Denmark

This course provides an introduction to theories of strategic and practical communication and organizational analysis in preparation of communication campaigns and other limited communication efforts with strategic purposes. Topics include crisis communication, organizational communication, communication and change, stakeholders, content strategies, social media, online communication, media and media choice, cross-media, transmedia, storytelling and strategic writing, visual communication, and branding. Throughout the course, students work with self-selected cases and concrete analyses of communication efforts and campaigns.

This course focuses on environmental management of natural resources (soil, water, biodiversity and climate) from a European perspective. It discusses how the European Union (EU) sets the policy frame for almost all environmental regulation in the member states, and how this frame determines both the possibilities and the limitations for carrying out environmental management and developing environmental solutions in the EU. The course commences with an introduction to the overall concept of environmental management and current state of the European environment. It introduces environmental management theory and application and how it incorporates environmental monitoring and assessment, areas of governance including EU environmental law, economic tools for environmental valuation and cost benefit analysis, and EU environmental policy and lobbyism. The course features different EU environmental policy initiatives related to soil, water, biodiversity and climate (e.g. European Green Deal, the Habitat Directive, the Water Framework Directive, and the Soil Framework Directive). It details and analyzes how these initiatives originated, and how they are interpreted and implemented from the EU level to the national, regional, and local levels. The intertwined character of environmental, economic, and social consequences of EU environmental policies are discussed, addressing the need for a combined systems approach and environmental policy integration.

The focus of the course is on the relations between terrestrial ecosystems and global climate systems. Seen in a historical and present perspective as well as on a temporal and spatial scale, the interactions between climate and ecosystem are put in perspective of the ongoing and future climate change. Further, the course explain how models and data bases are used to develop future climate scenarios and reconstruction of previous climate conditions, as well as the anthropogenic role in the present changes in climate.

The course covers various theories and models of culture-cognition interaction within particular domains of human life, e.g. religion, science, play, work, environment, gender, and health. The course introduces theories of how cultural practices and ideas work to align norms, values, and behaviors among members of a given society. The course also introduces to qualitative and quantitative methods that are relevant for studying the link between culture and cognition.

This course is designed for international students. It is a course within the science of religion, and it deals with the religion in Denmark before the introduction of Christianity. The course reads poems concerning pre-Christian deities from Iceland as well as the medieval Icelandic writer Snorri, which makes it possible to get a glimpse of the mythology of the Scandinavians before Christianity. The gods Odin, Thor, Vanir, Loki and Balder are accentuated. The course also goes beyond mythology and tries to get an idea about the religious rituals and the religious experts of the Norsemen. The course includes an excursion to Lejre, Trelleborg and Roskilde and an excursion to Scania in Sweden to visit a couple of burial places in the shape of a ship and also some well-preserved runic stones. Students get an introductory understanding of ancient Nordic religion, mythology, its sources, as well as the archeological remains of it.

The course introduces approaches and topics rooted in linguistics such as intercultural pragmatics (speech acts and linguistic politeness), sociolinguistics, intercultural semantics (cultural keywords and scripts), non-verbal communication, gender differences, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how identities and values are reflected and constructed through language and communication. It takes as a point of departure the idea that language is both a resource that enables communication and collaboration within a community, but can also act as a boundary between insiders and outsiders. In this context, paradigms to the study of culture, like the distinction between cultures as rooted in essences or functions and thus more objectivist or constructivist scientific worldview are also introduced and related to questions of the study of intercultural communication.