Denmark

This course develops an understanding of the fundamentals of consumer behavior and the ways in which consumer behavior can be influenced. It introduces concepts and theories to provide insight into the drivers of consumer behavior, including the analysis of how consumers make decisions. Several company examples are discussed that show how insights about consumer behavior are applied and implemented in business contexts. Topics include consumer segmentation, tools to conduct consumer research, consumer decision making process (problem recognition, information search), internal influences on consumer behavior (exposure, attention, motivation, attitudes, memory, knowledge, learning), external influences on consumer behavior (social influence, reference groups, cultural influences), consumer biases and heuristics, and consumer behavior in the age of artificial intelligence.

This course focus on advanced spatial analysis using GIS/Geoinformatics and Remote Sensing. It provides an understanding of the relevant theories and methodologies necessary to select appropriate strategies within the broad context of urban and regional geography. The course discusses the theoretical background and tries out the practical implementation in a number of practical exercises. Topics include GIS and Geoinformatics for urban applications, high resolution remote sensing, spatial analysis, spatial optimization, spatial statistics, and general knowledge of Geodata. 

This course explores how sex is implicated in international politics. It is centered on showing how sex, gender, and sexuality structure understandings and practices of foreign policy, statehood, conflict, political violence, social movements, and the like. To do this, the course traces how debates over "normal" and "traditional" sexual orientation and gender expression have come into international politics and how the current "culture war" around queer rights and protections has come to play a significant role in (re)negotiating international order. Throughout the course, it asks how gender and sexuality, both of which are racialized and classed, are used to construct and maintain power; how in some cases sexuality and gender are mobilized to legitimize certain foreign and domestic policies. The course divides into two parts. The first half of the course focuses on theoretical and conceptual debates about sex(uality). The second half of the course focuses on mobilizing this theoretical and conceptual work to study queer issues in world politics.

This course introduces students to the distinct communication activities related to social marketing, including the practice of achieving societal change for the benefit of the greater social good through the integration of commercially inspired skills and tools with other approaches. Sustainability, diversity, health, and community development have all become global societal concerns. Social marketing communication is therefore a much-needed individual and organizational proficiency for popularizing these concerns in a credible manner and for inferring voluntary behavioral changes among specific target audiences. The course provides relevant theoretical insights within social marketing communication, cause-related marketing communication, and commercial marketing communication. It also develops expertise in employing analytical tools belonging to narrative and discourse studies for working with and developing social marketing communication materials across various media.

This course introduces the basic tools to understand how to analyze economic phenomena and presents the main topics in macroeconomics and international economics. It focuses on applications and policy implications rather than formal demonstrations to provide a critical perspective on economic models and apply them to many different situations. Critical thinking and knowledge of the basic formal mechanisms of macroeconomic and international trade models is essential. The first module on modern macroeconomics analyzes the determinants of economic well-being in the short and long run and key macroeconomic terms (for example, defining and measuring economic growth, inflation, and unemployment). It examines how the economy grows in the short and long run, the role of productivity, and the impact of the business cycle, as well as the role of monetary and fiscal policies. The second module on policy in the open economy analyzes the financial linkages between different countries, especially regarding the Balance of Payments and its effects on national economies. It also surveys the role of money and finance in the world today and the role of government policies toward the foreign exchange market, including the choice between fixed and floating exchange rates, strategies to keep currencies under or overvalued, and the use of exchange controls to create impediments to currency flows. Finally, it incorporates climate change and income inequality in regular macroeconomic models and examines development problems and the role firms can play in fostering growth.

This course offers a unique opportunity to study some of the world’s oldest religions in a comparative perspective. It is an interdisciplinary initiative between the disciplines of the Study of Religions, Egyptology, and Assyriology. The course is theme-oriented and each unit has both a more theoretical part along with an empirical component that focuses on texts and objects from Egypt and Mesopotamia. Themes studied include deities and concepts of the divine, mythologies, temples and sacred space, ritual leaders and other religious agents, rituals and festivals, hymns and prayers, magic, healing rituals and divination, conceptions of death and afterlife. The course also introduces the main textual sources (such as the Gilgamesh Epic, the Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Myth of Isis and Osiris, and the Book of the Dead), excerpts of which are read in English translation. The course provides a general overview of the basic theoretical debates in the history of religions, as well as a basic overview of religious beliefs and practices in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3300 BCE – 300 CE). The empirical material in class come from the religions of the ancient Near East, but the analytical tools used are applicable on historical religions at large.

This course introduces art, images, and vision in the digital field and various aspects of the roles technology plays in our creation, circulation, and use of images today. The main focus of the course is how contemporary image technologies shape us culturally on an everyday basis and how contemporary visual art can help us understand this. The course introduces works of art and theoretical approaches in the field and concretely analyzes how works of art and other image practices use specific image technologies. By combining theoretical insights and concrete analyses of works of art and everyday image practice, the course provides critical understandings of how humans and machines make sense of images today.

Like the human body, the human skin has an elaborate history, and now—perhaps more than ever—it calls for serious critical study. This course takes skin as a point of contact between historical and contemporary encounters. Skin troubles notions of identity, notably in legend and art. In more recent times, skin is a contentious site of systemic racism. Thematically structured, this course addresses a wide range of issues, including skin as corporeal and conceptual threshold; skin as multisensory organ; skin as artistic support; architectural skin; flaying; sacred skins; skin as anatomical curiosity; skin art; skin pigment; the skin of materials; second skins; literary skin; skin and the self.

This course introduces theories, methods, and procedures that can be used to assess and manage the psychosocial work environment in work organizations. It covers theoretical and methodological approaches to the understanding of different types of job demands and job resources, and their differential impact on health, well-being, and organizational behavior. The course also discusses theoretical and practical approaches to occupational health assessment and intervention; and workplace bullying: concept, measurement, antecedents, and consequences, and intervention levels. Through group activities and case analyses, it introduces the challenges of translating theory into practice. The course is graded on a pass/no pass basis only.

This course studies topological spaces and continuous maps. Main topics include: topological spaces; subspace, order, product, metric and quotient topologies; continuous functions; connectedness and compactness; countability and separation axioms. Secondary topics include: retractions and fixed points; Tychonoff Theorem; compactifications; and vistas of algebraic topology.