University of Bologna

This course 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 carries out a comparative study regarding the main current European legal systems. In particular the focus is on civil law and common law in order to reconstruct the origins of a common legal culture with particular reference to private law and specifically to the law of obligations and contracts. In this context, the course investigates the persistence of rules and principles of roman law in the present system, working backward in search of the common legal bases that are the basis of the unification of the private projects in contemporary law. The aim of the course is to provide knowledge of European legal traditions, their origin in Roman and Medieval law and their subsequent development in two distinct areas: common law and civil law. At the end of the course, students are able to: understand the basis of the European legal tradition and distinguish it from that of other regions; know the origins of contracts and their differences in various national contexts.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by consent of the instructor. The course provides a general overview on business strategy main concepts and definitions. These concepts are discussed under critical lights by relating them to real world cases. Specific topics regarding the cultural and creative industries are addressed during the classes, and the boundaries between standard industrial contexts and the cultural ones are explored in depth. The classes cover the following topics introduction: what is a business strategy; the external perspective on strategy; the internal perspective on strategy; competitive advantage; competition analysis; partnerships and strategic alliances; innovation in cultural and creative industries; business models in creative and cultural industries; and intermediation in cultural and creative industries.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. This course offers an understanding of the different systems of attainment, transfer, and conservation of knowledge in ancient societies all over the world. The course focuses on the methods and procedures for exchanging and archiving wisdom in different cultures and offers a comparison with regard to specific aims and effectiveness in storing knowledge and information, with attention to material aspects. Emphasis is also placed on recently established databases that aim to collect data and texts of ancient authors and literary works, and to carve out new tendencies in the conception of modern storage systems on the basis of a widened perspective regarding the classification of cultural memories. Highlights of the course are the recent developments in Digital Papyrology and interdisciplinary and intercultural connections, as well as the application of different scientific approaches. The course focuses on how different ancient cultures across the world, from Greek-Latin to Indian, Chinese, Meso-American and the like, have faced and solved the problem of the organization and transmission of written data, both in the documentary field (the texts of everyday life and of administration: letters, accounts, contracts, lists) and in the literary field (books). Particular attention is placed on how, within different pre-modern cultural systems, people conceived and organized their archives. The preferred methodological approach is that of archiving as a social practice, which in turn allows for a cross-cultural comparison of phenomena beyond the European and modern idea of archive. Among the points to be explored are the difference between documents that can be discarded or that must be preserved (short or long term); the different ways of organizing the material writing support and – where possible – the physical place where the texts are stored; finally, the course refocuses attention on the activities of non-elite players and generally stresses the diffusion of archival practices throughout societies. Special attention is devoted to the implications of this methodological approach to the digitalization of ancient archives.

This is an advanced 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. There are three versions of this course; this course, “GEOGRAPHY OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177B and Bologna course number 95931, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme. One of the other versions, “GEOGRAPHIES OF GLOBAL CHALLENGES,” UCEAP Course Number 177A and Bologna course number 81952, is associated with the LM in History and Oriental Studies degree programme. The final version “GEOGRAPHY OF DEVELOPMENT,” UCEAP Course Number 176 and Bologna course number 19695, is associated with the LM in Local and Global Development degree programme.
Climate change offers the opportunity for a multidisciplinary analysis. The course discusses various aspects of the topic through a primarily geographical approach. The course is structured into three parts. Part one introduces climate change as a global phenomenon, with its natural and anthropogenic root causes. Students discuss and reflect on the socio-spatial inequalities inherent in the climate crisis. Part two analyzes climate governance, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Post Kyoto adaptation and mitigation strategies. In addition to the policy-making process, the course critically examines theoretical frameworks of adaptation, notions of climate justice, and intersectional approaches to addressing the climate crisis and its colonial roots. Part three concerns climate change and mobility. The course examines the complex interconnections between climate change and (im)mobility. Empirical examples are drawn from the #ClimateOfChange [https://climateofchange.info/publications-press/] interdisciplinary research project to contextualize the climate crisis as it is manifested, resisted, and understood from diverse locations across the globe. At the end of the course students show understanding of some of the global challenges the population of the planet has been facing since the second half of the twentieth century. Among these, the critical relation with the natural resources and with the concept of development and, above all, climate change, with its connections to territorial development, ecological risk, food security, and the consumption of natural resources. At the end of the course, the students have acquired the theoretical and empirical tools to critically analyze the global strategies of climate resilience and cooperation and the relation between climate change and tourism.

This is a special studies course with projects arranged between the student and a faculty member. The specific topics of study vary each term and are described on a special study project form for each student. The number of units varies with the student's project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student's special study project form.

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 gender studies (theories and methodologies) in diverse cultural contexts. Notions of identity and otherness, difference and diversity are analyzed with specific reference to the politics of the body. The course intends to favor the capability to deconstruct these notions in diverse texts (theoretical, literary, visual). 

This course covers literary texts, with specific reference to speculative fiction, and discusses diverse politics of the body in black feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, posthuman, and trans* studies. In particular, the course tackles the historical and discursive construction and "framing" (J. Butler) of the non-human: how it has been culturally appropriated; but investigates also different forms of resistance as well as transversal and transcultural (and trans-species) forms of alliances, questioning the possibility of imagining an episteme that expands the very category of the human, not only to those subjectivities that have never had complete access to it (R. Braidotti), but also to a series of new "bodies" that have never been associated with the idea of human, and therefore of life.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced students only. Enrolment is based on consent of the instructor. The course focuses on particular phases of Italian film history, following movements, themes, trends, and genres that have characterized the transnational paths of Italian films, from the silent era to contemporary cinema. Through the analysis of Italian films that have been internationally distributed, the course detects the elements that may have contributed to their international success or failure. The course focuses on the following films: GERMANIA ANNO ZERO (GERMANY YEAR ZERO, Roberto Rossellini, 1948); CRONACA DI UN AMORE (STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950); LA CIOCIARA (TWO WOMEN, Vittorio De Sica, 1960); DJANGO (Sergio Corbucci, 1966); MIMÌ METALLURGICO FERITO NELL'ONORE (THE SEDUCTION OF MIMÌ, Lina Wertmüller, 1972); and NICO, 1988 (Susanna Nicchiarelli, 2017). The course uses methods from reception theory, production and distribution studies, and textual analysis. The course considers the evolving characteristics of the film distribution system, the differences and nuances between distribution and circulation, and between local, national, and transnational scale. The course investigates the evolution of film scholarship on Italian popular cinema, as well as Italian films' most exportable traits and what have defined them throughout the history of Italian cinema.

This course 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 some of the main aesthetic traditions of the past century. Students acquire the conceptual and methodological tools enabling them to analyze the key issues that are central to the contemporary aesthetic debate, according to a mainly theoretical and problematic approach. The new paradigms provided by the theory of mind suggest today a remodeling of the notion of the aesthetic experience starting from a reconsideration of the traditional conceptions of perception and expression. Merleau-Ponty's thought considered a turning point in the passage. The course aims to examine this phenomenological reflection by comparing it with current outcomes that also derive from cognitive sciences and studies on evolutionism that can contribute to shedding new light on the particularity of the aesthetic dimension.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. At the end of the course, students are able to: identify and critically analyze the major research traditions and theories in the study of collective violence; distinguish the major forms of collective violence, identifying the causes and dynamics; link theory with empirical analysis on the subject of collective violence. The course examines different types of collective violence, including violence occurring in civil wars, instances of state repression, mafia and gang violence. The course is divided in three sections. The first section explores classic types of “political violence” (such as civil wars, revolutions, and terrorism) looking at their origins and dynamics. The second section deals with violence perpetrated by states (such as repressions and genocides) and violence that occurs within states that does not challenge their existence or regime (such as that perpetrated by organized crime and gangs). The third section looks at the organizations that “produce” violence, and namely at insurgent and mafia groups, discussing their emergence, their internal functioning, their relations with violence, and their demise.