Denmark

This course offers a study of state-of-the-art research within the field of environment, society, and development with a specific focus on understanding theoretical approaches to development geography and coupled human-environment systems in the Global South. It provides the theoretical and historical foundations for understanding contemporary sustainability agendas, including approaches to sustainable development. The first part of the course focuses on societal transformation processes in urban and rural areas and discusses how contemporary scholars theorize and explore urbanization and rural transformation processes in the Global South. The second part of the course focuses on the dynamics of coupled human–environmental systems and the multiple conceptual models that have been proposed to understand this complex relationship, including cultural, human, and political ecology; land use intensification; land system science; sustainability science; and resilience and vulnerability approaches. The course discusses approaches that relate to interactions between the human and environmental spheres.

This introductory course covers some of the most familiar and important themes in medical anthropology. The literature focuses on classic texts dealing with issues such as classification of illness, uncertainties, bodies, subjectivities, identities, narratives, medicines, symbolic healing, patients and therapeutic journeys, lay and expert knowledge, medical practices, technologies and infrastructures. The course introduces the field of medical anthropology as part of the overall study of culture and society.

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.