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. The course provides in-depth knowledge of European legal foundations, their origin in Roman law, and their subsequent development in Common law and Civil law. Under this framework, the Roman Law's heritage in modern legal systems is investigated, working backward in search of the common legal bases on which the harmonization projects in the European law lays on. 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. At the end of the course, students understand the roots of the European legal traditions, and in particular, they the legal rationale of institutions such as contracts and obligations and their differences under various national contexts.

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 discusses the fundamental principles of the relational data model and of the relational database management systems. In particular, the course examines the structure of a relational database, the integrity constraints on data, and the SQL query language. Course contents include: data modelling, database management, language to query databases, and data analysis.

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 explores the main theories, concepts, and approaches developed by social studies of science and technology (STS), and analytically compares them and discusses their pros and cons. The course examines basic issues about the materiality of and governance by data infrastructures, and their social and philosophical implications. Students develop experience in designing research on data infrastructures. Throughout the course, interactive moments are devoted to developing empirical research design skills, ranging from research question design to research methodologies. Such moments are finalized to support the STS research design to be submitted as part of the course assessment. The last week of the course focuses on data infrastructures and addresses some sociopolitical implications of data infrastructures. All topics are tackled by reading, presenting, and commenting on leading international literature and empirical case studies.

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 explores the prominent concepts and theories of competitive and corporate strategy. The study of the core elements of strategic management is combined with the development of the skillset to apply strategy models and tools to case studies from different industries, such as finance and banking arena, including the emergent fintech and digital companies. Students develop their collaborative skills in a role game as consultants to advise the management of a corporation. At the end of the module, students develop an understanding of the most relevant models of company competitive analysis and strategy and are able to identify key factors for organizational performance. Students learn how to set up necessary actions to attain organizational goals in international markets.

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 global aim of this course is to provide students with an expert knowledge on the use of language and other semiotic systems in contemporary discourse. Including lectures and language classes, the course covers a number of aspects of English linguistics in order to develop a critical understanding of the relationship between discourse and society and to strengthen English language proficiency. Students are able to identify and describe metalinguistic factors and semiotic resources at play in discourse as they are provided with theoretical knowledge related to one or more of the following areas of English linguistics: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics, corpus linguistics, multimodality, and social semiotics. Theories and concepts are applied to samples of authentic texts (written and/or spoken, belonging to different registers), including the use of language and multimodal corpora as sources of examples. The course is divided into two modules. Module 1 aims at acquiring the theoretical knowledge and practical skills needed to master the relationship between language, cognition, and emotion within persuasive communication. Module 2 focuses on discourse as a social phenomenon.

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 historical, theoretical, and methodological foundations of iconographic and iconological research. Through a diachronic examination of some examples, from Prehistory to the Middle Ages, the course explores the world of ancient images and their semantic value. In particular, the topics covered include: reading images: theoretical approaches; history of the studies in iconology; iconography and iconology in archaeology; current research methods and tools and their issues; and case studies (in FALL 2023) in Mediterranean Antiquity, from Prehistory to the Middle Age (the presented samples change every year).

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 linguistic theory related to the coding of the linguistic message into sounds, particularly the fundamentals of articulatory/acoustic phonetics and segmental/suprasegmental phonology. In particular, students are able to analyze the phonetic and phonological aspects of a language or linguistic variety from different perspectives: synchronic, diachronic, sociolinguistic, and acquisitional. Students analyze phenomena of phonetic and phonological disruption in pathological speech; and set up autonomously theoretical and experimental research in the fields outlined above. Topics include: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, form and substance of the signifier; and the development of phonetic/phonological competence during childhood.

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. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 180B and Bologna course number 75074, is associated with the LM in Sociology and Social Work degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 180A and Bologna course number 81779, is associated with the LM in Language, Society, and Communication degree programme. The course focuses on different notions of globalization, and how information technologies affect everyday life, markets, and the process of consumption. Emphasis is placed on a sociological reading of globalization, i.e. understanding the internet culture and the relationship between globalization and web society. Students analyze the impact on individual behaviors and society at large within social networks and online communities through the mainstreaming of private information posted to the public sphere. The course addresses the emergence of a new rhetoric concerning democratization and participation in the web society, the changing relationship between producers, consumers, and prosumers in the web society and the consequences and effects of the Digital Divide nationally and worldwide.

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 course the student is able to evaluate the scientific basis of Earth’s past climate system, identify past states of the climate system that offer the closest analogs to the climates of the coming decades, and appreciate the scientific context for the long view on a warming world, based on the recognition of natural, past climate variability rather than mathematical models of future potential scenarios. The course consists of two modules. Module I focuses on pre-Quaternary examples of global climate changes, including quantitative methods for the study of past global changes, examples of rapid climate changes in the geological past, and the relationships between geodynamics, paleogeography, and climate. Module II focuses on climate variability during the Quaternary (glacial and post-glacial), with emphasis on the high-resolution signature of climate change in the stratigraphic record on millennial to centennial timescales, from quantitative dating methods to climate proxies.

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 introduces the main concepts of Python and its use in economic and econometric analyses. In particular, the course focuses on: 1) data types: definitions and use; 2) pandas; 3) basic programming structures (loops, if,...); 4) a primer on classes; and 5) applications to economics and econometrics.