English

Conventionally, the discipline of International Relations tends to either obliterate or ascribe race and racism as categories to a subsidiary role in the mainstream scholarships that organize, structure, and regulate the borders of its field of inquiry, which has deep implications on how we imagine and articulate political interventions. In such framework, IR reiterates a view of world politics and of the interstate system that privileges the perspective of the Western and Westernized dominant powers and reifies the historical and cultural subject position of white and ‘whitened’ groups, globally.  The course investigates world politics from the premise that the underlying condition of the international order, as we know it, and the (post)colonial geographies that it has historically been built upon is permanent racialized violence and multiple antiblack codes. Therefore, the aim is to explore the explanatory agency of race and racism as analytical categories in multiple international contexts and political conjunctures, drawing particularly from the African and Afrodiasporic scholarships, which also include the so-called Black studies. This epistemological and methodological move towards African and African diasporic intellectual traditions is premised upon the perceived need to question the persistent monopoly on author-hood over what can be said, known, and consequently done about the international, the global and the national time-spaces. 

This course covers basic theories and contemporary issues of Human Rights Law across international, national, and transnational dimensions. Important themes and questions in the fields are explored by closely examining cases from various jurisdictions and critically engaging with global academic literature. Active class participation, including one class presentation, is expected. This is a discussion-based seminar course, but a few lecture sessions may be provided as necessary.  

Topics include ideas of human rights, transnational approaches to human rights, human rights and state sovereignty, universality and particularity, non-citizens' rights and democracy, rights of social minorities, equality and discrimination, human rights in the new contexts of human existence. 

This course examines conceptual and technical principles of publication design. It emphasizes the development of skills using standard industry software, and the positioning of briefs in real world contexts. It covers the systematic processes that make designing publications more efficient. 

The field of computational psychiatry has taken off over the last decade. Research in this field uses computational modeling to identify the precise component mechanisms underlying deficits and biases in learning, decision-making and other cognitive processes. The first part of this course reviews some of the early classic papers in this new field illustrating how this approach has been used to advance understanding of psychiatric disorders ranging from anxiety and depression to addiction and schizophrenia. Each week, one or two papers are set in advance, presented using a lecture format, and discussed via class participation. These papers are selected to present some of the most widely used theoretical frameworks and experimental tasks. In the second part of the course, students are introduced to current issues in advancing the nosology of psychiatric disorders. This covers why the field has become unhappy with traditional binary diagnostic categories and alternate approaches advanced to address this, including NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework for investigating psychiatric disorders, the Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology (HiTOP), and modeling of latent factors to tease apart symptom variance associated with comorbid conditions. Following this, students are introduced to precision and translational psychiatry and issues pertaining to the promise or perils of translating computational psychiatry findings into real-world practice.

This course explores how concepts of mobility, boundaries, and (un)belonging are negotiated in modern travelogues about Europe by afrodiasporic as well as African writers. In the postcolonial fashion of "Irritating Europe", the class examines central ideas of European self-imagery, such as its humanism and supposed progressiveness. Students analyze how Black travel literature not only functions as a deconstruction of colonial discourses but also establishes a new literary geography: the Afropean space.

This is an introductory course in Chinese (Mandarin) for students with no prior knowledge of the language. The course, which enables students to reach the A1.1 level in the Common European Framework of Reference for languages, introduces the tonal system and the four fundamental skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) with a focus on communication. Students also develop awareness of Chinese culture.

This course provides an introduction to the Politics and Government of Ireland. On successful completion of this course, students should be able to: Identify features of Irish political political culture and how they shape the workings of institutional processes in Irish politics; Evaluate the workings of Irish political institutions; Critique the role of political institutions; Propose potential solutions to the problems raised or weaknesses identified; Demonstrate an understanding of the Irish party system; Analyze the role of women in Irish politics and the conditions that shape women's access into political life; and demonstrate the ability to conduct independent research and engage with course materials and recommended readings.

This course introduces students to the fundamental theory of the finite-element method (FEM) as a general tool for numerically solving differential equations for a wide range of engineering problems, with special focus on solid and structural mechanics. The course covers the following topics: approximation, weighted residuals and Rayleigh-Ritz methods; finite-element formulation for solids; continuum elements; structural elements; material non-linearity; geometric non-linearity; heat transfer problems and thermal stress analysis; and transient problems.

Utilizing both academic research and literary/artistic expression, this course contributes towards gaining critical and dynamic analytical perspectives on urban transformations in the Arab region, especially in newly formed cities-turned-capitals like Amman and Kuwait. The course visits precolonial societies in the region, their precolonial interactions and modes of communal existence, and then considers the effects of colonialism, border-drawing, and postcolonial identity construction and its enduring effects in modern cities whose inhabitants go through various degrees of identity questioning, alienation, and conflict. The course also looks at the effects of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, commodification, and self-centered consumerism on urban transformations and malformations.

This course explores the transformative power of media. Through critical analysis and hands-on media design, students examine how media artifacts construct national identities, deploy soft power, challenge gender norms, and transform digital spaces into sites of justice. Bridging theory and practice, students develop ethically grounded media interventions, such as storyboards, TikTok campaigns, and justice-oriented projects, etc. that engage with the tensions between cultural specificity, global algorithms, and neoliberal platforms.