Netherlands

This course provides insight into the some of the most relevant social sciences and social scientific perspectives commonly used in global sustainability science. It introduces the field of social science – broadly the study of the relationship between individuals in their context within society – and its application to our understanding of environmental issues.This course discusses the skills needed to identify and apply some of the key social science concepts and theories that are commonly used in sustainability science. The first part of the course introduces the study of society, of society’s interactions with the environment, and of societal change, thus also demonstrating the specificity of a social scientific perspective on sustainability. The second part of the course examines various social processes of change in nature-society interactions, thus introducing and discussing a range of different, but often complementary theories that are commonly used to conceptualize change toward sustainability. The course is taught through interactive lectures and tutorials, and makes ample use of real world examples and case studies. The course involves diverse learning activities which include concept mapping, small group discussions, writing exercises, and hands-on critiques of students' own implicit assumptions about social processes that are critical for sustainability.

In this course students receive an overview of the basic principles of connectionism and neural networks ranging from simple to complex models of neurons and their interconnections. Students learn how these models are used to study brain function for a wide range of topics including vision, decision making, and higher cognition. The course begins by identifying the brain, its structures, and their function. Also covered is the type of information processing carried out in the neural structures and what the physical and biological constrains are within those neural structures.

This course provides the tools to understand the intersection between religion, media, entertainment, and popular culture in the context of processes generally described as globalization. The course focuses on the formations of contemporary religious communities in various parts of the world, so as to highlight the differences between several religious traditions, the socio-political contexts in which they thrive, and the various means through which these religions are channeled to their audiences and adherents. The focus on media and popular culture includes anthropological understandings of religion, such as the effects that film, music, radio, and social media have in the shaping of power relations between groups of people. 

The objective of this course is to provide an introduction to modeling univariate and multivariate time series in economics. The topics covered include modeling non-stationary time series, Granger causality, co-integration, ARIMA, seasonality, ARCH, and Unit roots.

After an introduction to the theory, three major themes in international law–human rights, international criminal law, and migration/refugee law–are explored from a gender perspective. Gender bias is a multi-layered phenomenon. It is quite common to distinguish three forms of bias in law: first at the level of legal provisions itself, secondly regarding the effects of law in practice due to differences in position of men and women, and thirdly at an institutional or systematic level: invisible obstacles for an impartial application of the law such as sex-stereotypes and dominant gender ideology.