English

The majority of the world's population live in close proximity to the coastal zone. Coastal processes are highly dynamic and sensitive to external drivers, including long-term climate change and anthropogenic activities. Understanding these systems is important for developing appropriate coastal management strategies. Coasts (and coastal processes) therefore represent an excellent opportunity to study the interactions between humans and their physical environment. The course enhances students' understanding of environment-shaping processes and to offer advanced field-based training in the coastal environment. Including practical classes and an obligatory, reasonably priced, weekend field excursion, it encourages students to think about the ways in which process knowledge can inform coastal management.

As the global population speeds past seven billion, mounting evidence about resource depletion and climate change, and global economic inequality and social injustice, suggests current human development is unsustainable and that we are now living in the “Anthropocene” – an era in which human activity has, for the first time, become the dominant driver of environmental processes, and is causing unprecedented global change. The course shows how Geography, a discipline that draws on knowledge that spans the social and natural sciences and the humanities, is uniquely placed to understand our changing world.

This course provides an introduction to cross-cultural psychology and the main challenges and advantages of the scientific study of culture. Topics include methods in cultural psychology; cultural conception of self and agency; motivation; emotion; and cognition and perception.

This course offers students an opportunity to think, speak, and write in English about diverse issues of modern and contemporary society, using readily accessible genres and forms of cultural and social texts, including popular literature, literature for children and adolescents, graphic novels, movies and TV dramas, music, art works, journalistic writings, internet postings, etc. The class may either be organized around a single overarching theme or cover a series of different yet preferably interrelated themes.

This course is a workshop-based class on the topic of culture in multimodal communication. Students explore tools for understanding and analyzing different modes of communication. Particularly, the class focuses on how meaning is made through the interaction of two modes (language and image) in an important modern cultural medium, graphic novels. However, students apply the knowledge gained from this class to other forms of multimodal communication in the world around them.

The course provides a general introduction to the study of law, starting with the basic concepts of jurisprudence. The expected goal is that students become acquainted with the fundamentals of private law both at the domestic and the international level. Particularly, the course deals with some of the essential rules applicable to economic activities and focus on the interaction between party autonomy and market regulation in business transactions. The expected goal is that students learn how to tackle and discuss legal problems and gain a good command of the terminology of private law. The course adopts an international perspective and highlights the main differences between civil law and common law jurisdictions in the context of the Western legal tradition. The aim is to provide guidance on issues of international relationships in which the applicable law can crucially influence the economic outcome of a transaction. In this regard, European private law is also taken into consideration, with a specific focus on the rules aiming to protect consumers vis-à-vis professionals. In the final part of the course, small groups of attending students are given an assignment. The expected goal is to train students in addressing legal issues by drawing up a memorandum and/or a presentation. Written midterm, final exam, group project.