University of Copenhagen

The course is interdisciplinary, and will introduce commonly used models of work-related stress, as well as broadly applicable methods for measuring the physiological effects of stress on the body. 

This course addresses the interdisciplinary applicability of phenomenology, including best practices, use and application in a non-philosophical context, what qualifies a discipline or practice as phenomenological, and the core commitments of phenomenology. The first third of the course offers an introduction to core ideas and figures in phenomenology. It makes clear how phenomenology, by offering an account of human existence where the subject is understood as an embodied, socially, and culturally embedded being-in-the-world, is not only addressing specific issues relevant to several disciplines from within the humanities and social sciences, but also contributing to the philosophy of the human sciences. The rest of the course looks at successful applications in qualitative research and psychology, in discussions of gender and race, in health care (primarily psychiatry and nursing), in cognitive science (primarily developmental psychology and neuroscience), and in the social sciences (including sociology, anthropology and political science). The course offers some reflections on what a phenomenological interview might look like and discusses how ideas from phenomenology can be used in corporations and private companies.

This course introduces concepts and theories behind causal inference in order to predict and analyze a system’s behavior under manipulations. Topics include causal models versus observational models; observational distribution, intervention distribution, and counterfactuals; graphical models and Markov conditions; and identifiability conditions for learning causal relations from observational and/or interventional data. Working with graphs and graphical models, students derive causal effects, predict the result of interventional experiments, perform variable adjustments for computing causal effects, and gain an understanding of and ability to apply different methods for causal structure learning.

This course returns to the formative texts of Michel Foucault on the topic of biopolitics, a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment. It examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics as terms integral to the fields of public health and virology (contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, quarantine) now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. The course examines conceptual and historical questions of how life came to be understood as the object of government and how this has intensified the operations of power in the modern era. It also expands understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions, from understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare. It considers how Foucault’s formulation has had wide-ranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism, neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human.

This course focuses on technology for modern and emerging user interfaces and hardware, with an emphasis on physical computing. Learning takes place in two ways: a theoretical component introducing both classic and the latest and most exciting research around novel user interfaces; and a practical component to gain hands-on skills in building novel physical interfaces.