Netherlands

This course develops Spanish language skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. The course is organized around interactive and communicative activities that allows students to build all skills in the most effective way. Class proceedings focus on submerging students in real-world Spanish language. Grammatical structures and vocabulary are also integrated into the learning process in meaningful contexts. Furthermore an important aspect of the course is the cultural knowledge about Spain and Latin America, with a strong emphasis on intercultural communication. This course develops competency in spoken and written Spanish to a standard that enables the student to communicate effectively and confidently with Spanish native speakers and sustain, to some extent, a work or study placement in a Spanish-speaking country. In terms of the CEFR of the Council of Europe, the student can: understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. can deal with most situations likely to arise while traveling in an area where the language is spoken; can produce simple connected text on topics that are familiar or of personal interest; can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes and ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans. Prerequisites for this course are Beginners Spanish and/or level A2 CFER equivalency.

In this course various theoretical and empirical theories on individualization and social policy are discussed in lectures and tutorial meetings, with a dual focus on individualization “from below” (citizens willing – and forced by their social environment – to be independent, autonomous and unique) and individualization “from above” (governments actively stimulating and/or capitalizing on the individuality of their citizens). In addition, students are asked to select a certain policy field (education, health care, etc.) and to analyze 1) how the process of individualization has affected this policy field, 2) how in the past the present government policies have stimulated and/or capitalized on citizens' (supposed) individuality. Students report on the analysis in a paper.

This course unpacks the debates on freedom of religion on the basis of actual case studies. After an in-depth look at the ways in which identity discourses in general vacillate between “biological” and “cultural” interpretations (and valuations), the course zooms in on legal and social debates on religious freedom, culminating in an exploration of violent state interference in religious communities. Students not only learn about religion, and religious identity, but also about the construction of identity discourses in general. They learn to understand how differences in world-view (normative cognition) impact understandings of reality. By taking a look at actual cases of conflict between religious communities and state actors, they learn to deal with diversity on the basis of religion. From a series of outlier cases, students acquire a more generalized view of the nature of religious identities. Recommended prerequisite is an intermediate-level anthropology course.

This course aims to put the dynamic analysis of decisions and developments on center stage. The course focuses on industry dynamics–the analysis of firm entry, growth, and survival as components of industrial change. Innovative activity, one of the central manifestations of change, is also one of the key challenges faced by firms. This course offers an understanding of the mechanisms involved in industry dynamics, allowing key players to form better strategies and policies. Students engage in a simulation game to learn about innovation from a practical point of view and apply the literature to a realistic case.

This course is for non-History students only. In this course, the main events and developments in the history of the Netherlands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are explained, studied, and analyzed. Although the emphasis is on political history, a broad definition of politics is deliberately applied. Relevant social, cultural, and economic aspects are also covered in the lectures and the literature. Literature and primary sources are used alongside the lectures. Students analyze a historical aspect using a source of their own choice and provide a written report. Finally, their knowledge and understanding of the historical evolution are tested in an exam.

This course discusses both the key concepts of Big Data and provides hands-on-experience in developing and using Big Data systems. It introduces concepts related to Big Data system architectures, distributed file systems, the Map-Reduce framework, Resilient Distributed Data sets, and scalable linear and machine learning models, and how they are made available with cutting-edge technologies such as the Hadoop Distributed File System and Apache Spark. Students practice with tools with individual tutorials, and gain hands-on experience by working on a group project formed as a "data challenge". Students demonstrate the use of the tools learned in the course, but also their creativity as data scientists, that includes communicating the value of their findings with visualization tools. The course covers the following topics: the basic concepts related to Big Data and data-driven value-creation in the environmental, social and life sciences; Big Data methods for designing scalable applications in the environmental, social and life sciences; the role of various tools in the Big Data ecosystem; data analytics for discovery, and data visualization for communication of meaningful patterns in data.

In this course, students acquire knowledge and insight with respect to the most important phenomena and theories on the interface of semantics and pragmatics. The interpretation of an utterance lies at the intersection of grammatical, logical, conceptual, contextual, and communicative factors. Semantics and pragmatics study how those factors determine meaning and what the consequences are for the processing and acquisition of language. In that study, theoretical models and experimental research methods come together. This course is about research at the interface of semantics and pragmatics, of theory and experiment, focusing on a number of topics, like implicatures, proto typicality, reference, and coercion. Prerequisite knowledge of semantics and pragmatics at an introductory level is required.