University of Bologna

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course is designed to provide advanced knowledge of fundamental issues of the human experience, such as the origins and persistence of old and new forms of social prejudice and their link with stereotyping and discriminative behaviors. A comprehensive summary and critical analysis of the state of theory and research on the causes and consequences of intergroup prejudice is illustrated. Moreover, similarities and differences among distinct types of prejudice are addressed. The Social Prejudice course involves 2 modules; Social Prejudice I: Basic processes and differences among prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination; Social Prejudice II: General theoretical perspectives, specific domains, methodology and tools, and effects and reactions to social discrimination. By the end of the course students know the theoretical models, the fundamental methods of investigation, and the practical course of actions leading to social discrimination, stereotypes, and social prejudice.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor.  The course deals with the study of the Aegean civilizations of the Bronze Age (third and second millennium B.C.E). Lessons firstly deal with geography and history of the researches; then with the Cycladic civilization; the Cretan sites and the different paths that brought about the formation of the first Minoan palaces; the impact of the Cretan civilization outside the island and on the Greek mainland communities; and eventually the Mycenaean civilization, with the analysis of a few key-sites, such as Lerna, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos. Last but not least, attention is given to the causes and long-lasting factors that brought about the decline and eventual collapse of the Mycenaean palatial states.

At the end of the seminar, students are able to interpret issues related to specific historical phenomena in a diachronic and transversal perspective within the Aegean Bronze Age framework, thought the elaboration and synthesis of the data coming from the analysis of written records and material sources and from the collective debate originated from the contact with other people, especially the civilizations originating in the Near East and Anatolia. They are able to formulate autonomously and in an organized way a research path or an intellectual work, using the specific acquired tools with methodological rigor, precision, and accuracy.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on some main issues of the contemporary geographical thinking, starting from authors like David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, Neil Brenner, Ash Amin, and Nigel Thrift. Specific topics concerning the spatialization of the ideas of city, sovereignty, and border will be analyzed during the lessons. Theories, models and their implications will be connected to specific case studies. The course offers advanced critical instruments to understand some issues affecting contemporary geographical space both at local and global scale.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides detailed knowledge of 12 major areas of corporate law, including references to comparative and European aspects.

The course covers the following topics:

1. introduction to corporate law;

2. corporate forms and incorporation;

3. separate legal personality;

4. limited shareholder liability;

5. shares and shareholders' rights;

6. the general meeting;

7. the board of directors;

8. directors' duties;

9. legal capital;

10. corporate groups.

At the end of the course, students: understand the structure and function of corporate law; possess an in-depth knowledge of the principles applicable to 12 areas of corporate law; understand differences between corporate laws of three jurisdictions; are familiar with corporate law practice through case analysis.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The aim of this course is to develop cultural, scientific, and technical aspects for the enhancement and sustainable use and recycling of both raw materials and primary-secondary resources. Moreover, this course develops the design aspects and feasibility of Appropriate Technologies for the developing countries, particularly with regard to water supply, wastewater treatment, and solid waste management. The course is deepened on principles of Circular Economy (dry waste for recycling and organic waste for composting), on the circularity as tool for saving raw material, water, and natural resources and to reduce waste production. Course content includes (but is not limited to): Principles of circular economy and sustainability, climate change and transition engineering, sustainable development and sustainable use of resources, and the integrated management of municipal waste collection and treatment. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course consists of theoretical lessons and practical sessions. In each lesson, after a theoretical introduction, a practical session takes place in which the student is asked to experience the introduced topic first-hand. The course is organized in two modules. The first module covers basic programming concepts, the second module covers advanced topics. The topics of the lectures include:

• Introduction to programming
• Introduction to the Python language
• Importing and Exporting data and text in Python
• Manipulating data and text in Python
• Describing and visualizing data in Python
• Libraries for Machine Learning

At the end of the course, the student has competences on theoretical and practical foundations for the acquisition, manipulation, and analysis of text and data using computational tools. Furthermore, the student will be familiar with the methodological foundations for the development of scripts for natural language processing. They know and use the fundamental algorithms and data structures and are able to build and interpret graphs that show descriptive statistics of the data collected in order to facilitate its analysis.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on the following themes: 

• International contest, international organization (historical view, present rules)
• European contest, single market (from 1951 to the present), Law and legal systems
• Regulatory framework of specific sectors: organization, European agencies, rules, assessment of market structures and European regulation

At the end of the module, students: are familiar with the forms and legal disciplines applicable to public intervention in the economy, with regard to relations between State and market, in the European legal order; know how to apply the relevant legal rules in simple factual situations and how to identify the interaction between various sources of European law, in particular Treaty and directives.

The course provides students with the sociological-empirical analysis of societal phenomena, such as integration, acceleration, polarization, fragmentation and social action, such as conflict, protest, critique, social mobilization, and claims-making. It also introduces the students to a range of methodological approaches to the study of society/social actors in interaction with politics, law, and the economy. The course enhances the student's capacity and skills to analyze society, social actors, and social problems by using sociological and interdisciplinary instruments.

The course is divided into 3 parts:

In the first part, the course provides an introduction to political sociology, its main sociological theories, concepts, and forms of analysis. Political sociology will be explored through main themes including power and authority, conflict in society, forms of mobilization, societal actors and civil society, and interaction with state (and international/transnational) institutions as well as economic actors.

In the second part, the course provides a specific (and critical) attention to forms of (innovative) data gathering, measurement, ranking, the usage of big data, and the potential downsides to the collection and uses of big data. The course critically discusses formatting, codification, quantification, measurement, rankings, forms of surveillance and control, performance indicators, and auditing.

In the third part, the course explores specific case-studies around four themes: Rule of law and democracy; Human rights, crime, surveillance, and justice; Market economy, the digital world.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course is divided into three parts:

A) The first part (Sociology of Law) is delivered in person. The students survey the main classic and contemporary approaches to the sociology of law: the focus is on the classic integration theories and theories of conflict: in particular, the Durkheimian, Weberian, and Marxist approaches are analyzed.

B) In the middle part, which takes place online, the students explore topics such as: recent theories on moral reasoning, affective primacy, and confirmative thought as keys to understand the human behavior in the digital dimension; aggressivity in the online arena against the individual (e.g. cyberbullying, revenge porn) and against groups (e.g. call out culture, hate speech, and use of memes); polarization and echo chambers.

C) In the last part, which is delivered in person again, the three main conceptions developed in the philosophy of law—namely, natural law theory, legal positivism, and legal realism—are presented, emphasizing their theoretical implications; then, some contemporary trends (such as legal feminism) are introduced and discussed, also in connection with the traditional views.

At the end of the course, students: know the history of legal philosophy thanks to the development, during the course unit, of a thematic analysis centered on fundamental theoretical problems and argumentative patterns designed to resolve those issues also under a perspective approach; know the classical and contemporary theoretical-sociological debate on the function of law, the relationship between social and legal norms, the social nature of the concepts of status and role; are capable to deal with problems of theoretical and legal nature, in a logical manner and by relying on a solid argumentation, and to discuss those problems in an interactive way by efficiently communicating the advantages of multiple their multiple structures and issues.

The course provides:

• Sources, methods and tools for the study of Greek history 
• Themes and prominent figures of Greek history through the analysis of selected and translated sources pertaining to the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods (approximately 20 hours).
• Specific topic: Demetrius the Besieger and the creation of the Hellenistic state (approximately 20 hours).

The program includes the knowledge, acquired through the students' independent study, of the key events in Greek history, from its origins to the first century BC, focusing on the evidence for the reconstruction of these events. By the end of the course, students are broadly familiar with the development of Greek history, using the basic interpretive categories towards critical analysis of issues pertaining to the Greek world and working from historical and documentary sources read in the original and in translation. Students have a good knowledge of the main themes, events, and phenomena of Greek history in a broader context, possess precise spatio-temporal coordinates and know the main tools of information, research, and updating. They also read works by historians in at least one language other than Italian and are able to speak in the appropriate technical terminology.