Denmark

Contemplative practices such as mindfulness and yoga, silent retreats and pilgrimages have seen a significant rise in popularity in recent years, in part driven by a rapidly growing body of scientific literature on the purported benefits of such practices for the relief of the ills of modern life, such as stress, anxiety, depression, but also as elements in the enhancement of human resilience and capacity. A sustained, critical and practical engagement with this field using a broad humanities approach can offer students an unusually rich and concrete experience in combining scholarly and personal inquiry. Through a close engagement with contemplative practices as objects of academic study and debate, as social phenomena in contemporary society, and as lived practices, this course provides an opportunity to explore fundamental questions in the humanities; for example, about the nature and meaning of being human; about consciousness, cognition and experience; about the relationship between mind and body; about freedom and connectedness; and about the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. The course introduces a rapidly growing field of research with considerable public interest to which humanities research makes significant contributions. By exploring contemplative practices in context, in theory, and in practice, students have an opportunity to develop a critical ability for assessing scholarly and popular claims about the nature and purported effects of contemplative practices. Literature for the course includes both scholarly texts about contemplative life and practice and historical and contemporary texts from contemplative traditions, including from classical philosophy, Christian, Sufi, and Buddhist contexts, as well as modern forms, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

This course provides an overview of the development of economic theory, primarily emphasized as a science in evolution and fostered by the debate on the main economic issues of the time as a response to economic reality. The course focuses on major writers and economic issues central to the development of what is considered standard economic theory, as well as lesser-known contributions, to account for the historical and theoretical preconditions for contemporary economic theory.

This course examines how businesses excel (or stumble) based on how well they tap the widening power and reach of persuasive communication nationally and across borders in today's digital age. Students explore how persuasion theories, corporate storytelling, thought leadership, advocacy, negotiation, and other strategic elements are applied through the organizational communication disciplines to strengthen companies and brands. Primary attention focuses on corporate social responsibility's role in building a positive reputation, driving sales, and enhancing customer loyalty. Lectures, readings, and video clips also provide insight about communicating persuasively when developing new markets, managing ongoing business issues, and dealing with controversies.

This course provides the analytical tools required to connect and address the historical, philosophical, and political dimensions in the climate crisis. The first part of the course explores the development of the idea of humans as global agents; an idea which has culminated in the notion of “The Anthropocene,” the geological epoch that ends the Holocene. It examines the conceptual and technological conditions that have enabled us to think in terms of a global climate crisis and the ways in which this history continues to shape how we think about solutions and futures in a world of climate change. Part of this is also to reconsider the relations between the human and the natural sciences in a situation in which the nature-culture distinction may have lost its meaning. The course then encourages an adjustment of human self-understanding in light of the proclamation of our time as the Anthropocene, raising ontological as well as ethical issues, which burst the time frames as well as our understanding of responsibility for climate change as we know it. It examines the consequences of the collapse of the nature-culture distinction and the distinction between earth history and world history, and explores alternative conceptual models of framing our current situation. The final part of the course develops further the political and ethical implications of the climate crisis. It discusses the relationship between the global climate crisis and economic inequality and investigates the political dimensions (is the future of the planet a form of world government – a climate leviathan?) and the ethical dilemmas (what are the responsibilities of individuals, between societies and across generations?). 

This course offers a study of migration research through an anthropological lens. New analytical and methodological perspectives raise important questions concerning the social organization of migration as well as our understanding of the processes of socio-cultural continuity and change. The course examines how anthropological theory could potentially contribute to the conceptualization of the spatially and temporally extended processes that are set in motion by migratory movements. The course discusses the possibility of the creation of an ethnographic research practice that can encompass these complex processes. 

This course builds up a toolbox of numerical optimization methods for building solutions in future studies, thereby making it an ideal supplement for students from many different fields in science. The course is taught both at a theoretical level that goes into deriving the math, and also on an implementation level with focus on computer science and good programming practice. Students participate in weekly programming exercises where they implement the algorithms and methods introduced from theory, and apply their own implementations to case-study problems like computing the motion of a robot hand or fitting a model to highly non-linear data. Topics include: first order optimality conditions, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, Taylors theorem, mean value theorem, nonlinear equation solving, linear search methods, trust region methods, linear least-squares fitting, regression problems, and normal equations.

This course introduces the sub-discipline of economic sociology and discusses how this field is related both to other branches of sociology and to economics. It introduces core concepts and approaches in contemporary economic sociology, particularly sociological perspectives on markets, money, and the social embeddedness of these phenomena. The course also analyzes various types of social and economic phenomena by means of economic sociological concepts and theories. It is structured around the reading of Mark Granovetter’s SOCIETY AND ECONOMY: FRAMEWORK AND PRINCIPLES (2017), which in an exemplary fashion rehearses many of the key concepts in contemporary economic sociology. The readings are supplemented with research papers that exemplify some of the issues dealt with in the book as well as additional concepts and perspectives in economic sociology. In parallel with the reading of course literature, students develop an economic sociological analysis of a case of their own choosing, applying and discussing core concepts in economic sociology.