Netherlands

Current theories of psychiatric and neurological disorders are largely derived from what is known about drugs that can mimic the symptoms or that are used for treating these disorders. Basic knowledge of the effects of drugs and their underlying neurobiological mechanisms will therefore help to understand these theories better. This course facilitates the understanding of therapeutic and side effects of psychoactive drugs. The course presents major classes of CNS drugs and their use in prominent disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, and presents the mechanisms and effects of a number of recreational drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and ketamine. The course recommends a basic understanding of neuroanatomy and neurotransmission as a prerequisite.

This course examines Black (Afro-diasporic) music and its impact on society in America and Europe. It reveals how Black Music functions as a form of cultural politics, a philosophy, and a way of building identity and community. It shows how Afro-diasporic musical production has been a central force in political movements and social transformations from interwar anti-colonial activism to Civil Rights campaigns, which has continued in the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement. This course engages with genres of music such as blues and spirituals, jazz, gospel, afro-futurist pop, and hip-hop. This course situates these genres in their historical context, listens to and performs them, and shows how the music – both individual pieces and whole genres - makes political and philosophical claims. This treatment of music serves as a form of critical thinking and engagement with scholarly traditions that give primacy to textual work. The course combines readings, historical case studies and biography, and music listening and making. It therefore enacts and models radically interdisciplinary approaches that connect text-based and embodied learning.

This course provides a systematic overview of the key topics of environmental ethics. It focuses on three protracted and heated debates at the interface of environmental ethics and ecological restoration. The first debate is about the value of ecological restoration (including ‘nature development’). The second debate is about the moral status of animals within ecological restoration projects. Here the course distinguishes between (complementary) two cases: the first one is about the (re)introduction of indigenous species that were once pushed out of their native environment; the other one is about the elimination or eradication of exotic and alien species that have invaded and degraded ecosystems. Both cases show that there is considerable tension between environmental ethics and animal welfare ethics. The third debate is about the role of human intervention in the Anthropocene. Old-school conservationists want to restore and protect pristine nature and call for an attitude of humility. Ecomodernists, on the other hand, see the Anthropocene not as an ecological disaster, but as an opportunity to increase human welfare and protect nature with the use of technology.

People communicate, for the most part, through language. Language (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) is so ordinary and commonplace that one often forgets that it is actually a highly complex and miraculous capacity, with its own specific laws and peculiarities. Understanding the properties of the language system is very important for understanding and clarifying the process of communication. This course covers the following topics: how psychologists and linguists view the structure and functioning of the human mind and the place of language competence in it; how a language is acquired and the difference between language acquisition by children and acquisition by adults; the processes that take place in our heads when we perceive and interpret the written or spoken language; impairments in the ability to use language and how are they related to defects (congenital or acquired) in the brains; how and where language knowledge and language processing is represented in the brain, and how we can make its investigation measurable and visible; the genetic basis of language; and how participants in a conversation understand each other's intentions.

In this hands-on course, students work in interdisciplinary teams to uncover the rich history of Utrecht and share findings with the public. Combining historical, architectural, and societal data, students develop and design an innovative application for the city of Utrecht. In the process, students cooperate across disciplinary borders, take charge of their own learning process, and experimentally assess the added value of new media and ICT. The course accumulates in presentations and interactive demos of the teams’ final prototypes.