English

This course investigates how human societies adapt to climate change and variability. Central concepts and theories in current adaptation research are presented and discussed using case studies from different parts of the world. In doing so, central actors, policies, and management strategies are analyzed. This includes private and public stakeholders and institutions, and adaptation strategies and initiatives at different geographical scales (local, regional, national, and supranational).

This course introduces post-World War II Japanese history, with a focus on foreign policy and the domestic factors affecting it. The course examines Japan’s relations with Asia and the United States as well as issues such as the debate over the revision of Japan’s constitution; Japan’s security; the “history problem;” Japan’s official development assistance, and Japan’s “Soft Power” strategy. 

This course offers an introduction into the field of comparative politics with specific focus on the government and ideologies, social stratification, and institutions in the Middle East. It also includes a study of the problems of modernization and political development. It studies the similarities and differences between political systems by examining in-depth themes of analysis in order to provide certain patterns and dynamics to create a comparative framework tool in order to better understand the nature and dynamics of governance in the region. Themes include: Arab nationalism, democratization, personal rule, military involvement in politics, the politics of violence, and why civil war emerges. Specific country case studies are used as a basis to provide an in depth framework of understanding and analyzing the Middle East. The course creates an overall framework for students to navigate understanding of the region and develop a better understanding not only of individual political systems, but also an overall knowledge within that realm.

In this course, students develop appreciation for the diverse ways that natures are known, protected, and changed. It provides students with the skills to: (1) critically engage with histories and contemporary uses, languages, and concepts of nature and sustainable development; (2) critically reflect on our relationship to nature, as a basis for formulating strategies for action; (3) understand the fundamental, long-term functioning of coupled human and environmental systems, and the implications for sustainability; and (4) practice interdisciplinarity, synthesizing different forms of knowledge for sustainability or exploring their apparent contradictions. The course brings together both the natural and social sciences. It explores the roles of people, politics, and policies, and the nature of change that is required to meet contemporary challenges.

Students explore major formal, historical, and theoretical questions posed by the novel, including key ideas in narrative theory, the relationship between the novel and modernity and why the novel is often viewed as a central form for representing social life.

This course awakens for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetics, cultural capital, and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these promotes an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality, and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms, in relation to the world system, of affective, cognitive and monetary circulation. The seminar thus draws on and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of postmodernist/postwar global films and world-auteurs: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), Agnès Varda (France), and Orson Welles (USA). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus is evaluated anew. Attention is given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many utopian forms of thinking, looking, and individual/collective being. In so doing, it considers arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought in post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture is also given critical coverage.

This course covers the purpose, methodological aspects, and critical issues within the fields of comparative and international education. Students will examine currents trends in these areas, including international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The core themes and implications of these ILSAs for education will be a key focus of the course.  

Additionally, selected themes, such as culture and learning will be briefly covered, providing a comprehensive overview of the diverse factors influencing education worldwide. The course aims to sharpen students’ analytic and research skills while cultivating independent and comparative insights into education on an international scope. 

The course focuses on North American literature (USA and Canada) written in English, with a special emphasis on identity issues and the making of "national" literatures. Classic and funding texts are compared to outline the symbolic and mythological patterns that have shaped the US and the Canadian realities, from the European colonization till the end of the 19th century. In this class, literature is investigated through a constant dialogue with other arts, including media, cinema, photography, and the visual arts. The concepts of identity, memory, community, inner/outer landscape constitute the thematic paradigms to approach the evolving mentalities underpinning the evolution of complex identity processes in the so-called New World. This course features a series of guest scholars to encourage the dialogue between literature and civic society so to widen our knowledge of learning and training opportunities available nationally or internationally. The list of featured guests will be available when classes start. Students learn the literary history of the period at stake; they acquire useful literary tools to analyze fictional productions and question them in relation to the complex and heterogeneous North American realities.

The course provides an overview of the development of Icelandic culture from early to modern times, with emphasis on contemporary culture and art. Focus is placed on the rapid development of the country from a rural to an urban society during the past decades and the way in which the development has influenced Icelandic music, visual arts, films, theatre, and literature. 

This course explores the many ways in which poetry matters in the world: how it is read; how it is used; how it can be put to work in the messy and often contentious settings of social life. Drawing on frameworks from the sociology of literature, it considers how relationships with poetic writing and practice can be implicated in the formation - and contestation - of unequal social relations.