English

This course examines the analytical object "violence" in its differentiated dimensions. What we think of as violence encompasses multiple phenomena that cannot only be understood as forces of destruction: violence must be grasped as also generative of life-worlds. The course inquires into the nature of violence, explores its epistemological and existential, sensual and structural, exceptional and ordinary dimensions, and forms.

This course covers the principles behind, and practical application of, data handling, visualization, and analysis in Earth Sciences. Statistical training includes understanding data types, data presentation and basic descriptive statistics, probability, hypothesis testing using parametric and non-parametric statistics, correlation and regression, and an introduction to numerical methods and modelling. 

This course provides real world, experience-based learning on what it's like to actually start a new business. The main objective is to allow students to directly experience the earliest phases of an entrepreneurial startup process. The focus is on concept building and testing. Students are asked to actively engage in developing the initial business idea, but also in talking to potential customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors, as they confront the chaos and uncertainty of how a real startup actually emerges from the entrepreneurs' efforts.

Fluid mechanics is concerned with moving and stationary fluids. This course builds on the concepts of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, and develops the mathematical and numerical framework to understand the behavior of fluids, from molecular to astronomical scales. The equations are fundamentally nonlinear, and rely heavily on vector algebra. As a result, it develops the necessary command of mathematical and numerical methods for handling nonlinear partial differential equations, as well as physical intuition about how to deal with moving and deforming parcels of fluids. Specifically, the course begins by discussing the basic properties of fluids and gases, then applies thermodynamics and conservation laws to arrive at the Navier Stokes equations. With their help, it explores the behavior of fluids under different conditions, with a special focus on concepts relevant in biology, oceanography, and complex systems theory: turbulence, vorticity dynamics, boundary layers, instability, and waves.

While most businesses will employ an accountant for the preparation of financial statements and for analysis of accounting information, it may still be important that others, such as owners, managers, or employees, from a non-accounting background, have a good understanding of the importance of various aspects of accounting and finance for a business or organization. In this course, students view accounting as a tool of management, and learn how to critically evaluate financial reports to assess the performance of a business or organization, and to plan for its future activities.

 

The course deals with the long nineteenth century in Britain and the twentieth century in the United States. It defines and explores the concept of "radicalism" in these two contexts, and illustrates this with reference to the main radical groups and political parties, their principal actions, and their political legacy.

This course introduce the theories and the tools that attempt to explain the emergence, trajectories, and outcomes of social movements. It covers the basic processes by which societies initiate, consolidate, transform, and change their basic institutions and social structures and provides an anatomy of reform and revolutionary social movements, especially those affecting Arab and Third World societies. It examines a variety of case studies of social movements during the 20th century and discusses some of the case studies of the recent wave of uprisings in the Arab World. The course encourages students to think critically about how social movements emerge, sustain themselves, feel, think, achieve their goals or/and decline.

This course is designed to be a broad introduction to the field of sociology. Students encounter some of the most influential theories developed, imagined and used by sociologists to make sense of the social world. We discuss and acquire familiarity with the concepts sociologists typically use in their work, and with some of the core methods sociologists employ to investigate the social world. For instance, students gain an understanding of what sociologists mean when they talk about culture, socialization and social structure, and how sociologists analyse these concepts linking theory and empirical analyses. The course also encourages students to think critically (i.e. as a social scientist, about human life and societies and develop their own questions about social life). Finally, the course pays particular attention to the broad themes of inequality as it pertains to race, class and gender, and the social changes it brought about, as well as family changes, by adopting a life course perspective. 

Climate change exemplifies the sort of planetary challenge facing humankind in the 21st century. In this course, students explore how that kind of challenge can be understood as a scientific, political, social, and moral problem, to better understand our place in the world under conditions of multiple and interlocking crises. The course introduces the Anthropocene, as both a proposed geological phenomenon and a critical tool to rethink the relationship between humans and the planet. Pursuing this question require students to question some established distinctions—between human/animal, nature/culture, biology/society, life/nonlife, and Globe/Earth. Through anthropological materials, historical and contemporary accounts of life in the aftermath of industrial transformation, colonization and anthropogenic change, the course considers the types of knowledge, forms of collaboration, political engagement, and social practice that might help us better apprehend the fragility of the planet and articulate a shared responsibility to its future.