University of Copenhagen

This course focuses on digital frontiers, geopolitical frontiers, and religious-health frontiers in Africa. It develops critical analytical skills for understanding and engaging with the challenges and opportunities related to the selected emerging frontiers in diverse African contexts. The course investigates various approaches to the notion of "frontier" – both theoretical and methodological – for investigating and analyzing a range of emerging empirical frontier forms and their effects. In keeping with an interdisciplinary, critical African Studies approach, it introduces ways of thinking about frontiers in their historical, spatial, political, social, cultural, economic, and technological contexts. The selected areas of focus include growing trends and new dynamics linked to widescale digitalization across the African continent; the effects within and beyond the continent of geopolitical shifts in interests, actors, encounters, and conflicts linked not least to changes from a unipolar to more multipolar world order; and changing relations, practices, and effects arising out of new encounters between religious and health spheres on the continent. Attention is also given to new epistemological/knowledge frontiers being generated on the continent.

This course offers a broad introduction and critical review of recent trends in the field of digital humanities, with particular attention paid to applications relevant for the study of premodern societies (history, archaeology, anthropology, theology, museum studies). The course is divided into four broad themes – text, image, place, and object – highlighting an extensive interdisciplinary range of evidence that both sits within students' fields of study and encourages them to create connections with parallel avenues of scholarship. Following these themes, the course introduces cutting edge tools, successful research projects, and recent scholarship that have leveraged digital advances to fundamentally reshape our understanding of the past. Simultaneously, it engages with more complex topics concerning the ethical and methodological implications of the “Digital Turn” in humanistic studies and its implication for more traditional modes of enquiry. As a whole, this course prepares students to both more substantively engage with digital methodologies and their potential for novel research in religious studies, broadly defined. The course provides hands-on experience developing fundamental skills in digital humanistic scholarship, developing a “Digital Toolbox” that allows students to both undertake digital scholarship in their own studies and to critically engage with ongoing trends and projects relevant to their own research. These tools include, but are not limited to, introductions to GIS, database development, 3D modeling, text encoding, large language models, network modeling, and semantic modeling. Special attention is paid to ongoing research at the University of Copenhagen, highlighting the fundamental skills and research objectives of the diverse research programs taking place throughout the university. The Faculty of Theology, in particular, hosts several compelling case studies for the development and implementation of digital humanities and offers a behind-the-scenes look at these methods in action.

This course covers conditional distributions based on densities, including conditioning in the Gaussian distribution; hierarchical/mixed-effects models (theoretical and practical aspects); Bayesian analyses and computations, such as prior and posterior distributions, credible intervals, MCMC sampling; and software for mixed-effects models and Bayesian computations. This is an advanced course in statistics; it is not an introductory course. Prerequisites include probability distributions with densities, linear normal models, logistic and Poisson regression, R usage. 

This course offers an understanding of life-history adaptations, their ecological context, genetic variation, and evolution. It provides a detailed perception of biological adaptation through natural and sexual selection, the different levels of selection (genes, individuals, and social groups) and the strength of these forces in shaping life-history adaptations. The course integrates ecological and evolutionary approaches. Topics include mating systems and sexual selection; decision making and the evolution of communication; life histories in animals and microbes; life history traits: genetic variation and phenotypic plasticity; mutualistic interactions and their evolutionary stability; social evolution: cooperation and conflict; and parasite-host interactions.

This course studies contemporary economic changes of city-regions by focusing on urban and regional development. Focus is on the rise of the post-industrial knowledge economy and the new economic and social geographies, the new divisions of labor and social classes, and how these are linked to urban restructuring.

This course is a first introduction to algebraic topology, the area of mathematics in which algebra is used to study topological spaces. It defines the fundamental group and singular homology and studies their basic properties and applications. The course introduces foundational competencies in algebraic topology. Important concepts include homotopy, homotopy equivalence, fundamental group, covering space, chain complex, and homology. Prerequisites include knowledge about general topology and abelian groups, as obtained through courses such as Topology and Algebra 2, and Advanced Vector Spaces.
 

This course is an introduction to computability theory and Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The first half of the course focuses on computability theory, and includes Recursive and primitive recursive functions; Turing machines and computable functions; basic results in computability theory including Kleene's Normal Form Theorem, the s-m-n Theorem, Kleene's Recursion Theorem, Recursively enumerable sets, the halting problem and decision problems in general; as well as hierarchy theory, relative computability, and Turing degrees. The second part of the course focuses on Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, and includes Axiom systems for number theory, representable relations and functions, arithmetization of syntax, the Fixed-Point Lemma, and Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, as well as Gödel's second incompleteness theorem.

This course provides an opportunity to rediscover classics, to explore contemporary economic and business issues, and to consider and discuss different approaches to anthropological work in economy and business. It provides classic and new knowledge within economic and business anthropology, develops a curiosity, overview, and understanding of the field and related fields, allows and encourages use of economic and business anthropology in the analysis of student's own empirical data, planned fieldwork, theoretical debates, or current issues. Topics include markets, capitalism, exchange, money, debt, leadership, organization, design, and consumption, as well as additional concepts of interest to students.

This course constructs a philosophical framework for the interdisciplinary examination of gender. Against a historical outline of the development of contemporary gender studies, it examines biological, sociological, and psychological perspectives on gender. These theoretical perspectives are put into discussion with ethical issues concerning sexuality, self hood, personal identity, and autonomy. The course develops skills to make sense of the interdisciplinary examination of gender and discuss the historical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of what it means to exist with a gender identity. It provides a philosophical foundation for thinking critically about the complexity of human experience of gender. The most important elements of this philosophical foundation are a sense of history, conceptual clarity, and an understanding of interdisciplinary methodology. 

The course links knowledge on marine environment and organisms with applied cases, where such knowledge is required (e.g. climate change, eutrophication, pollution). The course is based on several themes representing specific applied issues, which provide the frame for understanding and assessing the potentials, limitations, and environmental effects of human activities on marine ecosystem structure and function. The cases are presented in a scientific context, where an understanding of the underlying basic physiological and ecological processes provide the foundation for evaluating, predicting, and managing environmental effects of human activities on marine systems. Each theme involves lectures, student presentations, and theoretical exercises. Students work in groups and deliver a written report for each theme.