Netherlands

This public health course provides an exciting opportunity to strengthen understanding of the role of social and structural factors in health and how more distal drivers of inequity interact with more proximal individual determinants of health outcomes and behaviors. In addition to highlighting contemporary theories and research that take an ecological approach to public health, the course showcases key examples of contemporary health issues affected by broader social and structural factors, such as social stigma of specific groups. The course also encompasses an overview of social and structural approaches to public health and health promotion, such as through social policy and environmental change, complementing well-known education and counselling approaches.

This course starts with a critical assessment of development as a particular, historically grounded and morally colored enterprise. The course assesses how changing ideas about gender roles and relations prevalent in the Global North affected efforts to develop societies in the Global South. Students not only scrutinize how certain populations came to be imagined and targeted as objects of development, but also reflect on how women and men in the Global South have understood and expressed their own ideas about social change and their place in the world. To this end, students reflect on different ideological, instrumental, and critical approaches to development and ask what is at stake when gender is constructed as a development concern around discourses of equality, empowerment, and social justice. In the next part of the course, students closely assess the changes and continuities in gender structures during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. In this light, the course broadens the scope from Western-initiated development efforts to social change more generally and discusses the diverse impacts of globalization on gendered realities in different parts of the world. Key themes that are addressed: poverty, sexual and reproductive health and rights, education and empowerment, environmental politics, rural and urban change, as well as work and gender relations inside and outside the home. Whereas for long (Western-trained) academics, policy makers and development professionals equated gender with women's issues, it is now widely recognized that masculinity is as much a social construct as femininity and deserves critical attention too. Therefore, this course gives ample attention to men's issues too.

Public health nutrition is a multidisciplinary area of expertise. To solve global problems in nutrition and health, physiological, and biomedical aspects as well as the social and behavioral context are important to take into consideration. This course focuses on understanding the main function and determinants of diet and its relationship with major global public health challenges (eg. infectious diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular disease). Also, the course focuses on translating evidence from epidemiological research to public health policies and health promotion programs, both at the local, national, and international level. The course addresses common study designs and methods to evaluate the role of nutrition in public health as well as intervention programs addressing nutrition (e.g., behavior, food choice) and/or its societal context (eg. food policies, legislation of food fortification, and food supply at work and schools). A background in biology or chemistry is recommended as a course prerequisite.

The aim of this course is emphatically not to answer the question of the definition of culture, nor is it to provide a history of the development of culture. Rather, the course starts from the notion that culture creates meaning and allows us to understand ourselves, others, and the world in specific, constructed ways. What may seem natural to us, might in fact just be cultural convention, imprinted on us from such an early age that we have come to understand it as natural. This course examines how traditional cultural views on the world, concerning the uses of language, processes of othering, gender etc., have been studied, taken apart and criticized over the last few decades. In doing so, the course deals with several of the major theorists concerned with this process of deconstruction. The course necessarily deals with a limited selection of perspectives and objects. From the many methods of studying culture (anthropological, archaeological, biological, art historical, sociological etc.) the course uses the framework of Cultural Studies, a relatively recent field of study within Humanities. Furthermore, in order to focus discussions, the course takes three case studies as a starting point in the discussion sessions: the novel FOE by J.M.Coetzee, the artwork EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERY by Renzo Martens, and the documentary PARIS IS BURNING. These are discussed in light of different theoretical frameworks, allowing the study the following topics, each tightly linked to major theories in studies on culture and each functioning as a context for the analysis of cultural phenomena: language as construction, knowledge/power, the death of the author, Postcolonialism, processes of "othering." gender, and cultural memory.

This course examines how we use language to perform our own identities, to recognize others' identity performances, and represent identity behaviors in speech and writing. Students read contemporary research and theory in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to gain the theoretical tools and research methods for describing and analyzing language behaviors linked to identity. Topics to be covered include language ideology, critical race theory, ethnography, and discourse analysis to enable self-reflection about students' own language attitudes and identity practices. Students produce preliminary ethnographically informed research and writing by collecting and examining original data in this domain. They formulate a relevant research question and use one or more of the following methods of data collection and analysis to answer their question: participant observation, sociolinguistic interview, transcription, discourse analysis, and ethnographic writing. Students report on these analyses in spoken and written English appropriate for the fields of study introduced here. Lectures and tutorials are interactive requiring participation in games and game-derived elements as practice-based research for understanding key course concepts.

Information processing theory deals with how people receive, store, integrate, retrieve, and use information. The present course uses theoretical and empirical perspectives on human cognition, perception, and the experimental methods to study cognition and perception. Eleven basic topics of cognitive science/psychology are discussed using a Problem Based Learning format. The topics studied in the course are amongst others: the history of the study of the human mind as information processing machine, schema’s, scripts, plans, and frames, knowledge representation, top down and bottom up processing, semantic networks and spreading of activation, and intelligence and individual differences. This course assumes prerequisite knowledge from Introduction to Psychology or Artificial Intelligence.