English

This course examines knowledge of core business functions and analytical tools and applies these to the problems faced by modern organizations and decision-makers. There is a strong focus on the need to collectively arrive at decisions within decision groups, and to argue for these choices through typical business communication formats (e.g. business plans, slide packs, formalized reviews).  

In this course, students are introduced to a range of modernist authors from a variety of contexts and working in various genres and modes, including poetry, fic on, and the essay.  They learn how to recognize and articulate different conceptualizations of literary modernism from the early 20th century to the present. Students articulate the differences and interrelationships between some of the key figures of literary modernism across a range of cultural contexts. Students explore the debates regarding the multiple possible ways of defining literary modernisms. They gain a clear sense of how literary modernisms fit in within the literary histories of English, European, and US American literature. 

Religion is prominent in public debates, in the media, and in the cultural imaginary of people's daily life, no matter whether they see themselves as believers or not. In turn, religions also “make use” of media and mediation, creating symbolic representations and special experiences, be it through architecture and music, images and narratives, or through clothes and body practices. The course focuses on how the relationship between religion and media can be studied, and how this can help to better understand the role of religion in the public sphere. Our understanding of media reaches beyond TV and the internet – scripture and dance, money, and microphones are means of mediating religion as well. The course explores what a medium is; how religions are depicted in the media; how religions act on and react to new media; and how religions can be understood as mediation while often claiming to provide “immediate” and direct access to divine spheres.

In high value added manufacturing industry, engineers are required to understand how mechanical systems and materials behave at length scales at the micron level. This course develops the student’s skills and knowledge in both precision engineering and micro engineering. The course considers the selected topics in precision, micromanufacturing, ranging from enabling technologies, and processes to applications. This is research-lead, hence the content can vary on a year-to-year basis. Currently, most of the course focuses on LASER based manufacturing, LASER-Additive Manufacturing (3D printing) with metallic materials, and related automation.   

This course introduces arbitration as a procedural alternative to litigation. Different types of arbitration coexist for the settlement of a wide array of disputes in the transnational realm. Four types are studied in this course: commercial, investment, sports, and public international arbitration. Notwithstanding their evident distinctive features (e.g. involved parties, applicable law etc.), this course—on the procedural level—highlights common features and the challenges which they all face. Solutions to these challenges are nowadays no longer sought only in isolated reform and policy initiatives focusing on only one of these types of arbitration. Rather, global solutions and trends emerge for instance as regards the fight for corruption or the increasing demand for accountability and transparency of arbitral decision-making. Students identify and study the legal steps of the arbitral process from the signing of the arbitration agreement to the enforcement of the final award. While the course centers on procedural aspects, the provided materials and class discussions evidently offer insight into the substantive side of these disputes. Each session first provides an overview to foster a holistic understanding of the key procedural principles and dynamics at play. Subsequently, class discussion delves into a curated selection of materials encompassing all of the studied types of arbitration. Concurrently, students engage in a practical arbitration moot exercise, focusing on a range of procedural issues within a simulated arbitration framework. Working collaboratively in teams, students develop written arguments and present them before a fictitious Arbitral Tribunal during the final session of the course.

This course examines Australia’s rich and complex Aboriginal linguistic heritage in contemporary and traditional contexts. It covers language and the land, kinship and social organization, narrative and conversation, language acquisition, language contact, language and education, language maintenance and revival. There will be a focus on how new ways of speaking are created, how languages are lost, and the ways in which Aboriginal speakers are teaching and reviving their traditional languages today. 

This course covers recent statistical techniques in high dimensions and applies them to the analysis of real data. Students gain a broad understanding of various (non-convex) penalization techniques, dimensionality reduction, and more, with the goal of learning how to effectively summarize and interpret high-dimensional data and to systematically understand the challenges of analyzing data where the dimensionality of the data is comparable to or greater than the sample size.  

Topics include introduction to high-dimensional data, regression in high-dimensions, (non-convex) penalization methods in high-dimensions, regression in high-dimensional with real-data applications, matrix estimation with rank constraints, graphical models for high-dimensional data, spectral clustering in high-dimensions, principal component analysis in high-dimensions, and quantile regression in high-dimensions.   

This course examines the ways in which processes of colonization and de-colonization affect contemporary politics, resistance, transition, justice, the global order and localized and global challenges. 

This course examines human-centred design methods and tools that range from problem framing to prototyping, modelling, and validating solution ideas. Students will address a variety of briefs based on real-world problems and contexts, exploring their personal creative potential through a series of hands-on projects supported by presentations.

Being useful appears like a value per se: it would be an absolute, an ideal giving meaning to a life, a job, a public policy, a political project. Usefulness has been defined as a good in itself, and its negative, uselessness, as a criticism that devalues any object, especially any object in the political sphere. In contemporary times, the dividing line between useful and useless has come to be seen as a division between good and evil. But is this axis of division neutral? On what conceptual history does it rest? This course identifies the sources that have fueled the way in which, in a neoliberal context, public interest has become the equivalent of the Public Good, and the useless as the parasite that must be reduced, hunted down, and annihilated. An analysis of the notions of liberalism, neoliberalism and new public management are required for that.