Denmark

This course examines the dynamic nature of leadership and innovation as theorized in the past, its present application, and how it might evolve in the future within the backdrop of a fast-digitalizing emerging economy. Lectures focus on how leadership and innovation have evolved over time and how emerging economies are learning from the existing leadership debates and adding to it from their own experiences, culture, and social context. While this course starts from existing leadership discourse, it does not limit itself to the current understanding of leadership. It explores newer leadership experiences from emerging economies to develop a counter exploration to the existing leadership narrative and provides a holistic understanding of leadership by filling the gaps and insights from vibrant diverse cultures that identify themselves as emerging economies.

This course operates from the premise that there is nothing natural about gender differences. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of this premise and its implications for how scholars, students, and practitioners can think about sustainable development centered around commoning and care. This overview course has a distinct approach to understanding how gender and ecological conditions are interrelated. Grounded in social theory, it is inherently critical of standard development and gender narratives and instead seeks explanatory power within historical and structural conditions and explores different approaches to this. The course readings are selected as key contributions to broad debates on gender, environment, and development and are rooted in disciplinary fields such as critical geography, political economy, feminist political ecology, and critical social theory. Structured around core themes including decoloniality, critiques of capitalism, globalization, performativity, care, and commoning, the course engages in primary readings of feminist and other critical scholars who have been at the forefront of conceptualizing gender and human/environment relations in different ways. It discusses how gender and ecological conditions are interrelated; the dynamics behind the widespread “dual oppression" of particular humans and the environment as well as the policy responses designed to redress these; critical perspectives on buzzwords like “sustainability,” "sustainable development,” and "gender” that circulate in policy and project documents, global “development goals,” and social movements; and a range of conceptual and analytical tools to both explain today’s realities and instigate change toward new future trajectories. The course offers students of environment and development, geography, global development, environmental science, food science, natural resources governance, or similar fields the opportunity to learn how to understand and analyze the relations between gender, environment, and sustainable development, and to engage in debates about different approaches to these issues. It combines close reading and discussion of texts with case studies, documentaries, and interactions with activists and social movements. It provides an opportunity to build skills to formulate critical questions and clear methodologies around the entanglements between issues of gender and the environment and the challenges these pose to sustainable development to understand and engage in diverse gender and environment conflicts and debates across diverse topics, scales, and contexts.

This course analyzes financial data in Microsoft Excel using Pivot Tables and various Excel financial functions and financial concepts. These concepts include capital budgeting and time value of money, corporate bonds and stock valuation models, discounted cash flows, portfolio analysis and the capital asset pricing model, forecasting sales and profits, measuring investment performance, financial sales analysis, and cost and profit analysis. The course combines the basic theory of finance with the intensive implementation of all concepts in Excel to provide a better understanding of financial theory and valuable skills in Excel.

This course introduces the mathematical formalism of quantum information theory. Topics include a review of probability theory and classical information theory (random variables, Shannon entropy, coding); formalism of quantum information theory (quantum states, density matrices, quantum channels, measurement); quantum versus classical correlations (entanglement, Bell inequalities, Tsirelson's bound); basic tools (distance measures, fidelity, quantum entropy); basic results (quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, Schumacher data compression); and quantum resource theory (quantum coding theory, entanglement theory, application: quantum cryptography). 

This course provides an introduction to demography focusing on developing basic demography methods related to the measurement of vital events. These methods are then applied to study empirically (and theoretically) how demographic and economic changes interact with each other over time. Topics include measures of and economic and social determinants of fertility, mortality, and migration; as well as macro- and microeconomic causes and consequences of demographic transitions.

This political theory course considers whether the end of climate change denial leads to climate justice or new forms of fascisms. It takes seriously the emergence of new ecofascist tendencies as complex phenomena to be critically studied, analyzed, and contested. The course is divided into three parts. The first part explores various conceptualizations of fascism and climate change generally. It then analyzes the tendency from climate change denial towards realism about (anthropogenic) climate change and the forms of fascism that may follow from it. Finally, it discusses democratic responses to the emerging phenomena. The course draws on political theories concerning climate change, democracy, and fascism. It presents ecofascist, neo-Malthusian, petro-masculinist, and collapsologist movements that in some cases convey racist, misogynic, and homophobic ideas and critically discusses them within materialist, new materialist, and critical theoretical frameworks.

This course provides theoretical and practical knowledge of individual behavior in the context of social marketing and behavioral science. It takes on a multidisciplinary approach drawing from psychology, consumer research, marketing science, and behavioral economics that allows a holistic understanding of how people consume and behave. Based on these theoretical frameworks, the course introduces a range of tools to foster behavioral change, such as social marketing or nudging, and examines how they are applied in practice. Applied consumer research is at the core of this course and its potential and limits in understanding and ultimately changing individual behavior are studied. The course provides an opportunity to practice formulating research questions and proposing social marketing and behavioral science solutions to address real-life social and environmental problems. It also engages critical discussion on the use of behavioral and marketing techniques by policy-makers and the private sector.

This course provides an introduction to fundamental bioinformatics. Topics include biological databases, sequence alignment (pairwise and multiple), phylogeny, genomics, next generation sequencing, expression analysis, RNA-seq, RNA structure, and systems biology. 

This course begins with a historical perspective on the development of current economic and tech-structures, asking what is actually new. It then examines types of tech economies and forms of valuation, considering topics such as credit (e)valuations, the power of platforms, the producers of technology such as software engineers and users, prediction algorithms, digital money and markets, and surveillance capitalism. Anthropologists and social scientists from adjacent disciplines have the potential to contribute to both academic and public debates regarding economies of technology by engaging both critically and productively with the way that technology is shaping society and making specific assertions about what is “of value." Students develop their own argument about the changing economies of technology during the course using an empirical case and present their own case for feedback at a workshop, before writing the final essay. This course builds knowledge, skills, and competencies to engage with the current developments in tech by building on classical as well as current theoretical perspectives from fields including economic and digital anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies.

This course focuses on structure, functions, and current issues in the agri-food economy from input industry to farm processing to distribution and retail in Denmark, Europe, and internationally. The course covers issues such as the Danish agri-food industry; the European agri-food systems and trends; the economic organization of the agri-food industry; quality, food safety, and the consumer; globalization of food markets; chain management and organization in agri-food chains; and agri-food cooperatives and organizations.