English

The course provides a theoretical and practical inquiry into the interface between society and politics in both developed and developing countries. Special emphasis will be on African states.  The issues addressed include the nature of power and the state, relations between the state and society, social movements, political organization and civic participation, political culture, voting behavior, democracy and economic development, nationalism, citizenship, and globalization. 

This course is designed to help students establish a solid understanding of how cells and nutrients contribute to health and body functions by interacting with each other. The students are provided with an introduction to key concepts relevant to molecular and cell biology and cellular nutrient metabolism, and have the opportunity to learn and discuss how cells handle nutrients and how nutrients contribute to cellular health and functioning. Nutritional science is highly interdisciplinary. This class concerns a part of the broad array of topics relevant to nutrition, particularly with focuses on the molecular and cellular aspects of food components essential to the body.

Prerequisite: General biology

The course first offers students an introduction to the discipline of International Relations to understand some of the key questions that scholars and policy makers have focused on, and how the field has been transformed as the world has changed around them. It then studies a series of pressing contemporary issues, including war, security, development, human rights, and terrorism. These cases and questions are analyzed through different theories including realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, and feminism.

The course looks at anthropological contributions to the understanding of ritual and religion, starting and ending with moments of especially acute reflection on the place of religion in the contemporary world. Our starting point will be that moment in the late 19th and early 20th century when classic theorists (especially Weber and Durkheim) pondered the place of religion in an age of scientific challenge, and students explore contemporary arguments about the boundaries between religion, power, and politics. Students also investigate the intersection of religion and ritual with a range of topics (gender, material culture, the body and cognition).

From ancient times people have been interested in recording or analyzing past events, thereby giving birth to different traditions of telling history and the development of history as an academic discipline with a strict methodology. Still, people often ignore the conventions of this field when they refer to past events. We must deal with the whole of the past and reveal it based on valid methods, without making choices based simply on what we like. There were always kings, politicians etc. who tried to create a glorious past or hide an inglorious past, to change or use memories of the past for harming others or benefiting themselves. The misuse of history is part of our long history, and it has always been the responsibility of historians to organize/analyze past sources and describe a fair picture of the past.

This course aims to provide a firm understanding about history as an academic discipline, with its general rules and methods, its strengths and limits, while at the same time, gaining an understanding of why a correct or decent understanding of history is (and was) important for us to cope with internal and external problems in our world.

This course focuses on four major themes in Japanese and East Asian history:
(1) Diplomacy and trade;
(2) Disasters and Pandemics;
(3) War and Politics; and,
(4) Territory.
 

Each week the course explores a selection of primary documents related to these themes and key events. The goals of this course are: (1) To think about how and why different people have recorded and written about past historical events; (2) To consider how these events and documents were interpreted by different stakeholders/audiences/winners/losers at the time, and (3) to identify the challenges and limitations faced by historians as we seek to better understand the past, and its relevance for the world we live in today.