English

The course focuses on the natural world and our relationship with it. It offers an in-depth exploration of topics in environmental geography, focusing on the biological, chemical, and physical processes that sustain life on Earth, human impacts on these processes, and strategies for mitigating environmental damage. Students engage with concepts of sustainability, conservation, and environmental policy. Topics include biodiversity loss, water, air and soil pollution, climate change, land modifications, environmental technologies, environmental policies and management decisions. By fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills, the course prepares students to contribute positively to environmental conservation, policy development, and sustainable management practices in various sectors.

This course examines multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine significant and complex issues of Northeast Asia in the past and present. It aims to help students understand how the historical legacy of Northeast Asia is reflected in today’s states and societies of these regions, and how political, economic, social, and cultural characteristics of Northeast Asia continue to evolve in a comprehensive way.

This course is meant for anyone interested in alternative forms of organizing in a constantly changing world. The course takes a political perspective on the phenomenon of organizing in order to make sense of both dominant bureaucratic organizations traditionally based on rationality, control and efficiency, and emerging alternative organizations that emphasize participation, democracy and autonomy. Applying a critical management approach, the course examines the contextual forces (e.g. globalization) and societal challenges (e.g. climate change) facing organizations today; the assumptions underlying current logics of organizing, taking the case of the sharing economy and questioning to what extent it can be considered an alternative are explored. Lastly, the course elaborates on the principles and practices associated with other forms of ‘alternative’ organizations and organizing, from social enterprises to cooperatives and social movements. In the second part of the course, students perform a small-scale field study with a subgroup, engaging with a so called ‘alternative’ organization/grassroots’ community/social movement to better explore their organizational functioning. This is a high intensity level 3 course. Active participation forms the backbone of this course.

This course examines dynamics and control of prokaryotic cellular processes in response to the biotic and abiotic environment including metabolic interactions and metabolic cooperation between microorganisms.

This course reassesses the multi-medial and genre-averse nature of the works of Samuel Beckett. The first part of the seminar focuses on modern interpretations of Beckett’s works in areas such as disability studies, queer studies, transhumanism, and feminism. The second part examines how Beckett challenges the boundaries and norms of the written word through various cross-generic mediums.

The course introduces students to the interplay between trade, migration, and issues such as inequality, environmental degradation, and global politics. It equips students with the analytical tools and essential knowledge necessary to engage in contemporary debates on these issues, helping them to gain a deeper understanding of the interconnected dynamics in the globalized economy. The course covers both theoretical concepts and empirical studies. Students will understand the key theories and concepts underlying international trade and migration and have developed an awareness of how trade and migration trends are influenced by and contribute to challenges in areas like the labor market, environmental sustainability, or social cohesion. For the final examination, students are expected to demonstrate their ability to critically evaluate and discuss the relationship between trade or migration and at least one of the challenges discussed throughout the course.

This course examines economic history and its persistent impact on economic development in the context of China. Particular attention will be paid to explaining the missing industrialization in the Ming-Qing period and the historical roots of China’s recent economic rise. To this end, the course will compare China to the West in terms of culture, institutions, human capital, and other fundamental forces of development, and will employ historical data and econometric tools to examine the economic impacts of these fundamentals. 

This course is an introduction to international negotiation. Topics include the basics of negotiation, diplomatic and business negotiation, communication skills, understanding and navigating cultural differences in international negotiation settings, strategic approaches to negotiation, and the role of English as a lingua franca. 

The course also examines and analyzes diplomatic negotiation in relation to the current era of globalization and the importance of bilateral and multilateral international negotiations between companies or governments. 

This course provides a basic and broad introduction to the representation, analysis, and processing of sampled data. The course introduces statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, machine learning, and visualization for experimental data. Examples are taken from real-world problems, such as analysis of internet traffic, language technology, digital sound, and image processing.

In this course, students address the question of how political institutions affect economic development.  Students examine three core sets of institutions - state, nation, and regime – examining their character and development in both historical and contemporary perspective.  Students look at how democratic nation states emerged in the West, comparing this to the experiences of contemporary developing countries. They consider the major theories on how these institutions impact on development and what empirical evidence they have about this relationship.