Denmark

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.

This course provides the knowledge and analytical skills in relation to significant aspects of contemporary Indian and South Asian society and politics in a local and/or global perspective. Based on one or more delimited topics within contemporary Indian and South Asian society and politics, the course identifies and applies various relevant theoretical and methodical approaches with a view to critically describing and analyzing political and social conditions. It includes searching for various types of materials in Hindi and other languages at an advanced level, and to assess these critically in their context.