Netherlands

This course focuses on the relationship between religion and politics. To untangle this relationship, the course examines the role of four core processes – globalization, nation-state formation, colonialism, and gender – in giving shape to contemporary relations between politics and religion. In the first place, it offers a sweeping historical survey, starting with imperialism, the French and Haitian Revolutions, and modern state formation. This leads to contemporary geopolitics, religious nationalism (Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Confucian), and socio-cultural contests (over sexuality, abortion, education, and migration). The central goal is to understand how recurring questions of the political community (who has power, how, and why?) are informed by and inform struggles over the place, role, and nature of religion.  Questions are addressed in an interdisciplinary fashion, where politics, history, and religious studies encounter one another. The course consists of interactive lectures and seminar-style discussions, including ones that are student-organized and student-led.

Examining flows of diseases, people, goods, knowledge, and technology induced by processes of globalization can deepen our understanding of the complexity of health and disease. In this course, these flows are studied in depth, bringing insights into (epi) genetic disease distributions as well as the spread of information, technology, and migration, all in themselves affecting health and disease. The content of this course draws on several distinct academic disciplines of political economy, anthropology, biomedicine, (epi) genetics, and epidemiology. Prerequisites include Introduction to Biology and at least one of the following courses: Genetics and evolution, Infectious diseases and Global public Health, or Globalization and Inequality.

When exploring the principal rules that govern the flow of water, this course considers the four major types of water: atmospheric, ground, soil, and surface. With human activity and prevailing climate conditions placing more pressure on our supply of water than ever before, there has never been a more important time to develop a sound understanding of the subject. Students are familiarized with the basic terms and major laws that describe steady-state water flow in the subsurface and at the surface. These major laws are the energy equation (Bernoulli's law), the water balance equation (continuity), and the flow equation (Darcy's law or the Darcy-Buckingham equation). Students also gain knowledge of some aspects of atmospheric water, such as the generation of precipitation, measurement of precipitation, and the estimation of evaporation, as well as several methods for estimating surface water discharges in small streams. The ability to calculate volume fluxes and/or volume flux densities for several steady-state water-flow cases determines the successful completion of the course. Students are expected to have a working knowledge of mathematical differentiation and integration. This course is best suited for students in Hydrology, Geography, or Earth Science fields.

This course is designed for students in the Humanities or Social Sciences with no previous education in Biology. It may also serve as a remedial course for students with a high school Biology background insufficient for entering a regular level 1 Biology course. The course centers around three major themes: the basics of life, genes and evolution, and essential body functions. The course studies a wide variety of fundamental biological principles and concepts including the characteristics and basic units of life, biodiversity, the molecular basis of inheritance and genetics, origin of life and evolution, proliferation and differentiation of cells, principles of development and cancer, metabolism and energy, nutrition, health, nervous system and behavior, biological defense and communication, and reproduction and aging.

In this course students discuss, at a detailed molecular level, different cellular and genetic processes that are the basis of life as we know it. Students are familiarized with further knowledge in the field of cell biology, which enables them to better understand and appreciate the newest developments in this research area. Discussions revolve around general cell biological topics such as the role of membranes, membrane transport of small molecules, the nuclear architecture, the organization of the genome, regulation of transcription and translation, protein trafficking, the cell cycle and maintenance of genomic integrity, programmed cell death and senescence. The last task, dealing with cancer, serves as an integration task; knowledge of the previous topics is required to appreciate what the consequences can be when a cell goes astray and the defense mechanisms of the body fail. Prerequisites for this course include introduction to biology. This course is designed to be taken in combination with SKI2077 Lab Skills: Cell Biology. Students wishing to take the Lab Skills should concurrently enroll in or have completed this course. Students wishing to take SCI2037 Cell Biology without taking the Lab Skills may do so.

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s behavior, thoughts, and feelings are influenced by others. This course covers the core themes from social psychology – such as attitudes and attitude change, conformity, and aggression – and how they can be scientifically investigated. During the course, students participate in a “Humans of Maastricht” project. In this project, students make contact with their self-perceived “out-group,” applying social psychological theories and concepts to their experiences and reducing their stereotypes and prejudice in the process.

This course follows the approach that citizens are ‘predictably irrational’ (Ariely 2008). This model of human behavior has consequences for how governments can and should steer society. A behavioral approach to government steering such as ‘nudging’ is explored in this course. Students explore what it means to take a behavioral approach to public administration, how it differs from traditional policy, and to what extent has a behavioral approach been taken up by governments already, and learn about opportunities and pitfalls of a behavioral approach. Questions about whether a behavioral approach is effective, appropriate, and ethical are discussed. Finally, the course explicitly studies the policy process that leads to ‘behavioral’ policies including the other actors, such as interest groups, and contextual factors, such as institutions, rules, and norms that influence this process.  Theoretical knowledge, practical examples, guest lectures, field trips, discussions, debates, and presentations are used.

The course Poetry and Pop Songs reads English and American poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries Works are unraveled from a variety of older and newer music artists, ranging for example from U2 and Coldplay to Rihanna and Pink.  Students learn how to interpret poetry and popular music in a systematic and sophisticated way, and to write an in-depth analysis of a song or poem. The focus is on the analysis of the lyrics or ‘text’ of the poems and songs by using insights and tools from literary theory to find out how (specific) poems work, which effects they evoke, and what they mean. Students also apply these tools to the analysis of song texts. The course focuses on contemporary popular music, which means including other genres than just conventional pop music, such as rap, hip-hop, and rock.

The course introduces Geo-Information Science and its scientific and societal interests. The starting point of the introduction is the geo-information cycle. This cycle frames geo-data-based actions like acquisition and storage, processing, and visualization. It is explained that these actions can be used to describe, analyze, design, and realize real-world phenomena. Thus geo data is always acquired, processed, and visualized with a specific purpose. This is illustrated via the conceptual, formal, and technical modeling steps. Important in these modeling steps are the roles of geographical data attributes (thematic, geometric, temporal). Because the acquisition and processing of geo data are purposive, metadata plays an important role in finding geo data and geo data processing steps. It is also important to evaluate the (re)usability of geo data and geo data processing steps. Metadata explains important geo data characteristics like (geo)reference, map projection, and available attributes. Geo-visualization, especially cartography concepts, is introduced to show how geo data ought to be communicated. After the introduction of the geo data-related concepts, the course offers geo data processing options. The latter is done by the introduction of three data handling classes (query, transform, and alter) and the data-action model. Basic concepts of Remote Sensing (spectral signature, sensor types, and visual and quantitative processing) are also introduced. The application of all concepts is practiced during a practical and a small project using professional software and data.