University of Bologna

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the seminar, the student improves the knowledge of the Italian grammar. The student obtains the necessary linguistic abilities to understand and to analyze complex texts, as literary texts and related to the specialist bibliographies about the disciplinary area of the courses. The student is able to create texts in order to expose complex contents. The class is structured around the following activities: the analysis of Italian language through the study of literary texts and essays; an introduction to the reading of main bibliography of the courses in the first year of IS; producing texts and cultural and professional projects; commentaries and analysis of academic texts such as book, film, and art exhibition reviews and descriptions; and a focus on oral exposure aimed the presentation of cultural projects, events, shows, and exhibits. Students must have completed the equivalent of two or more years of university-level Italian language study as a prerequisite for this course.

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 deals with topics concerning the methodology of socio-political empirical research and addresses statistical data analysis techniques. Students who have completed this course are able to: a) examine the pros and cons of the main data collection designs; b) explore quantitative data and interpret empirical results; c) analyze quantitative datasets resorting to statistical software; and d) define a research problem, formulate research questions, collect data, test research hypotheses empirically, draw conclusions, and communicate research results. Particularly, the course explores the foundations and process of social science research and familiarizes students with basic techniques and principles of statistical reasoning. The course comprises a lecture introducing a topic/statistical tool, and a lab/seminar showing its practical application.

A working knowledge of regional geology represents the basis for any practical application of geology, including land planning, engineering geology, and the sustainable development of mineral, hydrocarbon, and water resources. This course provides the student with a modern synthesis of the geology of Italy in view of its many practical applications. The course discusses topics including the main geophysical features of the Italian peninsula and the adjacent marine basins; and the main Italian geological domains: the Alpine orogen, the Corsica-Sardinia block, the Calabria-Peloritani terrane, the Apennines, the Apulia and Hyblean platforms, the geology of Sicily, and the Quaternary.

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 focuses on the main sociological concepts related to health, with a focus on the intersections between medicine and new technologies. More specifically, the course explores concepts including: medicalization, social determinants, health literacy, bio-socialities, genetization, and pharmaceuticalization. The course analyzes social phenomena related to health by sociological concepts, evaluates the consequences of the technology and social networks related to medicine from the standpoint of sociological theories, and analyzes the relationship between new technologies in the health field and social inequalities. Main concepts discussed in the course include: medicalization; health cultures and healthscapes; social theories for global health; prevention health risks; structural violence pharmachologization; wellbeing and mental health; biomedicalization; genetification; human enhancement; reflexive longevity; STS; digital health; sociology of diagnosis; neurochemical selves; quantified self, gamification, syndemic epidemics; and endemic future.

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.