English

This course is devoted to a close reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION. The central concern of the course is to understand Merleau-Ponty’s importance for contemporary philosophy as well as cognitive science.

This course provides an introduction to African studies, especially to the Southern African Countries. While the African continent has significant legal, political and economic challenges, students are rarely introduced to the attempts of African states to set up structures to confront those challenges through regional integration. This course introduces students to the various legal, political, and economic regional integration initiatives in the emerging Southern African region.

The course features presentations from Ambassadors and Embassy officials of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), focusing on the variety of the economy and politics of the SADC region, as well as the relationship between Japan and each respective SADC state.  

This course discusses the concept of emerging countries and the transition of developing countries to emerging countries and on to developed countries. It provides an overview of economics, state and political institutions, and challenges of emerging countries.

This course offers an introduction to cryptography. Topics include: mathematical foundations of cryptography; classic cryptography; symmetric encryption; key distribution and asymmetric encryption; hash functions, MAC, and authenticated encryption; digital signatures schemes; public key infrastructure; user authentication.

This course introduces student government and politics of America, including its major elected offices (president, senators, congress persons and state governors), nomination process (caucuses and primaries), political parties and candidates, campaign issues and financing, and the general election. The course also analyzes the cleavages that divide American societies, seeking to understand how race, ethnicity, gender, religion, region, and sexual orientation affect people’s support for political parties and voting behavior.  In addition, there will be discussion on American foreign policy.  

This course examines Asia's cultures, track its political evolution from pre-colonial to post-colonial times, and explains its renewed prominence in contemporary global affairs.

This course traces technological developments and cross-cultural influences of food production in human history and demonstrates the effect of the evolution of historical civilizations up to the present. Engaging with this long temporal view helps students to reflect on the origins and effects of technological developments in food production. The course consists of three thematic and chronological blocks: the origins of agriculture (Neolithic agriculture; systems of land exploitation); the global diffusion of plants and animals (separation between Old and New World; Columbian Exchange); and the development of modern industrial food technology (changes in food processing technologies and consumption practices; industrial revolution; role of science in food production). 

This course provides an introduction to the theory and practices of economic policy-making. To understand economic policy-making, students take an economic as well as a political perspective. Students focus on the rationale behind economic policies, and seek to understand major changes in economic policy, and variation in policies across countries. Students also look at individual preferences for these policies, and their implications for the policy-making process. In the process, the course covers areas such as economic liberalization, financial regulation, labor market policies, and policies of poverty reduction and social insurance. The course takes an empirical and comparative approach, and its focus is generic, though most of the literature is concerned with policy-making in EU and OECD countries. 

Hate crimes are on the rise, and so is support for political violence. Because of their subjugating and oppressing nature, bias-motivated offenses are generally viewed as different in their effects. Compared to their non-bias-motivated counterparts, hate crimes strike thrice. First, by targeting the immediate victim; second, by sending a “message” to the victim’s perceived community; and third, by calling into question an open societies’ commitment to inclusion, equity and tolerance. As such, hate crimes pose a serious threat to democratic ideals and to the complex challenge of maintaining and strengthening a peaceful coexistence. In this seminar, we will explore the contextual drivers of hate crimes through a quantitative lens. By examining the existing literature, we will investigate the impact of various social, economic, political, and institutional factors on the frequency and prevalence of hate crimes. In addition to exploring the causes of hate crimes, we will critically examine strategies aimed at preventing these acts. In addition to theoretical knowledge, this course emphasizes practical experience. We will engage with common datasets, learn about relevant research designs and replicate existing studies. 

The subject of the course is active tectonic movements with emphasis on processes currently active in Iceland. Theory of plate tectonics, plate velocity models, both relative and absolute. Elastic and ductile behaviour of rocks in the crust and mantle. Brittle fracturing. Plate boundary deformation. Rifts and rifting structures. Transcurrent faulting and associated structures. Earthquakes and faulting. Measuring crustal movements, GPS-geodesy, levelling, SAR-interferometry, tilt- and strainmeters. A one-day field project is carried out in an active area. Additionally, one day field trip to the plate boundary areas of SW-Iceland. This course is only for exchange students.