese history and histories of the larger Pacific and Asia region. Assessment: attendance and participation, 3 short essays, midterm, final.

This is a course about Scotland's past from the earliest human habitation until the modern era. It examines the cultural evolution of Scotland in order to enrich a general understanding of the history and culture of Scotland. In the process, it introduces a range of methodologies and principles which underpin archeological knowledge in Scotland and beyond.