University of Bologna

This course introduces students to public management, i.e., the decisions and actions of public officials in managerial roles. At the end of the course, students understand how a public manager achieves, in an effective way, at all levels of government, the goals of public policies. Course topics include an introduction to management; private versus public management; performance management in the public sector; the new public management and the public governance; citizen engagement; the creation and co-creation of public value; collaborative governance in times of uncertainty; strategic planning in the public sector: processes and tools; the strategic thinking: meaning and underlying variables; how to create an effective strategic plan; and a comparative study on international strategic plans.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 152B and Bologna course number 93217, is associated with the LM in Geography and Territorial Processes degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 152A and Bologna course number 90543, is associated with the LM in Sociology and Social Work degree programme.

At the end of the course, students are able to: have a general overview of international migrations, their main interpretative models, and some related issues; and manage the main concepts for the study of migrations, without limiting to the classic economy and the demography ones, but paying attention also to some most recent approaches. The course provides the main conceptual and analytical tools for a sociological analysis of migrations, presenting the most accredited interpretation models, the most recent trends, and the social impact of this phenomenon in the Mediterranean area. The first part of this course considers the figure of the stranger and the interaction models with society as it emerges from the classical sociological debate (Simmel, Park, Thomas). The second part introduces the contemporary debate on international migrations and the interpretation models of this phenomenon from different disciplines. Special attention is given to: 1. theoretical contributions from the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s; 2. considering migrations as a "total social fact," according to the Algerian sociologist A. Sayad; and 3. interethnic and cohabitation relations in urban settings. During the Laboratory experts and workers of the socio-sanitary field present their professional experience, in order to enlarge the debate with students about the main issues of the course of sociology of migrations.

This course introduces students to the concepts of financial risks and to the techniques used to manage those risks using financial derivatives. After showing how to measure risk and its impact on the firm’s business, the course illustrates the functioning of derivatives, such as forward and futures, swaps and options, and their use to hedge financial risks.

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 provides an overview of the main actors and institutions of the Italian political system. The course analyses the function of major institutions (such as the parliament, government, and constitutional court) and interprets the institutional and political changes of recent decades. The course offers conceptual tools for framing and interpreting the many dimensions of the Italian political system. A first brief history examines the construction of the unified state, and the continuities and discontinuities between the liberal, Fascist, and democratic republican regimes. The course then focuses on the reasons for and consequences of the transition from the first to the second republic. This is followed by study of the electoral arena and evolution of the party system in parallel with discussion of Italian political culture. The latter part of the course, in the form of seminars, is dedicated to the topic of populism and the link between ethnos (community identity) and democratic values.

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 focuses on topics including: the basics for ICT, big data, and IoT; the introduction to IoT, application scenarios, enabling definitions and technologies, and cloud and fog computing; the main components of IoT solutions, and big data and references to Artificial Intelligence; and IoT and big data services from the product to the service, and application cases in smart agriculture. The course content is divided into 6 parts: 1) introduction to computer science; 2) Internet of Things (IoT); 3) big data and Artificial Intelligence; 4) tools for data analysis, elaboration, and visualizations; 5) field work; and 6) seminar.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on the diverse methodologies employed in gender and feminist studies in an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, the course moves from the debates between second and third wave feminism, the course investigates some feminist research methods in literary criticism focusing on how feminist and gender studies challenge the major methodologies employed for the interpretation of literary texts written by both men and women. The course provides students with critical tools which enable them to re-read women’s access to knowledge and education, the canon formation, and the process of exclusion and inclusion of female writers from and within the literary canon and the public sphere. The course is divided into two parts. The first part introduces students to the main important methodologies in women’s and gender studies with specific reference to the rise of feminist literary criticism and to some manifestos of second and third wave feminism(s) and their temporal rhetoric of “awakening” and “space.” In particular, it explores the debates on canon formation and female genealogy and explains the notion of re-vision, resisting reading, and situated knowledge. It also examines the categories of gender, class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality and their interconnection. The second part of the course is devoted to the close-reading of some extracts from emblematic literary texts written by women in different historical moments. These texts which significantly belong to different literary genre, are explored in order to interrogate how women negotiated their agency in the public sphere, in the print market and in the political, economic, and social order. They are also examined in order to discuss the way in which they resist or perpetuate patriarchy, gender inequality, and a heterosexual politic of desire and sexuality. But they are also interrogated to see how they contributed, together with their interpretation and appropriation across time and space, to place the female self within a specific social order, to define the otherness of race and gender, and to establish relations of power between men and women, but also subjects who become geographically, ethnically, and culturally distinct. Required texts covered in this course may include: Margaret Cavendish, THE CONVENT OF PLEASURE, (1668); Aphra Behn, OROONOKO, 1688; Mary Astell, A SERIOUS PROPOSAL TO THE LADIES, PART 1 (1694/1696); M. Shelley, FRANKENSTEIN, 1816 (1831); and C. Bronte, JANE EYRE.

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 requires basic knowledge of organic chemistry, general chemistry, and physical chemistry concepts as a prerequisite. The course explores topics including polymers and production processes from renewable sources, processes of recovery and recycling of polymeric materials, depolymerization and degradation of polymeric materials, production of biodegradable polymers, membranes and polymeric technologies, and composite materials for the environment and energy. The course includes a lab session where students work with biodegradable materials in order to understand their properties. Students prepare a lab report about this experience.

This course focuses on the basic elements of the history of anthropological research in the Americas. It provides a general overview of indigenous America and the tools to begin to undertake an ethnographic analysis of the indigenous Americas. The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, the topic of colonization is discussed, the category of “indigenous” is defined, and the issue of indigenous rights is exposed. In the second part of the course, some contemporary ethnographies are presented to understand the ethnographic analysis of the indigenous Americas.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course offers, through theoretical references and case studies, the basic knowledge on the implementation of a complex urban project. The adopted design approach consists in working on urban space starting from the recognition of the structuring value of open spaces. The perspective assumed is that of the "reverse city" (Viganò) or the "soil project" (Secchi), and the design tools adopted in the urban dimension can be traced back to consolidated international experiences such as "landscape urbanism" (Waldheim) or "ecological urbanism" (Mostafavi and Doherty). Within this theoretical and methodological framework, the laboratory engages with the "Bologna green footprint" proposal, focusing on the dimension of open spaces and the structures of ecological networks across scales. Tools and materials are provided to the students for studying in-depth themes and sites assigned to each group, and developing the urban project. In the end, students learn the adequate knowledge of the principles, tools, and rules of urban planning and they are able to develop protection and transformation plans and projects in urban contexts, identifying the actions to be implemented by the subjects involved. Teaching methods include series of lectures, design exercises, and seminars.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course will help students to develop a general vision of the relationships between Italian Literature and other Arts, from the nineteenth century to present, with a focus on painting. The course discusses the most relevant works of literature which interact with images and analyzes critical, theoretical, and literary texts regarding visual arts. In addition to the interactions between literature and the arts, the module introduces students to the following themes and areas for in-depth study: 1) the interaction between literature and the visual arts; 2) the issue of the gaze in literature; 3) iconology, the "visual turn" and the “pictorial turn;” and 4) literature and visual arts facing the crisis of modernity and postmodernity. In particular, the course delves into the intermedial influence of the visual arts (painting, illustration, and photography) and the reflection on the gaze in some works by Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati in the last decades of the 20th century.