University of Copenhagen

This course on conflict analysis and negotiation design offers valuable knowledge and skills to students in fields involving the environment, land use, urban planning, or natural resource management. In order to prepare for a profession involving public policy decision making, a process which involves negotiation of scientific knowledge against values, concerns, and conflicting interests of the public, students are provided with skills to tailor a negotiation process at both the personal and process level to a specific conflict. Themes covered in this course include discourse, culture, institutions, power, capacity, incentives, cognition, and several social psychological factors. Additionally, students learn that a universal approach to conflict management is not equally effective in different countries, and that they must educate themselves on the political culture and social values of the people with whom they are working in order to find success in natural resource decision making. Students practice implementing their knowledge and skills through group discussions as well as an individual project report on a real life case of their choosing.

This course looks at the nexus of identities, digital data and technologies, and methods, drawing on literature from anthropology, social data science, science and technology studies, and related fields. The course considers how identities have creatively flourished, but also provides a critical interrogation of how gender, race, and other forms of difference and inequality are reproduced in and through digital data and technologies. This course begins with considering the history of digital data and technologies, and the methods and tools used to understand digital identities from the fields of anthropology and data science. This includes examining differing approaches to ethics in these fields. The course also explores theories about identity and different ways identities are constructed and performed through digital technologies, such as social media, internet cultures, and fitness trackers. It also explores the identities of those who design and build these technologies, the politics and norms reproduced through technologies themselves, and the effects they have with particular attention to the role of gender and race. Finally, the political economic contexts of these technologies and the formation of digital identities are considered.

The course focuses on the international systems for the protection of human rights. Its purpose is to make students familiar with the institutional mechanisms and substantive provisions in force at the global and regional levels to protect human rights in the United Nations, European, American and African regimes of protection. The class addresses the key challenges in current international human rights law through a number of thematic explorations of topical issue areas and clusters of complementary rights and obligations. Throughout the semester, the class is required to discuss and provide critical perspectives on the case law of international courts and tribunals in light of theoretical and academic perspectives. Students also consider the institutional viability of the current regime(s) and the opportunities and difficulties of pushing forward the overall normative agenda of international human rights law.

Health policy is a core component of western welfare states. It is also a very complex and contested policy field where hierarchical, market, clan, and network based governance forms meet and sometimes conflict. A diverse range of national and international actors influence health policymaking. This seminar provides an introduction to comparative health policy analysis as a method for analyzing and comparing health systems. Nordic health systems are used as case examples, but comparisons are made to other types of health systems in Europe. Theories from comparative health policy, public administration, and health economics are presented as frameworks for analyzing differences and similarities.

This course is a study of the foreign policy of post-Soviet Russia and its neighbors, and it provides an overview of international relations in this region. It argues that in order to better understand the behavior of post-Soviet states in the international arena, students must examine not only political, but also cultural, historical, and religious phenomena. This course focuses on factors shaping the collective identities of international actors, including the role of Orthodox Christianity, dominant ideologies, geography and perception of space, literature, arts, and creative imagination.

This course covers the following: sequences of random variables, almost sure convergence, Kolmogorov's 0-1 law; the strong law of large numbers; weak convergence of probability measures; characteristic functions; the central limit theorem; triangular arrays and Lindebergs condition; the multivariate central limit theorem; the ergodic theorem.

Using theories and analytical tools from microeconomics and macroeconomics, this course introduces the basic economic concepts relevant for analyzing problems and policies relating to the environment, natural resources, and climate change. Students learn concepts related to the central economic services provided by the environment, the basic theory of optimal management of natural resources, the distinction between weak and strong sustainability, the basic principles for valuation of environmental goods and services, the theory of the environment as a public good, and more. Students apply the standard mathematical method for static optimization subject to constraints to analyze environmental policy problems such as the determination of the optimal level of pollution abatement and the optimal environmental tax rates. This course also covers the application of optimal control theory to solve dynamic optimization problems subject to constraints such as the determination of the optimal extraction of natural resources and the optimal pace of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Students explain and present central parts of economic theories and models of the environment, natural resources, and climate change, and apply the theoretical and empirical insights from the course in a critical analysis and discussion of important real-world problems of environmental and climate policy.

This course is primarily about contemporary British novels and the social concerns that they represent and raise in practice. In particular, the course considers the structure of British class society, and how the history of this structure has influenced, been represented in, and been resisted in fiction. Students think closely about the novel and the way it has emerged. Many of the twenty-first century novels covered in this course explicitly struggle to re-write the past, but in doing so they testify in interesting ways to its influence over the future, thus the course considers literature's role in the process of social change. In this light, students have an opportunity to look at some of the most influential British literary theory of the twentieth century (by Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Alan Sinfield) as a defense of literature's role, not just in representing, but in changing the world it describes.

The first part of the course looks at American literature in its international contexts, thinking about the ways that this writing has been defined against, and as part of, the world. Questions covered in the class include: What is the so-called transnational turn in American studies, and how has it changed the way we read American literature? How do the local and the global interact in literary texts? How do texts “move” in the world, either through transnational characters and settings, or the international dissemination and translation of texts? The course spans early nationalist movements in defining a canon of literature in the nineteenth century, the literatures of immigrant groups in the late nineteenth-century, expatriate writers in the early twentieth century, and contemporary transnational writing by authors with roots across cultures. Students also take local and global works into context, considering the reception of American texts in Europe, and Scandinavian-American literary exchanges. The second part of the course considers recent cultural texts that respond to and represent the U.S. South's relationship to contemporary globalization—and relatedly, the region's complex relationship to the nation. The course discusses texts—novels, non-fiction writing, documentary, film, and music—that have focused on the ways in which economic globalization and its demographic corollary, immigration, have challenged and transformed traditional understandings of U.S. southern identity (as a distinctive region within the United States; as characterized by a rooted “sense of place”; as structured around a rigid black-white racial dichotomy, etc.). By reading a range of primary texts produced by native southerners, non-southern Americans, and immigrants, the course maps the changing terrain of the U.S. South as it has been reshaped by an influx (and exodus) of global capital, and by the arrival of immigrants from around the world. Students consider, among other things, how globalization and immigration may or may not have transformed not only regional identity, but also whether it is plausible to situate (as some scholars have) the U.S. South as simultaneously part of the “Global South” and “Global North.” The course locates the selected primary texts in relation to and dialogue with recent critical and theoretical work in U.S. southern studies, especially the “New Southern Studies” (2001-present). Among this secondary reading are excerpts from WHERE THE NEW WORLD IS: LITERATURE ABOUT THE U.S. SOUTH AT GLOBAL SCALES (2018).