Netherlands

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.

General Chemistry 2 introduces students to general concepts from the fields of life sciences, environmental sciences, and technology. Concepts covered include matter, energy, size, scale, quantization of energies, driving forces, change, and equilibrium. Students explore concepts both theoretically and experimentally through tutorials and practical classes that cover themes and contexts from various fields. General Chemistry 2 emphasizes the physical and chemical properties of atoms, ions, and molecules. Subjects covered in this course include transport under the influence of concentration gradients, redox reactions and redox potentials, atomic and molecular structure, quantization, intra molecular interactions and spectrophotometry. After successful completion of this course, students are able to analyze and examine aspects of chemical mass transport (friction, drift, flux, diffusion, ionic mobility) and apply these to topics like Fick's first law, membrane potentials, and electrical conductance of a solution; analyze and examine aspects of electrochemistry (half reactions, electrochemical cells oxidation numbers, Nernst equation) and apply these to topics like spontaneity of chemical reactions, electrode potentials, equilibrium constants of electro chemical reactions and concentration measurements; outline the principles of the quantum mechanical model for single and multi-electron atoms and connect these to trends in the periodic table of elements and topics like the Aufbau principle, atomic orbitals, and energy levels in atoms; construct Lewis structures of simple inorganic molecules and classify their shapes using the VSEPR model; apply Lambert Beer's law and understand absorption and emission of electromagnetic radiation; and execute experiments in the domain of general and physical chemistry following a given protocol and analyze the outcomes.

The course gives students insight to a number of topics that are analyzed from the perspective of different linguistic disciplines: grammar (lexical semantics, morphology), psycholinguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, and typology. Students consider the following: what is the lexicon; what is a word; how are words and their meanings represented in the brain or mental lexicon; how is lexical knowledge acquired; what is the relation between culture and lexicon. Students apply different empirical methods and take a comparative perspective where possible (starting with Dutch and English but also with attention to other European languages and other language families). Specific topics of this course include the meaning of derivational morphemes and complex words, semantic fields, linguistic relativity, and lexical universals.