English

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides knowledge of a portion of the vast field of diaspora studies. The course covers diasporic cultures, imaginaries, consciousness, subjectivities, and practices across a variety of contexts and assesses the stakes of ‘diaspora’ as an analytical concept as well as lived experience. The course also covers the importance of intertwining critical race theory with ethnography in order to understand diasporic subjectivities are racialized. The course also equips students with decolonial approaches and methodologies to migration and diaspora studies, building the tools to critically engage with historical and contemporary debates around identity, nationalism, race, multiculturalism, and difference. "Diaspora" as a concept has enabled an understanding of identities and cultures beyond national, ethnic, or racial connotations. Diaspora functions as a vision to think of subjectivities and communities not as epiphenomena of nation-states but as springboard for de-territorialized and transnational cultural and political formations and political subjectivities. The first part of the course introduces anthropological and social theories of migration and looks at what Diaspora as a heuristic device has brought to studies and understandings of home, belonging, identities, and political cultures. In the second part, the course focuses on how liberal states manage Diasporas through containment, confinement, disciplining, and through a highly emotional politics of fear. Finally, the course analyzes diasporas as "cultures of resistance" effecting a dissolution of borders and boundaries in their everyday aesthetic and performative practices.

This course traces the history and evolution of rock and roll music and culture, from its inception in the 1950s to 1990s. It examines its artistic content and cultural, social and global roles, serving to develop general intellectual capacities of popular culture. The course studies the origin, development, and growth of rock and roll music from a variety of perspectives (e.g. social, cultural, global, technological and commercial standpoints) and discuss specific trends, styles, and issues related to the music industry. By evaluating rock history during its most fruitful years, the course seeks an understanding of what rock music is and its relationship to global popular culture, historical representation, and other media industries. The course covers American rock and roll and British, Scandinavian, and world music to a certain extent.  

This course provides an interdisciplinary examination of human trafficking, exploring its nature, impact, and responses from various angles. Through a combination of readings, discussions, and research, it critically analyzes the complexities of human trafficking, including its forms, anti-trafficking advocacy, challenges in research and evidence, psychological effects on victims, funding mechanisms, and public perceptions. Drawing on seminal texts, recent research articles, and recommended readings, the course provides insight into the global phenomenon of human trafficking and its implications for policy, advocacy, and social justice. Throughout, it explores pertinent psychological phenomena, including trauma bonding, learned helplessness, dissociation, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, cognitive dissonance, survivor's guilt, and post-traumatic growth, which significantly influence victims' experiences and recovery processes. Through this comprehensive examination, the course develops a deeper understanding of human trafficking and its impact on individuals and societies.

This course provides students with credit for professional and academic experience through internships with local organizations. While working at the internship site, students gain new abilities and skills and develop self-confidence from pursuing challenging goals. The academic component helps students navigate the challenges that they are likely to face while interning and afford them a greater understanding of their strengths and limitations related to their work experience and to Morocco. Students thereby get the opportunity to explore or affirm possible career aspirations. The Internship course provides students with a significant on-site work experience, both in terms of time spent and the tasks completed under the guidance of their mentors. The seminar develops their personal, interpersonal, and intercultural competences in order to maximize the gains from their internship placements. Furthermore, it broadens students’ perspectives of their international professional experience through a series of guided discussions, a professional journal, a final project, and presentations. The seminar helps students to evaluate and enhance their development in the workplace during their on-site work experience. Students explore and understand major professionally-related topics and develop their intercultural skills through interactive workshops and reflection of their work experience in the host culture.

This course examines the intricate relationship between colonialism, urban development, and economic growth through the lens of political ecology. A central theme of the course is the examination of colonial legacies and their enduring impact on contemporary urban and environmental dynamics. We will critically analyze how Europe's historical growth has often occurred at the expense of other regions, relying on extractive and exploitation of resources in colonized territories to fuel metropolitan centers. Through the classical readings in this field, contemporary case studies, and critical discussions, we will interrogate the role of colonialism in shaping global patterns of urbanization, resource extraction, and environmental degradation. By the end of the course, we will gain insights into potential pathways for building more equitable and environmentally sustainable futures.

Since the Covid19 pandemic and in the context of climate change, slogans such as “follow the science” or appeals to “trust science” have become ubiquitous. In fact, for modern societies, science and scientists are probably the last remaining unquestioned authorities; when we need guidance, we turn to scientific experts and trust that they will give us solid advice. However, this is a relatively new development; during the time of the ascent of the sciences, from the 18th through to the mid-20th centuries, new discoveries and inventions in the sciences as well as the scientists and inventors themselves were met with fear, skepticism or suspicion. One powerful expression of this attitude of societies towards the sciences can be found in popular works of fiction: we still use the names of fictional characters such as Faust, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll or Dr Strangelove to characterize mad, evil or amoral scientists as well as dangerous scientific and/ or technological developments. Program: In this course, we will examine the development of literary / cultural imaginations of science and scientists, looking at key texts as well as key developments in the sciences: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, galvanism and the creation of life; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde: experimental drugs and the split personality; H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau: Vivisection and genetics; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: eugenics, genetic engineering and chemistry; the figure of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, in post-war reality and fiction, and, finally, the benevolent scientific research on climate change as presented in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth trilogy. Based on extracts from the texts and on academic texts which contextualize and analyze the topics, discussions in class will take literature as a point of departure for a more fundamental examination of the connection between science and society.

This course introduces Chinese and Japanese literature through the works of best-known 20th-century poets (including songwriters) writing in Chinese or Japanese primarily to students from outside Chinese or Japanese-speaking cultures majoring in East Asian studies. East Asian Studies majors are encouraged to use this course as a complement to more specialized courses in Chinese and/or Japanese literature in their portfolio. 

Knowledge of Japanese and/or Chinese would be of great use, but is not a prerequisite for taking this course.

This course builds on previous stress analysis courses by extending the concepts of linear elasticity to two and three dimensions, as the basis for advanced stress analysis. Topics covered include complex stresses and strains, Mohr’s circle, failure criteria, shear stresses in beams, thick-walled cylinders, plastic failure and buckling of struts. The course enables students to develop sufficient familiarity with stress analysis and strength of materials to design a safe and reliable load-bearing component of simple geometry (or to assess the safety of an existing one).

This course introduces how to manage and interpret accounting processes, balance sheets, and understand accounting principles with a specific focus to European and international norms and principles. The course comprises two modules: financial accounting and management accounting. In financial accounting, this course focuses on accounting in action, the recording process, adjusting accounts, the accounting cycle, accounting for merchandising operations, and inventories. In management accounting, this course focuses on cost basics, costs behavior and cost-volume-profit relationship, absorption costing, short-term decision making, pricing, budgeting, and variance analysis. 

This course introduces students to an approach to politics which emphasizes a global perspective. Postcolonial studies moves beyond both International Relations, which tends to discuss relations between states or great powers, and Third World Studies, which isolates certain parts of  the world and discusses them separately. In contrast to a view of the world as split into the industrialized, developed West and the underdeveloped or developing South, what this course explores is the relationships between these two areas, seeing them as mutually constitutive: they produce each other. It examines how they have come to be produced as distinct, and how these differences are perpetuated as well as resisted through practices of development, race, gender, and neocolonialism.