English

In this course, students uncover the fascinating world of processes in businesses and daily lives. They explore how things get made, from the smallest gadget to the largest machines. It's not just about factories and assembly lines; it's everything from a coffee shop to the latest tech companies and the processes they use. Students explore how to design these processes, keep them running smoothly, and constantly improve them.

This is a course in the rigorous treatment of Fourier series and related topics, including Fourier series, Fourier coefficients, trigonometric polynomials and orthogonality; properties of Fourier coefficients; Bessel's inequality, Parseval's identity and the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma; various notions of convergence of Fourier series, including pointwise, uniform and mean square convergence. Summability methods, convolution and Young's inequality; Fourier Analysis in broader contexts; for example, Fourier integrals, Fourier expansions in groups, Schwartz spaces and tempered distributions.

Do feminists everywhere share universal concerns? How have feminists in non-Western societies navigated the twin challenge of responding to patriarchy and to Western imperialism? How have they reacted to feminist scholarship in the West? What specific challenges have feminists in the Arab world and in China been responding to, historically and in the contemporary period? What importance have Islam and Confucianism had, respectively, in the formulation of feminist demands in these two parts of the world? In this course, students consider the question of the convergence and divergence of feminist discourses and ideas, East and West. Students will read primary texts written by feminists in China and in the Arab world, starting with the classical period of each tradition, and moving to the contemporary period.

This course will cover practical and conceptual approaches to the study of plant and animal ecology covering population dynamics, community structure and ecosystem ecology.

Framing the study of gangs in the context of debates on globalization, youth studies and urban sociology, this course approaches street gangs as a lens through which to analyze broader processes of social change and inequality in the contemporary era. Taking in perspectives from children and young people involved alongside the social, economic, cultural, and political forces shaping these experiences, the course equips students with an understanding of gangs that is sensitive to both the micro- and macro-level forces at work in the global era.

This class explores how technology is transforming banking and finance, with a focus on distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain, and innovations such as digital currencies, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and decentralized exchanges. It also examines the rise of Regulatory Technology (RegTech) and the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in financial markets and services. The class reviews these developments through a legal and regulatory lens, highlighting key challenges and opportunities. No prior knowledge of FinTech or related fields is required.

This course covers the economics of discrimination guided by economic theory and evidence. In the first part of the course, students look at some broad stylized facts relating to discrimination in the labor market (both racial and gender) and then explore some of the leading economic theories of the causes and consequences of discrimination, why it tends to persist despite the economic inefficiencies involved, the role for corrective policies, and to the extent the negative effects of discrimination are transmitted inter-generationally. The second part of the course includes the empirical measurement of discrimination, an overview of the economic consequences of racial and gender discrimination, which policies have been implemented to promote equality for underrepresented groups, and examines the relationship between economic inequality and intergenerational mobility. The second part also covers econometric methods used in the literature on the economics of discrimination. 

Ecosystems are central to addressing business and societal challenges; they foster collaboration and the pooling of resources to drive innovation aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course adopts a managerial perspective to create and manage ecosystems—physical, digital, or hybrid. Explore strategic, engineering, and technological intersections, stakeholder relationships, and real-world examples such as Brightlands campuses and global hubs like Silicon Valley. Through designing your own ecosystems, participants build practical skills in developing value propositions and collaboration structures, highlighting the practical relevance of ecosystem management.

The course develops students' professional communication skills. It enhances their vocal qualities and connection with the audience. It aids them in becoming fluent and confident speakers, and effective and efficient writers, who know how to state a clear main idea and provide clear and structured substantiation for their claims. The course focuses on projecting the voice, pronouncing clearly, breathing effectively, and relaxing the voice. Students give presentations throughout the course. 

On a global scale, wealth, health, and life opportunities are unfairly distributed. Several philosophers have emphasized that this unfairness gives the affluent a moral duty to help the worst-off, others have tried to formulate basic principles for a fair society. Whereas political philosophers of the past mainly focused on these issues through the lens of the nation state, contemporary thinkers argue that globalization processes force us to approach themes like sustainability, justice and equality on an international level, for example by constructing international institutions or by rethinking ideas about national sovereignty. This course discusses a wide range of analyses of these issues by visiting core political theories of past and present and coupling these with debates on specific (applied) questions. The focus is on values as diverse as liberty, equality, (international) justice, sovereignty, sustainability and more, and critically discuss issues arising from phenomena like migration, climate change and poverty.