Denmark

This course returns to the formative texts of Michel Foucault on the topic of biopolitics, a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment. It examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics as terms integral to the fields of public health and virology (contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, quarantine) now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. The course examines conceptual and historical questions of how life came to be understood as the object of government and how this has intensified the operations of power in the modern era. It also expands understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions, from understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare. It considers how Foucault’s formulation has had wide-ranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism, neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human.

This course focuses on technology for modern and emerging user interfaces and hardware, with an emphasis on physical computing. Learning takes place in two ways: a theoretical component introducing both classic and the latest and most exciting research around novel user interfaces; and a practical component to gain hands-on skills in building novel physical interfaces.

This introductory statistics course focuses on data analysis. It begins with the essential concepts that are necessary for understanding data analysis, such as probability and their distributions. It then covers sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, analysis of variance, correlation, and linear regression analysis. Additional topics include probability concepts, probability distributions, sampling distributions, and two group comparisons.

This course provides a comprehensive understanding of processes in terrestrial ecosystems, and of effects of global change on processes and organisms. The focus is on carbon, water, and nutrient cycling between plants, soil organisms, soil, and atmosphere. This includes lessons in radiation and energy balance, photosynthesis, respiration, water use efficiency, and measures of stress, at leaf, plant, and canopy level. Belowground processes as plant nutrient uptake and microbial turnover, mobilization and immobilization of nutrients, plant-microbe-animal interactions, plant-soil-atmosphere interactions, rhizosphere processes and mycorrhizal function are also addressed, with focus on the importance of climate and anthropogenically induced climatic changes. Species/community effects on ecosystem processes and temporal dynamics are also addressed. Field and laboratory studies are performed and the results are presented orally and in reports. Participants present one or two journal papers with relation to the subjects taught in the lectures, including effects of global change on ecosystems.

This course provides an overview of mobile, ubiquitous, and wearable computing interfaces; including commercial devices such as mobile phones, smart watches, augmented reality glasses, smart speakers, and other home devices; as well as research interfaces such as public displays, smart jewelry, or body-based user interfaces. The course sheds light on two fundamental aspects of mobile computing: the technological foundations of mobile computing interfaces and the user interface requirements for such novel computing interfaces. It contains advanced material on both technological foundations and interaction styles on mobile interfaces.

This course introduces mindfulness as a psychological construct, presenting and discussing ways to understand and describe the concept. It presents theoretical perspectives that seek to illuminate the origin, development, potential, and limitations of mindfulness. The course examines clinical and cognitive empirical studies that demonstrate various operationalizations and effects of mindfulness interventions. It also contains a smaller practical part where select mindfulness exercises are exemplified to provide a practice-based understanding of the concept of mindfulness. Assessment is based on an individual or group written assignment of 12-18 pages.