English

This course focuses on the legal responses to climate change in three contexts: international, comparative, and national laws. It begins with causes and effects of global climate change and the methods available to control and adopt to it. It then investigates the emergence of climate change regime and various policy tools nations employ, including emission trading, carbon tax, litigation, securities disclosures, and voluntary action. Relations with other legal regimes (e.g., human rights, trade, and environmental justice will also be examined. 

Topics include Climate change and international law, Evolution of United Nations climate change regimes, Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement, Paris rulebook, Climate governance beyond the UN, Net zero, Green New Deal, Energy and climate change, corporate responsibility, climate liability, plastic pollution.  

This course offers a critical introduction to the sociology of revolution. As revolutions involve the dismantling of social orders and the remaking of new ones, revolutions are ripe for sociological exploration. Yet revolutions remain relatively absent from sociology curricula today. This course intervenes by guiding students through a global sociological history of revolutions spanning 200 years: from 1789 to 1989, before concluding by assessing 21st revolutionary movements in the aftermath of the putative 'end of history'.

This course examines the basic principles of pharmacology with an emphasis on drug action from the molecular and cellular levels to tissue, organ and whole organism levels. It will provide an understanding of the principles of drug action (pharmacodynamics) in terms of drug chemistry, drug-receptor interaction, receptor theory and dose-response relationships. An introduction to receptor-mediated signal transduction, membrane receptors and autonomic pharmacology will be covered. The handling of drugs by the body through the processes of absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (pharmacokinetics) will be covered in some detail along with drug analysis and the adverse effects of drugs. 

This course sheds light on how markets emerge and the actions needed to create a market. It also explains the role of institutions, networks, and culture in shaping markets. Lastly, Third, it shows the way in which markets are organized and has distributive effects. Understanding that specific actions are needed to create a market and the different ways in which markets can be shaped counters an understanding that takes markets as granted and market competition and the ensuing consequences as something natural. The course covers the various challenges associated with creating a market: challenge of cooperation, challenge of competition and challenge of establishing value, ability to explain how different mechanisms contribute to solving these challenges, and applying the concepts discussed in class to current issues in concrete markets.

This course provides an introduction to the basics of Modern Standard Arabic. Students learn to how to read, write and speak the language.

Short-lived, high magnitude extreme events, from meteorite impacts, to volcanic eruptions, fire, and storms, have shaped the surface of the earth throughout its geological history. Increasing population densities in critical locations on our planet (e.g. cities at the foot of volcanoes, on tectonic fault lines, and at the coast) and human impacts on the environment at the local, regional and global scale, however, have altered the likelihood and magnitude of certain types of natural hazards. This has brought the vulnerability of societies to natural hazards into sharp focus over recent decades. In October 2020, the UN Office on Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) reported that, over the past two decades, 1.23 million people had lost their lives in a total of 7,348 ‘disaster events’ that had been recorded globally (with floods (40% of occurrences), storms (28%), earthquakes (8%), and extreme temperatures (6%) as the four most impactful types of hazard). In our efforts to reduce the human and economic impact of such events, an understanding of the reasons for their occurrence, their spatial and temporal variability, the degree to which they are ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘anthropogenic’ as well as past and potential future societal responses to such events is critical. This course addresses the above aspects beginning with an introduction to ‘natural’ hazards and general concepts or risk and vulnerability. The introductory lectures are then followed by lectures, targeted reading and discussion groups. Finally, students explore case studies highlighting past, present, and potential future societal solutions for the mitigation of the impact of natural hazards with guest speakers bringing an applied natural hazard and risk management perspective to this course.

This course considers how American literature explores the relationship between various American peoples and the land from the earliest colonial settlements to the present day. It ranges across genres, from philosophical writing and journalism, through the novel and poetry, to the short story and theatre, to narrate the spaces that accommodate the current U.S.A and the contingency, precarity, and fragility of human and animal life upon them. From famed urban spaces, through the plantations that perpetuated slavery, to ideas of the wilderness and the seascapes of the whaling industry, the course tracks how literary texts of the U.S. canon and countercanon manifest, and often too critique, American political projects and geographical fictions that have contributed to current environmental conditions. 

This course examines theoretical developments in the psychology of learning from a behavior analytic perspective. It provides definitions of the basic behavioral terminology and an overview of the emergence of the experimental analysis of behavior. By focusing on theoretically important experiments, it traces the evolution of behavior analytic research, starting with animal-based work using simple classical and operant conditioning paradigms and finishing by examining modern behavior analytic research on language and higher cognition in humans. The strong scientific tradition of behavior analysis is emphasized, as evidenced by rigorous measurement of behavior, precise specification of methods, and careful interpretation of outcomes.

The course provides an overview over some of the most important aspects of Nazi Germany – covering political, cultural, social and military history. The course provides insights into one of the darkest, most disturbing and most formative periods of modern European history. The course aims to pay particular attention to different and conflicting interpretations of how the Third Reich came into being and why Hitler’s dictatorship proved to be one of the most murderous in history. Particular attention is paid to racial thinking, the Holocaust and the question of European collaboration with the Nazis. The course aims to improve the students’ capacity to engage with historical interpretations and different methodological approaches.
 

This course offers an overview of sociological approaches to law as social relationships and social institution. It gives an overview of theoretical, methodological, and empirical issues discussed in the Sociology of Law as a sub-discipline. The themes of the course include questions of justice, law enforcement, legal professionalism, everyday 'life' of law, social norms, and social change. These topics are scrutinised through both socio-legal and sociological methods. Drawing on theoretical approaches in legal studies, the course offers a variety of definitions of law that are then critically assessed with sociological tools. Hence, the broader question of the course is: What is law? What forms does the law take in our societies? How does law constitute the societies and do societies constitute the law? In other words, during the classes, we look at social, political, and historical aspects of the formation of justice as we know it.

The course covers literature in the Sociology of Law from classic authors (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) to contemporary debates (feminist jurisprudence, queer criminology, etc.).