University of Copenhagen

This course provides a deeper understanding of migrant lives, experiences, and emotions in the 20th and 21st century, to give a fuller sense of the varied comparative and transdisciplinary methodologies that can be used in the study of the subject, and to introduce students to research work with a view to thesis writing. The course incorporates varied approaches including chronological, thematic, and theoretical aspects. For example: the relationship between psy disciplines and migration experiences; the emergence of refugee psychiatry and its relationship to broader political contexts; and the politics of humanitarian psychiatry. The course centers around a group of comparative and interdisciplinary case studies. These include displaced persons and forced migration from within and outside Europe after the First and Second World War; dissidents and refugees in Europe; guest workers and post-colonial labor migrants after 1945 in Britain, France, and Germany. The course also incorporates varied methodologies and sources, including printed and unprinted sources, oral history and life-story analysis, quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods as well as film, memoir, and visual analysis.

This course is focused on the topic of infant and early childhood cognition, and draws on our knowledge of the developing brain and findings from neuroimaging. It begins with an introduction to the field of infant cognitive development, an overview of brain development, and current methodology for studying infants and their brains. The course covers a new topic each week, including both domains of knowledge (objects, number, faces, social reasoning, morality) and mechanisms of early learning (information expectation, information seeking, statistical learning). The course provides a state of the art on cognitive development and focuses on the most recent research that has transformed our understanding of what and how infants learn.

Fluid mechanics is concerned with moving and stationary fluids. This course builds on the concepts of classical mechanics and thermodynamics, and develops the mathematical and numerical framework to understand the behavior of fluids, from molecular to astronomical scales. The equations are fundamentally nonlinear, and rely heavily on vector algebra. As a result, it develops the necessary command of mathematical and numerical methods for handling nonlinear partial differential equations, as well as physical intuition about how to deal with moving and deforming parcels of fluids. Specifically, the course begins by discussing the basic properties of fluids and gases, then applies thermodynamics and conservation laws to arrive at the Navier Stokes equations. With their help, it explores the behavior of fluids under different conditions, with a special focus on concepts relevant in biology, oceanography, and complex systems theory: turbulence, vorticity dynamics, boundary layers, instability, and waves.

This course provides an introduction to sport and exercise psychology and associated psychological theories and methods. Theories relate to various contexts, including elite sport, sport and exercise at the broader community level, and sport and healthy lifestyle.

This course examines challenges posed by poverty affecting a billion people in low-income countries across the world as targeted by the Sustainable Development Goals and taking an economic approach to conceptualizing those challenges, their causes, and solutions. The course provides theoretical frameworks to understand, measure, analyze, and discuss themes within the development economics literature focusing on poverty, its consequences, and its alleviation. Key questions discussed during the course include: What is the state of progress towards relevant SDGs? What is life like when living with under a dollar a day? Are famines unavoidable? Is child labor necessary? Is education and health key to lifting people out of poverty? Does growth help the poorest of the poor? And, does aid matter for development? What is the relationship between environment and development, and how does climate change affect them? What role do sustainable food systems play in addressing both climate change and food insecurity? The course includes the following thematic topics: poverty and inequality; economic growth and development; health and education; agricultural transformation; aid; poverty, conflicts, and corruption; environment and development; sustainable food systems. 

This course explores anthropological approaches to large-scale matters of concern. Looking at, for example, the wars in Syria and Ukraine, the pandemic, climate change, and emerging authoritarianism, it analyzes intensifying and interconnected critical states and investigates their local implications. It does this by examining the concept of crisis within anthropology and questioning how critical aspects of power, politics, and globalization affect our contemporary world. The course is divided into 14 seminars with the following thematic orientations focused on the anthropology of emergencies, crises, and chronicities; conspiracy; authoritarianism; pandemics; climate change; migration; de-, post, and neo-colonialism; extractivism. 

This is a problem and knowledge based course that offers a unique insight in the linkages between peoples’ recreational use of nature and the sustainable management and planning of nature areas in the Anthropocene. The course deals with practical and theoretical aspects of planning, management, and governance of outdoor recreation with strong focus on balancing use and protection of nature. From a management point of view, it discusses how to deal with visitors and users of nature areas. The course has an international set-up and includes examples and cases from Denmark and other countries. Outdoor recreation is an integrated part of multiple policies, e.g. forest and afforestation policy, public health policy, municipal landscape planning, urban green space planning, agricultural policy, rural development, nature policy, and protected area management. These different policies, planning, and management fields form the basis of the course. Hence, a multitude of recreation environments are in focus, including urban green space recreation, forest recreation, countryside recreation, protected area visitation, wilderness recreation, and coastal and marine recreation. The following themes are included: visitors’ values, norms, attitudes, experiences and behaviors; conflicts between user groups; monitoring of visitor flows; accessibility and availability; children and nature; pro-environmental behaviors; and nature-based integration.  The planning and management focus includes: novel and traditional visitor monitoring; strategies and tactics in management of visitor flows; use and protection of nature; protected area management; volunteering; zoning and multifunctional approaches. In a sustainable development perspective, outdoor recreation connects people and nature, and thereby offers insight into social-ecological interactions and dynamics that are central to sustainability science. The course relates to Sustainable Development Goals 3 (good health and well-being), 10 (reduced inequalities), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), 14 (life below water), and 15 (life on land).