English

Sustainable marketing involves the creation and delivery of value to customers in ways that honor and improve both environmental and societal wellbeing. Through lectures and case studies, this course covers the principles of sustainable marketing across various industries, such as apparel, food, automotive, and technology, and provides an understanding of the sustainable consumer.  

Students learn to develop sustainable marketing strategies and explore how traditional marketing principles are being reshaped by growing sustainability concerns.  

The course defines sustainable marketing and links it to related business concepts like corporate social responsibility and delves into the "triple bottom line" framework, which encompasses economic performance, environmental impact, and social impact. Utilizing real-world examples, the course examines the buy-one-give-one business model through the lens of Bombas, reviews corporate sustainability strategies, and discusses how Allbirds adapts its approach to maintain competitiveness. The courses also covers the characteristics, psychology, and behaviors of sustainable consumers.  

Students are introduced to the Intention-Behavior gap, which highlights the difference between consumers' sustainable attitudes and their actual behaviors. Through the SHIFT framework, students investigate ways to bridge this gap by addressing key factors such as social influence, habit formation, individual identity, feelings and cognition, and tangibility. Additionally, students analyze sustainable consumer trends, including voluntary simplicity, vintage fashion, and sustainable luxury.  

A detailed examination of Norlha, a luxury yak wool textile enterprise on the Tibetan Plateau, provides a case study in sustainable luxury. 

This class then covers the essential steps for creating a sustainable marketing plan, discussing product development and marketing sustainable innovations, and applying these concepts through the Aleph Farms case.  

Next, students learn how to use life cycle analysis to assess the social and ecological impacts of sustainable products and explore issues related to sustainable supply chain management and the management of re-commerce platforms within the circular economy. Finally, we study how to design effective communication campaigns for sustainability goals, illustrated by the General Motors case on electric vehicles. 

The course introduces the principles of probability and statistics and their applications in engineering. Topics include the relationship between probability and statistics; random variables; probability distributions; mathematical expectation; random sampling; estimation; tests of hypotheses, and regression analysis. 

This course explores Berlin through the lens of émigré and exile literature, examining works by writers who either left Berlin or found refuge within it. Through close readings of texts spanning from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary works, students analyze how experiences of exile, migration, and displacement shape literary imagination and cultural identity. The course moves through Berlin's key historical moments—from the Russian émigré communities of the 1920s, through the forced exile of Jewish writers, to post-war Turkish-German literature and contemporary refugee narratives. By pairing literary texts with theoretical frameworks and conducting original ethnographic research, students investigate how different waves of migration have transformed both Berlin's physical spaces and its literary landscape. Special attention is paid to how writers represent specific Berlin neighborhoods and how various communities have shaped the city's cultural geography. Through engagement with memoir, fiction, poetry, and first-hand accounts, students explore themes of memory, nostalgia, linguistic displacement, cultural adaptation, and the evolving relationship between place and identity in émigré writing.

This course offers an exploration of the derivation, development and practice of Irish foreign, security and defense policies, with a particular focus on contemporary challenges. Students gain a detailed insight into Ireland's place in the contemporary world order, the transformation of Irish national foreign, security and defense policy through its membership of the European Union and the efforts of Irish policy makers to pursue Irish interests and values within an evolving global order. This includes an analysis of Irish foreign policy strategy, policy making and economic, political and military engagement. This course provides a solid theoretical and empirical grounding for further advanced study, and encourages students to compare and to evaluate critically competing understandings of Ireland in the world. Transferable skills are developed through independent research, teamwork, communications and role play.

In this course, students learn to conceptually understand and empirically explore how news content is evolving in response to social media platforms. The first seminar introduces students to key theoretical concepts related to the platformization of journalism, the adaptation of news to TikTok’s affordances, and audience-centered approaches to understanding what constitutes news on TikTok. Students learn to critically engage with current studies on news on social media and develop their own questions for empirical research. In the second seminar, students gain an overview of methods for audiovisual content analysis, ranging from qualitative and quantitative approaches to computational analyses. Students learn about key steps of the data collection and analysis of TikTok content. The coupled seminars are structured around an empirical group project, allowing students to directly apply the concepts and methods related to news content on TikTok.

In this course, students learn how to use Python to retrieve and parse data from biological repositories through bulk download and application programming interfaces (APIs). They learn about established data formats for different data modalities so that they understand the structure and content of the data they are using and how it was generated. Each week students focus on analytical tasks in linked topics that span the main components of modern biomedical informatics research. Topics change slightly each year, but typically include tools, algorithms, and approaches for biological sequence, multi-omics (transcriptomics, proteomics, methylomics), biomedical network, and biomedical text analysis. Each topic is explored using real-world examples.

 

This course integrates Chinese language and culture, by using materials from Chinese culture, history, and actuality to support language teaching. It was designed especially for those UCU students following a track in Chinese language and culture and preparing for their study abroad program in China. It is, however, also suitable for all students interested in Chinese language and culture.

At the end of the course, students have acquired knowledge on the main morphological, physiological, and molecular responses of higher plants to environmental cues and the basic mechanisms of tolerance and adaptation to adverse conditions. Students learn about how plants contribute to air quality by the release of biotic particulates and by interfering with air pollutants derived from anthropogenic activities. Due to changes in plant distribution in relation to climate change, students become acquainted with the contribution of alien species to the release of such biotic particulates. Students also learn about methods employed in aerobiology for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of pollen and other air-borne allergens, gain the capacity to interpret data, and critically read scientific literature relating to this topic. They also acquire knowledge on the ability of plants to monitor environmental quality and influence it, on the release of volatile plant compounds with therapeutic effects as well as on the possible use of plants in environmental phytoremediation. Additionally, students in the laboratory acquire methods to analyze plant allergenic proteins, to monitor the effect of stress on photosynthetic activity; in addition, students analyze an aerobiological sample, allowing them to know that a myriad of microorganisms and particulates (many of which are respirable) are present in the atmosphere.

Laboratory activities:

1. Microscopic recognition of aerobiological slide: allergenic and non-allergenic pollen

2. Western blotting/dot blotting for apple and pollen allergenic proteins

3. Pollen-fruit cross-reactivity with specific Ab and comparison with non-cross-reactive pollen/food

4. Handy-Pea: evaluation of photosynthetic activity in stressed and non-stressed plants (e.g. plants maintained at 4 °C)

This course examines the causes and consequences of climate change in relation to agriculture, recognizing agriculture as both a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and a sector highly vulnerable to climate impacts. With particular attention to Ireland, where agriculture accounts for a substantial share of national emissions, the course explores innovative land-use solutions and strategies for mitigation and adaptation at local and global scales. Topics include livestock management, food systems and dietary choices, agricultural efficiency, bioenergy, and policy pathways toward carbon neutrality, including those proposed by Teagasc. The course also emphasizes the development of research skills, including the sourcing, critical evaluation, and synthesis of information related to agriculture and climate change.