Portuguese

This course provides an overview of contemporary literature in Portuguese-speaking African countries. It explores poetry and prose in colonial and post-colonial contexts, writing and orality, ancestry, tradition, modernity, appropriation of the colonizer's language, local variants, and cultural resistance movements.

This course provides philosophical support for understanding the present technological ubiquity and contemporary discourses about technology. It explores topics linked to contemporary technological development, especially its ethical dimensions. 

This course provides an introduction to geotechnics. Topics include physical indexes, soil classification, notions of sampling and surveying, tensions in the soil, resistance wraps, compressibility, and shear strength, stability analysis (slopes, embankments, and excavations), thrusts at rest, retaining structures, gravity walls, direct and deep foundations, drainage, and lowering of the water table.

This course focuses on the development of Portuguese language basic structures, as well as oral and written practice based on selected texts and Brazilian popular music songs. Consistent with intensive Portuguese courses at UC campuses, this course is upper division.

This advanced language course emphasizes the finer points of Portuguese grammar and syntax. The course devotes equal time to the practice of written and spoken Portuguese. In order to improve skill and style, students examine both essays and literary texts.

Reading and analysis of key literary texts written in Portuguese. The course begins with an examination of literary canon and the classics and the birth of Portuguese literature through the 15th century, including poetry, prose, and dramatic texts. It then looks at the origins of contemporaneity, the literature that came out of the Renaissance (tragedy, lyrical poetry, comedy, the epic), and the works of Camões.

This course examines themes present within the issue of violence and social order, primarily against the background of Rio. It analyzes how the State has been legitimizing the use of violence and the process of criminalization in some sectors of civil society. Starting with a general theory of violence, the course discusses the concept of violence and the violent urban criminality, its political uses, and articulations with power. Other topics include the different forms of violence against minorities, such as the black population, indigenous peoples, women, and LGBT groups.

This course seeks to make students familiar with the main controversies that are present in urban sociology with particular attention to Brazilian cities. Topics covered include: origins of modern western cities; industrial cities, large cities and metropolises; the Chicago School; Marxism and cities; welfare cities and urban planning; cities and disorganized capitalism; urban dimensions; social movements; the concept of global city; rebellion and change.