Norway

The course provides in-depth analyses of scientific knowledge (classical and recent, theoretical and empirical) about the relations between cognition, emotion, and language from the perspectives of psychological and developmental sciences. A large range of cognitive, emotional and language phenomena (typical and abnormal) as well as scientific theories and methods are examined.

This course introduces the field of digital methods for undergraduate students. It requires no coding or programming skills or prior experience with digital research tools. It centers on hands-on exercises and mini-projects to explore the potential utility and versatility of a broad range of tools (e.g., for issue crawling and mapping, data scraping, text mining, and visualizing data). The course teaches students to extract or scrape text and interaction data from the Internet, including important social media platforms, and to visualize and analyze these data in novel ways and with novel means. The course considerably augments the student’s range of means to access and analyze empirical material more generally: it is meant to generate competences which can be of use to complement and nuance virtually any social scientific investigation (in tandem, or not, with traditional methods). The course also touches upon more theoretical aspects and discussions associated with digital sociology and the use of digital methods, including theories about how (social) media frames and informs interaction, about the relationship between the digital and the social, and about the ethical implications and problems of digital research. Yet, it focuses on the development of technical skills and upon gaining familiarity with the software tools introduced during the course. The course involves extensive group work, including the final assessment which is completed as a group.

The course gives an introduction to gender equality in the Nordic context. It provides an overview of how the concept of gender equality has developed, and how it is implemented. The focus is on the period after the 1970s. Central themes in the course include: gender equality as a concept; work-life balance; Nordic masculinities; gender equality in an intersectional perspective; gender equality and the military; gender-based violence; gender equality as nation branding; gender and sustainability.

This course offers an introduction to Norwegian history, life, and society. Topics include: Norwegian history, geography, the political system, foreign politics, economics, the welfare state, religion, the judicial system, the role of the family in Norwegian society, Norwegian literature and language, Norwegian visual arts, culture, and identity. The course provides insight into Norwegian way of life and Norwegian identity seen in the light of historical, political, and cultural development.

This course is an introduction to topological spaces. It deals with constructions like subspaces, product spaces, and quotient spaces, and properties like compactness and connectedness. The course concludes with an introduction to fundamental groups and covering spaces. The course discusses topics including sets and functions, images and preimages, and finite, countable, and uncountable sets; how the topology on a space is determined by the collection of open sets, by the collection of closed sets, or by a basis of neighborhoods at each point, and what it means for a function to be continuous; the definition and basic properties of connected spaces, path connected spaces, compact spaces, and locally compact spaces; what it means for a metric space to be complete, and characterizing compact metric spaces; the Urysohn lemma and the Tietze extension theorem, and characterizing metrizable spaces; and the construction of the fundamental group of a topological space and applications to covering spaces and homotopy theory.

The course provides a survey of Norwegian visual art from the early medieval period to contemporary art. The primary focus is on painting, but developments in sculpture, architecture, folk arts, design, installations, conceptual, and performative art are also covered. Beginning with archeological findings from the Viking Age and the arts of the stave churches, the course runs more or less chronologically through the arts with regular interventions from the present. The course develops skills in describing, interpreting, and critically reflecting upon visual art and its discourse. It analyzes Norwegian art as a key to understanding Norwegian culture, and develops an understanding of the vital role that Norwegian artists have and have not played in shaping national identity.