Sweden

Understanding sustainability broadly, the course explores how social entrepreneurship and innovation are a particular form of organizing toward social transformation. The course provides knowledge of how to explore and evaluate social entrepreneurship and innovations in theory and practice. Different theories and intellectual tools from social sciences are used to both understand the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship and innovation and apply them to the design of social entrepreneurial ventures in groups. During the theoretical part of the course, an introduction to the academic field of social entrepreneurship and important key concepts in social innovations are reviewed. Students work in groups to develop their own social enterprise. 

Animals figure in human society and culture in multiple ways, while frequently being marginalized or reduced to commodities, production units, status symbols, and tools. This course offers a critical exploration of how a shifting economic, scientific, political, and media-shaped landscape assigns various roles and values to animals in contemporary Western society and the consequences for the living conditions of animals and humans alike. The course integrates innovative critical animal studies research from a range of areas such as sociology, media and communication studies, philosophy, cultural studies, geography, gender studies, and critical race studies.

The course covers different themes with a focus on exercise physiological and evolutionary aspects on physical activity; appetite regulation and energy balance; the genetic basis of ADHD and hereditary diseases and syndromes; evolutionary medicine; biological gender differences and the evolution of human sexuality; evolution of influenza and HIV; stress and immunosuppression; evolutionary genetics and sexual conflicts; human partner choice and sexual selection; Richard Dawkins and the concepts "selfish genes" and "memes"; evolution of human cooperation; and evolution of human life histories.

This course introduces a selection of the main theoretical works in the Western tradition. The readings present some of the most important ideas in the history of thought, including contributions to philosophy, religion, politics, and science. Different approaches to the reading of theoretical texts are discussed and evaluated, including close reading, historical contextualization, and various critical interpretations. 

In the course, some key social institutions that together have come to be called the "Swedish" or "Scandinavian" Model, are presented. The course covers the historical development of the Swedish welfare state, both in relation to institutional changes and to the political project of the welfare state. It departs from an analytical and historical perspective where the internal contradictions and impetus for change of the Swedish Model are central. Therefore, the course includes recent developments such as the possible dismantling of the Swedish welfare state and emergence of a new welfare model. The emergence of social rights and social citizenship are included in this section. The course discusses welfare state policies directed towards the family, which includes a gender perspective in which feminist critique of the welfare state is introduced. The course also discusses the particularities and the development of the Swedish Model on labor market and labor relations, reviewing different theoretical perspectives on the triad state, capital, and labor.