English

This course introduces theories in critical communication and technology studies and applies these theories to contemporary debates around big data and AI, examining multiple and situated contexts of technology within mediated environments. The course invites students to delve deeply into critical perspectives and explore where and how data systems re-arrange and re-organize existing human practices.  

This course examines political dynamics of development and resistance. It covers contemporary struggles over development as well as some of the historical trajectories underpinning those. It introduces the ﾠpolitical dynamics of development and resistance at local, national, regional, and global levels, and the relevance of decolonial thought. It explores how different political development objectives inter-relate, and how they are institutionalized, experienced, and acted upon, not least through resistance struggles, contestations, and calls for reform or change. 

This course consolidates and expands both receptive and productive skills through a variety of learning tasks, to be carried out individually and/or in group. It aims at fluency and accuracy and it fosters independent learning.

Making Micro Documentaries immerses students with little formal filmmaking or arts backgrounds in the process of shooting short unscripted films or documentaries. It examines methodologies for devising, producing and distributing short films, and how they can be used to support and enhance the student's own academic output. The course asks participants to use their own devices for audio and video capture, editing and post-production. During the course, students will shoot a series of micro movies to explore how moving images engage with, and represent, the real world. The practice-led program will be framed by critical analysis and historical contextualization. 

This course examines the manner in which modern Japanese literature reflects issues of concern in Japanese society, among them discrimination, family life, the ageing population, war, disaster, identity, gender, and sexuality. Students will read a range of translated Japanese literature including fiction, non-fiction, academic articles, and short-form literature (i.e. poetry, short stories) written from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Students will also engage with material written about Japan by non-Japanese writers (i.e. news articles, academic articles etc.). 

This course examines digital cultures, the critical interdisciplinary field of research into the cultural and social dimensions of digital technologies. It explores the histories, imaginaries, ideas, platforms and thinkers that inform the study of digital cultures. Students will examine tools and theories that explain the interrelated processes of digital media and communications development and social change. 

This course focuses on digital frontiers, geopolitical frontiers, and religious-health frontiers in Africa. It develops critical analytical skills for understanding and engaging with the challenges and opportunities related to the selected emerging frontiers in diverse African contexts. The course investigates various approaches to the notion of "frontier" – both theoretical and methodological – for investigating and analyzing a range of emerging empirical frontier forms and their effects. In keeping with an interdisciplinary, critical African Studies approach, it introduces ways of thinking about frontiers in their historical, spatial, political, social, cultural, economic, and technological contexts. The selected areas of focus include growing trends and new dynamics linked to widescale digitalization across the African continent; the effects within and beyond the continent of geopolitical shifts in interests, actors, encounters, and conflicts linked not least to changes from a unipolar to more multipolar world order; and changing relations, practices, and effects arising out of new encounters between religious and health spheres on the continent. Attention is also given to new epistemological/knowledge frontiers being generated on the continent.

This course offers a broad introduction and critical review of recent trends in the field of digital humanities, with particular attention paid to applications relevant for the study of premodern societies (history, archaeology, anthropology, theology, museum studies). The course is divided into four broad themes – text, image, place, and object – highlighting an extensive interdisciplinary range of evidence that both sits within students' fields of study and encourages them to create connections with parallel avenues of scholarship. Following these themes, the course introduces cutting edge tools, successful research projects, and recent scholarship that have leveraged digital advances to fundamentally reshape our understanding of the past. Simultaneously, it engages with more complex topics concerning the ethical and methodological implications of the “Digital Turn” in humanistic studies and its implication for more traditional modes of enquiry. As a whole, this course prepares students to both more substantively engage with digital methodologies and their potential for novel research in religious studies, broadly defined. The course provides hands-on experience developing fundamental skills in digital humanistic scholarship, developing a “Digital Toolbox” that allows students to both undertake digital scholarship in their own studies and to critically engage with ongoing trends and projects relevant to their own research. These tools include, but are not limited to, introductions to GIS, database development, 3D modeling, text encoding, large language models, network modeling, and semantic modeling. Special attention is paid to ongoing research at the University of Copenhagen, highlighting the fundamental skills and research objectives of the diverse research programs taking place throughout the university. The Faculty of Theology, in particular, hosts several compelling case studies for the development and implementation of digital humanities and offers a behind-the-scenes look at these methods in action.