Maastricht University – University College Maastricht

This course covers mental disorders. Students learn about mental and behavioral distress and/or dysfunction and how to promote subjective well-being and personal adaptation.  Case studies on different anxiety disorders, eating disorders, addictions, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, and personality disorders are used. Questions continually raised during the course are: what is the clinical picture?  where is the boundary between no need for care and need for care? what causes such a disorder? what can be done about the disorder?  the gap between theory and practice, between scientific thinking and clinical treatment are evaluated. Different theoretical schools are examined. 

This course studies the work of young writers that at first sight seem to engage in the sort of genres we easily associate with the received practices and institutions of literature, and these young writers not only address the major issues and concerns in our society – racial injustice, class and gender inequalities, climate change, the rights of migrants and refugees, discrimination of LGBTQ+ people, domestic violence, sexual abuse, political violence, etc. – these are in fact at the core of their work. A closer look reveals that these young writers seem to break with the accepted boundaries between genres. To give one example: many of them challenge the binary between form and content, which too often has been broken down along racialized lines. The work of writers of color usually are more appreciated for its political activism rather than for its experimentation with form. The work of Claudia Rankine however shows a subtle combination of poetry, essay, and visual art, approaching race through form. Rankine is an exponent of the hybrid genre of the lyric essay. Other genre developments the course addresses are autofiction, spoken word, and relational theatre.

The debate between Enlightenment and Romanticism has an enduring impact on discussions of today in art, politics, science, human identity, and social values. The Western world is hardly understood without knowledge of these two decisive periods. This course is a systematical introduction to these two, formative, opposed intellectual traditions. First, a historical context is presented to the political and ideological ambitions of the Enlightenment (enlightened despotism, Voltaire at the court of Frederick the Great, censorship and the diffusion of the Enlightenment). Secondly, the opposed approach to "Nature" is introduced; the influence of Newton, the rise of modern science, the Encyclopédie vs. Romantic science (e.g. Goethe’s criticism on Newton’s Theory of Color) and the role of the arts in the new approach to nature (such as landscape painting and romantic poetry). Then, the changes in the visual arts illustrate continuity and discontinuity in cultural history (Romanticism and Neo-Classicism). In the fourth place, human subjectivity in the Enlightenment (based on Lockean psychology and Self-love) is confronted to new approaches to the romantic soul (the unconsciousness, irrationality, Weltschmerz). This is also discussed with an analysis of the classic movie DANGEROUS LIAISONS (Stephen Frears, 1988). Finally, discussions about morals and politics are presented (Rousseau, the Social Contract, the slogans of the French Revolution vs. Romantic values concerning the State and personal relationships like love and friendship, nationalism).

This course covers the theoretical approaches and methodological components within cultural memory studies concerned with minoritarian groups and affect/emotion: e.g. Nora, Stoler, Rigney, Trouillot, Said, Azoulay, Sharpe, Hartman, Muñoz, Mbembe, Campt, Arondekar. It provides an introduction into archives (theory) and memory, especially in relation to power by introducing the political and academic assessment of the post-colonial dimension of cultural memory, and the queer dimension of historical scholarship.

This course reviews organizations and workplaces with a focus on how to enhance relationships with the organizations. Organization Theory is a branch of social sciences that is particularly interested in the why, how, and when multiple individuals join efforts to reach a common goal. It is a multidisciplinary subject drawing from disciplines such as arts and humanities, educational sciences, psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, and politics. These multiple lenses through which we view organizations make Organization Theory a fascinating and relevant topic to explore and examine at any stage of your study program. The main topics covered in this course are organization-environment relations, organizational design types and culture, leadership development, HRM and well-being, and managing diversity and inclusion at work.

This course probes the entanglements of nature, society, and politics through which the environment is formed, experienced, problematized, interpreted, contested, and governed in different sociocultural contexts. It develops a critical perspective on the dominant patterns of industrial production and consumption and asks how our societies can be made more sustainable. The course draws on insights from environmental history, environmental sociology, science and technology studies, sustainability studies, and recent debates on the "Anthropocene". Thereby, it seeks to complement the fact-oriented perspective of the natural sciences with a reflective understanding of the politics through which our knowledge (and non-knowledge) of the environment is formed. The course is structured in four sections. The first three focus on one core domain of nature-society-politics: the risks of industrial production; biodiversity and land; global climate change. The final section reflects on how we can move from these insights toward a comprehensive understanding and transformative politics of the Anthropocene.

The first part of this course serves as an introduction to the general characteristics and typology of arguments. Furthermore, students learn how arguments can be standardized and how argumentative structures can be visualized by drawing patterns. This part of the course also contains an introductory lecture, entitled “Standardizing Arguments”. In part two, an informal but systematic method for evaluating the quality of arguments, the ARG method, is introduced. During this part of the course an introduction to bad arguments, so-called fallacies, is provided as well. A lecture on evaluating arguments accompanies this part of the course. In the third part, the knowledge and skills provided in the first two parts are applied to complete texts, seeking to isolate the arguments they present systematically and evaluate whether or not they are good arguments. In part four, standardization and patterns of arguments, as well as the ARG method, are used to construct arguments. Furthermore, students practice how the skills learned throughout the course can be applied to writing academic papers. Students considering enrolling for the skill training in argumentation should be aware that the course does not focus on rhetoric and debating skills (although it can be assumed that the analytical skills acquired in this course will be helpful for debates). Prerequisite: Students who take the course need to have written at least one academic paper.