University of Copenhagen

This course debates issues in green transition in Africa with a focus on governance of natural resources at and between local, national, and international levels. It develops an understanding of key concepts including theories related to governing natural resources towards a green transition in Africa and discusses specific cases from Africa related to green transition with a focus on utilization and/or conservation of Africa's natural resources. The course critically discusses actors in Africa's development and the role they are playing in green transition by governing natural resources in Africa. It considers issues related to green transition linked to discussion about scarcity and abundance, debates conservation in Africa related to the role of state, marked and civil society, and discusses impact and coping strategies related to climate change in Africa.

This course is an introduction to how anthropological analysis can contribute to an understanding of climate change, environmental justice, and human perceptions of nature. Although anthropology primarily focuses on social relations, environmental anthropology has historically been preoccupied with the interaction between natural and social processes. Through a mix of theory and ethnographic examples from around the globe, the course introduces newer perspectives on climate change and nature and cosmology, environmental justice, multispecies relations, care, conflict, and climate activism. The course includes a one-day collective fieldwork near Copenhagen and presentation of findings, collective reading and presentations of the work of a key author, and joint of essay writing based on fieldwork and theory.

This course provides an overview of the different aspects and stages involved in the engineering of software with a special focus on architectural properties of large systems. Assuming that course participants are acquainted with basic software development principles, this course provides knowledge on and experience with the wider aspects and stages in the lifecycle of a (large) software system. It introduces the general principles of software engineering, methods for addressing software engineering problems, common tools and techniques for solving software engineering problems, and methods, tools, and techniques for designing software systems and their architecture. Topics include: project management; requirements elicitation; architectural analysis, description, synthesis, prototyping & evaluation; software design and development; software implementation; quality assurance; maintenance and evolution; software business.

This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to Korean culture from the "opening" of Korea in the 19th century up to today. It travels chronologically through Korean history with a changing disciplinary focus. The course builds a robust knowledge fundament of Korean culture, including insights into multiple disciplines, including history, literature, film, historiography, geography, anthropology, and sociology.

This course investigates how human societies adapt to climate change and variability. Central concepts and theories in current adaptation research are presented and discussed using case studies from different parts of the world. In doing so, central actors, policies, and management strategies are analyzed. This includes private and public stakeholders and institutions, and adaptation strategies and initiatives at different geographical scales (local, regional, national, and supranational).

This course introduces the components and structure of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and discusses how national guidelines and requirements for EIAs influence the outcome. Current EIAs include an evaluation of environmental, economic, social and cultural impacts of development projects, hence the course is interdisciplinary by nature and is relevant for a range of academic disciplines. The course provides a comprehensive overview and thorough knowledge of EIA procedures and methodologies, introduces basic concepts and generic methodologies, and focuses on EIA within the fields of agriculture and forestry, natural resource management, infrastructure and water resource management projects. The problems and pitfalls of EIA are also discussed. The course mainly focuses on EIA in developing countries, but examples from Denmark and other countries are also used.

This course focuses on plant knowledge in a broad sense covering recognition/identification, geographical distribution, ecology, and human use of plants. It covers important crop plants, timber trees, non-timber forest products, medicinal plants, pasture grasses, ornamentals, as well as ecological important plants. During a series of lectures and exercises, the course discusses taxonomic principles, botanical terminology, plant morphology, occurrence of plant families around the world as related to climate, evolution, and continental drift, plant ecology, pollination, fruit and seed dispersal. It introduces various web-based information sources, floras, and apps. Parallel with these overall principles, the course goes through a large number of selected plant families with a highlight on characters, genera, and species. Dry material, and to the extent fresh plant material is available from the Botanical Garden, these materials are integrated parts of presentations and exercises. Students elaborate a report on an in-depth study of a selected topic, plant family, or group of families during the progression of the course that includes several elements of the course curriculum.

This course provides in depth knowledge of fundamental results and methods in discrete dynamical systems, knowledge of the concrete dynamical systems presented during the course, and an understanding of the many and diverse appearances and applications of discrete dynamical systems. It develops skills to analyze and argue for results on discrete dynamical systems, produce proofs for theorems, and solve exercises posed during the course.

This course examines the cultural fascination with the supernatural from the nineteenth century to the present. It explores a range of topics including the publication of important horror novels such as Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN (1818) and Bram Stoker’s DRACULA (1897), studies of séances and psychic investigations, as well as paranormal media and its online culture. Themes such as the otherworldly, monsters, magic, and supernatural forces continue to feature regularly in our modern society. Therefore, the course asks: how does the fascination with horror manifest itself in culture? And why are humans so drawn to the dark, evil, and macabre? By delving into the intersection of science, literature, media and the occult, this interdisciplinary exploration provides a deep understanding of the multiple contexts and social factors in which supernatural phenomena and the occult emerged and grew over the past two centuries. The course has a significant digital humanities component that takes up around 50% of the course.

This course provides an introduction and overview of the physics of strong and electroweak interactions and their experimental foundation. These fundamental forces underlie the rich phenomenology of nature's smallest components: elementary particles and atomic nuclei. The course outlines the theoretical and experimental advances which have led to the current understanding of physics at the subatomic scale. These topics are covered at a mathematical level appropriate for undergraduates students of physics. The focus is more on the understanding of phenomena rather than their rigorous mathematical description. The course touches upon selected topics of current interest, including: symmetries and conservation laws in nuclear and particle physics; relativistic kinematics and applications in high-energy reactions; the Standard Model theory: fundamental matter particles and their interactions by strong and electroweak forces; the Higgs mechanism and the origin of mass; neutrino oscillations and masses; effective nucleon-nucleon interactions and models of nuclear physics; alpha, beta, and gamma decay and fission; form factors and structure functions; and selected applications of nuclear and particle physics.