English

This course explores cultural heritage definitions and relevant conceptualizations in the local context. It introduces the historical development of cultural heritage in the contemporary world. It then further discusses the current legal and policy framework of local heritage selection and conservation. It requires students to reflect on what heritage is and how heritage shall be selected and defined. Students will explore the social relation between cultural heritage and the local community through various local case studies. They will debate how cultural heritage shall be interpreted from a local perspective but could be operated sustainably.

This course critically evaluates Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), focusing on firms’ attempts to prevent labor standards violations in their supply chains. Students begin by analyzing the rise of CSR, setting it in the context of global value chains, international labor standards, and emerging private forms of regulation. They then analyze topics such as the impact of CSR on corporate financial performance; whether CSR is an effective means of raising labor standards; theories of CSR; and how to embed CSR within the firm and comparative CSR. The course includes examples of how large firms are dealing with the ethical challenges posed by global supply chains. The course will include one lecture from a CSR professional.

At the zenith of the civil rights movement in the USA and de-colonizing movements in Africa, the Carribean  and Asia, just prior to the advent of second wave feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and other social movements linking political liberation to embodied physical differences, something new was born. There arose a new vision of the body as precisely the obverse of how we now consider it—a single, universal human body shared by all, ungendered, unraced, unsexed. This new body-in-common, unmarked even by such core physical differences as biological sex, became legible as radically dissident under a new political ideology that has thus far largely escaped historical attention: Eros. As a potent challenge to a number of repressive orthodoxies, not least capitalism, Eros was also, perhaps not surprisingly, a central theme in a number of art works of the period, from Carolee Schneemann’s nude performances to Claes Oldenburg’s erotic public sculpture, Yayoi Kusama’s immersive environments, Helio Oticica’s Tropicales and Kenneth Anger’s films. This course examines the relationship among art, sex, gender and revolution from the vantage point of Eros’ brief historical moment, a vista now largely obscured by our contemporary fixation on a politics of social distinction and bodily difference. Reading the work of Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Norman O Brown and others, we will also study the art, film and performance of such key figures as Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Franz Erhardt Walters and Rebecca Horn.  As such, this period constitutes both the theoretical prehistory of the sexual revolution, as well as perhaps the defining episode in our ongoing transubstantiation of flesh into politics.

This course examines the evolution of global internet governance. It focuses on the changing role of key actors and conflicts between them – the conflict between private or public oversight, the rise of multistakeholderism, and the attempts of democratic as well as authoritarian states to increase their regulatory grip. It also focuses on key issues of global internet governance such as privacy protection, content control, or cyber security. The course starts from the assumption that despite its dynamics, internet governance is politics like any other and can be understood with standard social science tools, particularly with concepts from international relations and political science.

This course explores diverse aspects of death and dying. It encompasses history, the arts, the impact of technology, anthropological perspectives, social policy, and key theories. Underpinning the course is the permission to discuss a subject normally viewed as "depressing" or even "contagious" in an open – and even fun – way. This challenges taboos and creates space to explore a wide range of aspects, from the mundane to the bizarre.

This course explores questions concerning personal identity and transformation raised by the two Golden-Age writers who hold a pivotal position in Danish cultural heritage: Hans Christian Andersen and Soren Kierkegaard. The course treats the question of searching for one's identity and themes of self-examination, self-definition, inner exploration, as well as understanding one's values, belief's, passions, and purpose in life. Through the works of Andersen and Kierkegaard, these themes are explored in their connection to cultural, social, emotional, and personal dimensions. The course considers how, though both writers are intimately connected to their contemporary society, there is something in their works that far surpasses the limits of the national and historical consciousness to which they adhere, and extend to a wider, global, and modern consciousness. It examines what it is in their writings that merits such a prolonged actuality and such an extensive, modern appeal. Through a vast proliferation of conceptual, fictive, and allegorical narratives, Andersen and Kierkegaard outline a map for the individual to navigate a path toward self-realization, without giving any definite directions nor any fixed points of orientation.

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 in-depth knowledge of how the Italian literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance evolved, with particular reference to the texts that profoundly influenced the subsequent literature and culture, so confirming the canon. The course explains how to best analyze texts, reading them with a critical eye and relating them to various temporal and social-cultural periods. Specifically, this course focuses on the works of Dante Alighieri, which are a landmark of both the Italian and the European medieval literary canon, and have exercised a paramount influence on the Western cultural tradition as a whole. The course introduces a selection of crucial themes and episodes from the Commedia and other minor works. Lectures and seminars explore the context of late medieval Italian culture and society in which Dante's oeuvre has been produced, and examine its afterlife and significance for modern literature and visual culture.

This course provides a psychological foundation for understanding consumer behavior and marketing strategy. The course builds from current psychological theory to understand recent marketing applications. Topics include perception, attention, memory, language, categorization, creativity, social cognition, and personality, and their application to product design, marketing communications, and brand management. Students on this course learn: how the basic principles of psychology constrain and predict consumer perceptions and preferences; how psychological models can be used to develop effective marketing strategies and campaigns. Topics covered in this course include: perception and sensory marketing; perceiving similarity and differentiation; consumer memory; the language of marketing communication; marketing emotions; creative consumption; brand personality; social aspects of consumption. Prerequisites for this course include an introductory marketing course.
 

This course develops one's understandig of economic phenomena through analyzing evolutions of Japanese economy over the past decades and their interactions with economic policies, including monetary, fiscal, financial regulation policies, trade and industrial policy. The discussion encompasses the high-speed growth period of the '60s; the hyper-inflation age of the '70s; the financial bubble of the '80s; the financial crises of the '90s and 2000s, as well as the successive deflationary decades extended through the launch of the new policies - Abenomics and beyond.