Netherlands

This course is an introduction to sociology. It treats sociology as a science and a profession, emphasizing scientific questions, theories, methods, findings, and their applications. It covers a wide range of topics and social phenomena, such as inequality, crime, immigration and ethnicity, intergroup hate, misperceptions, polarization, religion, gender, and modernization. The course introduces useful sociological ‘tools’ and ‘principles' designed to describe and understand social phenomena scientifically. Furthermore, students receive an introduction to key sociological concepts, theories, perspectives, methods, and stylized findings.

This course provides a survey of the conflict between literary creativity and control by society, in a wide historical, European context. A series of case studies on controversial texts and authors are discussed in connection with the regulations imposed to suppress or regulate the distribution of these works. Official secular and religious censorship, the development of copyright, and protests against “inflammatory”, “blasphemic”, or “amoral” texts are studied through authors like Erasmus, Montaigne, Vondel, Spinoza, Stuart Mill, Nabokov, and Rushdie who used literary strategies to avoid censorship and repression, such as the use of metaphor, humor, satire, or hiding their name.

This course is intended for students who have not taken any other courses in academic writing as this course provides the basic knowledge and skills required to produce written academic work in your field of study. Students learn to use the most important grammatical structures of English appropriately and expand their vocabulary and register required in formal academic writing in your subject. Some attention is paid to the mechanics of academic writing in English (structure, punctuation, referencing).

Full course description

Flowing from this objective, the course deals with the over all history of mankind, and a number of the decisive transformations involved in that history.

What sort of creatures are we? How have we evolved from and lived before we became homo sapiens? What sort of animals are our ancestors?

Important topics nearer in time are the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The agricultural or neolithic revolution has changed us and the world permanently. In a relatively brief period we went from hunting and gathering to tilling the soil and domesticating plants and animals. Why and how did we do this? Since the agricultural revolution our numbers have multiplied beyond comprehension. Societies became increasingly complex and stratified.

The industrial revolution lifted everything to a new unprecedented plane. A type of society arose, driven by industrial innovation and run on fossil fuels. We are still living in that kind of society today, so it is interesting to know how it came about.

The course will also deal with topics like the role of war, disease, religion, worldviews and finance in shaping history. Take disease. Their ways of life brought men in contact with all sorts of diseases. Especially after the agricultural revolution we had to adapt to diseases we caught from our domesticated animals. We still have to do this. Look at present day threats like bird flu. Living in some form of armed peace with diseases has always been a major characteristic of societies. How did we do this?

Finally the course also touches upon the ‘Rise of the West’. The contentious rise of Western Europe and North America as a dominant factor in worldhistory over the last 5 centuries will be the closing topic of the course.

Course objectives

• To understand some of the major issues and episodes that have shaped the history of mankind. The focus will be on themes and topics that have had or are still having long term influences on historical development.

Prerequisites

Any course in history or sociology, COR1003 Contemporary World History, or SSC1003/SSC2065 Theories of Social Order. 

In many situations, economic actors need to make decisions while knowing that the final outcome also depends on the decisions of others. Such situations are called games, and the actors involved are called players. In order to reach a good decision, it is important for a player to reason about the decisions and motivations of their opponents. This course teaches how to reason about your opponents in game theoretic situations, and how to use this reasoning to make good decisions. The theory is applied to various economic situations of interest.