University of Copenhagen

This course develops an understanding of key concepts and theories related to climate issues, sustainability, and environmental governance in Africa. It debates climate adaptation and mitigation, sustainable development, and governing the environment, and discusses specific African cases related to climate-smart interventions, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and governance initiatives related to biodiversity conservation and rural development. The course examines key actors in Africa's development and the roles they play in responding to the climate crisis, in sustainability, and in governing natural resources. It discusses relevant questions concerning the relationship between climate, scarcity, and abundance; internationally-driven, climate-smart initiatives in Africa related to the role of state, market, and civil society; and the impacts and coping strategies related to implementing the SDGs in Africa. The course consists of a combination of lectures and workshop-like activities with active student participation and presentations by a number of external lecturers, including guests from the private sector, NGOs, and researchers. This version of the course is worth 15 ECTS (12 quarter UC units) and assessment consists of a written paper on a topic of the student's own choosing comprising 36,000-43,200 characters.

This course examines the question of the good life as it surfaces in key texts from Continental philosophy, with particular focus on human freedom and the search for meaning, fulfilment, and happiness. The course explores the works of European thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and Camus, who shared an insight into the existential conditions of despair, anxiety, and meaninglessness, seeing these trials as occasions to examine how we live. With them, the course invokes inquiry into relationships, activities, and commitments; considers the importance of personal responsibility and active engagement; and discusses whether freedom is key to the good life, and, if so, the freedom to do what? The course may not discover the secret to happiness, but does partake in an age-old pilgrimage in search of the good life.

This course studies the earth’s climate history from the deep past to recent climate change. It spotlights changes on geological time scales as well as variations over glacial-interglacial cycles, and recent human induced changes. There is a particular focus on the climate archives in the large polar ice sheets and the geological record. It introduces reading the paleo-climate archives and judging their uncertainties. This course provides an introduction to and general knowledge of what can be learned from paleo-climate archives about global and regional climate on timescales from a few thousand to millions of years. It provides an update of new records of past climate and their interpretation and the background for a critical view on man made climate change.

This course examines (and sometimes challenges) the common premises and approach of today’s psychological researchers, practitioners, and educators. By reading, thinking, discussing, observing, and writing, it also reflects on our own values and assumptions, which would hopefully make us better members of this increasingly globalized world. The course discusses core concepts and frameworks of cross-cultural psychology and culturally sensitive research; cross-cultural research methods (types of cross-cultural comparisons, research, and Bias and equivalence); culture, cognition, and emotion; culture and self; culture and human development; cultural understanding and sensitivity in mental health and psychotherapy; and multicultural competence (acculturation, challenges, and strategies for intercultural interactions).

This course uncovers a European history about love that has shaped the present in untold ways. It follows love on various historical stages – from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages, the romantic era, the post-romantic period, and into the present – and pays close attention to the stories we have told ourselves about love. Our love stories reveal that we conceive of the human condition as desiring, striving, and longing, but also as avoiding reality and the concrete commitments that tie us to finitude. The course reads responses to this escapism in the form of a moral call to respond to the other, also when this means respecting difference and the other’s independence. Throughout, it provides tools for thinking seriously about love today.

This course covers algebraic number fields and their rings of integers; trace, norm, and discriminants; prime decomposition in Dedekind domains and rings of integers; prime decomposition in quadratic and cyclotomic number fields; decomposition theory in Galois extensions; decomposition- and inertia groups and fields; quadratic reciprocity via decomposition theory; Frobenius automorphisms; the prime divisors of the discriminant and ramification; finiteness of class numbers; Dirichlet's unit theorem; the first case of Fermat's last theorem for regular primes.

This course covers a number of fundamental topics concerning groups of graph automorphisms, with an emphasis on group-theoretic notions and results. Topics include fundamentals of graph theory and of group theory; graph automorphisms, transitive graphs; group actions on graphs; Cayley graphs, Schreier graphs; fundamental group of a graph, coverings; free group: definition, elementary properties; subgroups of free groups; and Hanna Neumann conjecture.

This course provides a broad introduction to marine mammal biology and research, including topics such as origin, evolution, taxonomy, distribution, abundance, anatomy, sensory biology, ecology, and behavior. Further, the course addresses impacts caused by pathogens, human activities, and climate change, as well as marine mammal management and conservation. Each topic is covered at a general introductory level, and selected topics are additionally presented and discussed by guest lectures with expertise in marine mammal research, conservation, and management. The course provides an overview of marine mammal biology and research practices, forming a solid basis upon which to build future study, research, and career interests in marine mammal biology and wildlife biology in general.

This course examines the past three decades' explosive surge in neuroscientific explanations of human nature, promising clear-cut biological answers to commonplace philosophical questions concerning rationality, emotion, behavior, values, and ethics. It explores to what extent such a promise is warranted, in particular concerning existential questions such as anxiety, responsibility, and religious faith.

This course provides a combination of critical analytical and practical skills for engaging with the challenges of development planning and policy analysis in relation to African contexts. It includes at least three dimensions: firstly, it introduces critical theoretical approaches to the very notion of doing "development," to the study of policy, and to the politics of planning; secondly, it will prepare students for analyzing different kinds of development planning and policies in their historical-political-social-economic contexts; and thirdly, it provides critically reflective yet practical skills for planning concrete development projects and undertaking critical readings of policy. Students are encouraged to draw on and share their own previous experience of working in "development" settings where relevant but such experience is not a pre-requisite for the course.