University of Copenhagen

This course provides a people-oriented global approach to sustainable environmental resource management and an introduction to essential contemporary issues related to global forests. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between people, environmental resource use, and conservation, with a particular focus on forests. Central topics include the ideas and views that guide forest use and conservation; how people rely on environmental resources and the relationships between forests and human health; how a price is placed on environmental products and their importance to local people is made visible; quantifying forest cover; deforestation and what can be done; the existence and effectiveness of national and global policies; and sustainable forest management. The course offers a combination of guided readings, in-class discussions and exercises, online discussions, and detailed feedback on two individual essays.

This course explores the possibility of religious conviction in a secularized world. Questions like these are central: In a world in which religious narratives and doctrines strike the contemporary mind as unbelievable as history or scientific explanation, upon what might the modern, educated person base religious convictions? Are religious sensibilities ultimately expressions of a deep sense of morality? Is the religious attitude better described as a feeling or intuition for the infinite behind the finite world? Is personal religious conviction based on experience of the divine? Is contemporary faith an intellectually indefensible but nonetheless hopeful subjective decision to adopt religious traditions and doctrines? The course follows the evolution of religious thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of which argues that religion should avoid the distorting demand of justifying itself solely in terms of rationality and that it ought to consider the volitional and experiential aspects of religious life, as well. It develops a critical appreciation of the development of religious thought, with a particular focus on the significance of religious experience, based on a study of a handful of highly influential texts by authors such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, as well as Copenhagen’s most famous philosophical mind, Søren Kierkegaard.

Through lectures and excursions, this course offers a portrait of Denmark through its output of popular entertainment and high art within film, television, and streaming. It places internationally famous auteurs such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and Susanne Bier in their cultural context and presents important genres such as youth film, realism, drama, comedy, pornography, and documentary. The course interrogates the role of screen sexuality, gender and racial representations, and cultural identity, and it explores the role of film, television, and streaming policy. 

This course covers structure and mechanisms in organic chemistry with an emphasis on physical organic chemistry. Topics include chemical bonding and structures; stereochemistry; conformational, steric, and stereoelectronic effects; solutions and non-covalent binding forces; acid-base chemistry; energy surfaces and kinetics; isotope effects; linear free energy relationships; catalysis; nucleophilic substitution; addition, elimination, rearrangement, isomerization; concerted pericyclic reactions; radical reactions; and organometallic chemistry.

This course provides an overview of modern vision techniques used in man and machine. It focuses on both conceptual understanding of the models and methods as well as practical experience. The course covers state-of-the-art methods for image analysis including how to solve visual processing tasks such as object recognition and content-based image search and retrieval. It provides the necessary mathematical background to understand vision and image processing methods through programming exercises, which include converting a theoretical algorithmic description into a concrete program implementation, comparing computer vision and image analysis algorithms, and assessing their ability to solve a specific task. The course involves a mix of lectures and exercises.

This course analyzes and discusses core concepts of the philosophy of sociality by focusing on contributions from classical and contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Topics include empathy, collective intentionality, varieties of groups, varieties of being together, online sociality, and social (in)visibility.

This course considers how colonial legacies and forms of colonial governance persist today. It does so by examining debates within anti-colonial and postcolonial theory about the aftermath of colonialism. In particular, it considers how postcolonial thought articulates conceptions of freedom, justice, the state, and democracy and how these challenge liberal and republican ideas. Moreover, the course considers how postcolonial and anti-colonial thought has influenced the formation of other critical traditions including abolitionist thought, poststructuralism, surveillance studies, and critical border studies. In doing so, critical reflections on colonialism and empire offer new ways to think about state and corporate power, political subjectivity, violence, and borders and migration.

This course provides an introduction to programming in order to numerically solve simple economic models and perform basic data analysis. The first part of the course introduces programming using the general-purpose Python language. It teaches how to write conditional statements, loops, functions, and classes; print results; and produce static and interactive plots. It provides an opportunity to solve simple numerical optimization problems; draw random numbers; run simulations; test, debug, and document code; and use online communities proactively when writing code. The second part of the course instructs how to import data from offline and online sources, structure it, produce central descriptive statistics, and estimate simple statistical models on the data. The third part of the course introduces the concept of a numerical algorithm to write simple searching, sorting, and optimization algorithms, solve linear algebra problems, solve non-linear equations numerically and symbolically, find fixed points, and solve complicated numerical optimization problems relying on function approximation. The course provides hands-on experience with applying the above techniques to solve well-known microeconomic and macroeconomic problems through both a small data analysis project and a larger model analysis project based on a well-known economic model.