Denmark

This course provides a basic introduction to human nutrition with emphasis on the underlying molecular mechanisms and aspects. Topics include: an introduction to the anatomy and physiology of the gastrointestinal system, including an introduction to the natural bacterial microbiota in the digestive system and its influence on human nutrition and health; the study types used in human nutrition studies; energy balance and macro nutrients in human nutrition; a detailed mapping of the structure and mechanisms of action of vitamins, and their influence on human health; an overview of minerals and trace elements in food and the importance on health conditions; "functional foods" and selected additives and their mechanism of action and impact on health; the relation between diet and the development of lifestyle diseases. The course involves laboratory exercises of glucose tolerance test after intake of different food components and DEXA body scanning.

This course enables students to work strategically with sustainability and environmental communication in organizations. It introduces key theoretical approaches of special relevance to the topics of environment and sustainability and applies these in order to critically analyze and assess how organizations use communication both to develop a sense of self in relation to the topic of sustainability and to engage in the public space. Students learn to understand, explain, and use discourses as a strategic and tactical resource in order to establish and put credible messages into perspective which may affect the views and opinions of various target groups in relation to the important themes related to sustainability and the environment. The course addresses current practical issues by focusing on the approaches to sustainability and environmental communication that companies, NGOs, mass media, and political organizations use when they enter into dialogue with different stakeholders, including customers, government agencies and institutions, and the general public.

This course provides the basic qualifications needed to use and describe the principles of modern geospatial science and geographic information systems. It provides a conceptual and practical introduction to geographic information systems with emphasis on practical data handling and data analysis. Teaching consists of lectures and practical computer exercises and two minor reports are produced during the course. The course identifies suitable methods to perform spatial analyses common in biological research and monitoring. Analyses is performed in the geographic information system software and documented in a professional scientific report.

This course introduces the extent of the global agriculture and food production and its geographic location. Through a combination of lectures and exercises, the first part of the course identifies the factors that influence and adjust the global need for and production of food, as well as of the global trade with food. It then looks at the impact of different climatic and soil conditions on plant and livestock production in specific regions. In the project work, students go into detail in an individual area.

This course provides an introduction to basic elements of animal behavior and application of ethology (i.e. the study of animal behavior) in relation to livestock farming and keeping of domestic animals. Furthermore, it provides an understanding of how different types of behavior are affected by management and the external environment to enable assessment of these factors on animal welfare. Topics include: domestication; behavior and physiology; motivation; factors controlling behavior; learning and cognition; normal and abnormal behavior in selected farm animal species; human-animal relations; and behavioral variables as welfare indicators.

This course takes as a starting point the expansive understanding of feminism as a value system rather than a style or movement to elucidate and make meaning of contemporary Nordic art within a global context. The course underscores feminism’s historical, theoretical, and activist facets, focusing on a transnational, situated, and intersectional approach to understand feminist practices in and around contemporary Nordic art. Understood in the broadest sense to include other normative-critical approaches such as postcolonialism, in this course feminism is deployed as an emancipatory modality to deconstruct and contextualize the most important issues concerning contemporary art today, including migration, sexuality, race, ecology, and the move towards the digital—and how the Nordic cases interact with, correspond to, and challenge wider global patterns. The course nevertheless provides a solid historical overview of feminism within the realm of art from 1970 onwards and develops an understanding of foundational and more recent feminist theory, as well as the ability to recognize and apply an activist approach to contemporary art. Nordic examples make up the core of the course to provide a nuanced knowledge of the immediate art environment (including visits to local museums, art institutions, and practitioners). With its intersectional and reflexive approach, the course conveys the intergenerational, gender-fluid, heterogeneous, and transnational nature of feminist practices today by contextualizing them within a global framework. to convey the intergenerational, gender-fluid, heterogeneous, and transnational nature of feminist practices today by contextualizing them within a global framework.

This course introduces and utilizes classic as well as more recent concepts and analytical frameworks to explain some of the policy phenomena that puzzles students of public policy. The first part of the course introduces theoretical approaches to studying the five basic stages of the policy process and discusses some of the more recent developments in the policy studies discipline, taking mainly a temporal perspective. The policy phenomena addressed includes path dependency, punctuated equilibrium, sequencing, policy feedbacks, policy capacity, policy design, reform sustainability, disproportionality in public policy, and policy success and failure. The way in which these analytical concepts have been applied to study real world policy challenges is illustrated through examples and discussed in class. The second part of the course applies the theoretical concepts and analytical frameworks by analyzing real world examples of policy making. Students select their own case and analytical framework for their assignment. The course is designed for Danish and international students. The wealth of knowledge on national policy processes brought to the classroom by the students is utilized to explore nuances in concept application and to explore how differences in institutions affect policy making.

This course reflects on how the institutions, issues, actors, and practices of global environmental governance have evolved over the past half-century since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the first global conference on the environment. In addition, it explores the potential of current environmental governance systems to accelerate the social, economic, political, and ecological transformations for a sustainable future.

This course examines the traditional economic theory which assumes that economic agents are fully rational with unlimited cognitive abilities and willpower and considers how individuals frequently and systematically make decisions in contradiction with these standard presumptions. Against the background of this finding the course discusses the shortcomings of traditional theories in economics and finance; how new concepts and theories in behavioral finance and behavioral economics address these shortcomings; how these new theories relate to the traditional theories; what are their strengths and limitations; and how the new behavioral presumptions in behavioral finance and economics change the predictions of classical economic theories. 

This course analyzes the place of gender in world politics. It introduces theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of gender in international relations, and reviews different fields of research, focusing on security studies, with cutting-edge literature. The course examines how both the practice of international politics and the academic discipline are gendered. It takes its starting point by reflecting on international relations theory to understand why the mainstream of international relations has traditionally had difficulties in engaging with feminist critiques. It looks at the early feminist debates and turns to themes of international relations such as war, conflict, militarism, and security through a gender perspective. It analyzes the role of bodies in international relations and their complex intersecting identities to understand how gender is intertwined with categories such as race, class, and sexuality. The question of how these complex identities give subjects possibility for agency runs throughout the modules. The course emphasizes how gender, security, and politics are discursively constructed through both language and images. To shed light on these discursive constructions, the course conducts several case studies.