Lund University

Animals figure in human society and culture in multiple ways, while frequently being marginalized or reduced to commodities, production units, status symbols, and tools. This course offers a critical exploration of how a shifting economic, scientific, political, and media-shaped landscape assigns various roles and values to animals in contemporary Western society and the consequences for the living conditions of animals and humans alike. The course integrates innovative critical animal studies research from a range of areas such as sociology, media and communication studies, philosophy, cultural studies, geography, gender studies, and critical race studies.

The course covers different themes with a focus on exercise physiological and evolutionary aspects on physical activity; appetite regulation and energy balance; the genetic basis of ADHD and hereditary diseases and syndromes; evolutionary medicine; biological gender differences and the evolution of human sexuality; evolution of influenza and HIV; stress and immunosuppression; evolutionary genetics and sexual conflicts; human partner choice and sexual selection; Richard Dawkins and the concepts "selfish genes" and "memes"; evolution of human cooperation; and evolution of human life histories.

This course introduces a selection of the main theoretical works in the Western tradition. The readings present some of the most important ideas in the history of thought, including contributions to philosophy, religion, politics, and science. Different approaches to the reading of theoretical texts are discussed and evaluated, including close reading, historical contextualization, and various critical interpretations. 

In the course, some key social institutions that together have come to be called the "Swedish" or "Scandinavian" Model, are presented. The course covers the historical development of the Swedish welfare state, both in relation to institutional changes and to the political project of the welfare state. It departs from an analytical and historical perspective where the internal contradictions and impetus for change of the Swedish Model are central. Therefore, the course includes recent developments such as the possible dismantling of the Swedish welfare state and emergence of a new welfare model. The emergence of social rights and social citizenship are included in this section. The course discusses welfare state policies directed towards the family, which includes a gender perspective in which feminist critique of the welfare state is introduced. The course also discusses the particularities and the development of the Swedish Model on labor market and labor relations, reviewing different theoretical perspectives on the triad state, capital, and labor.

This course provides a foundation in Swedish. It prepares students to engage in general conversations, daily life situations, the discussion of current events, and the presentation of rules governing academic studies and life in Sweden. It also teaches language structure and basic grammatical rules. In addition to language learning, students engage in a variety of cultural activities such as field trips/excursions to points of interest in Sweden.

This course deals with the most important developments in the history of the media concerning social aspects and key perspectives on them; special emphasis is placed on Swedish circumstances and present-day social media, which are approached from a historical perspective. Students focus on the different historical forms of participatory media and the changing concept of the audience.

The course gives an introduction to numerical analysis for differential equations. This includes the construction, analysis, implementation and application of numerical methods for initial value problems, boundary value problems and different types of partial differential equations.