Norway

This course explores what infrastructure is, what infrastructure does, and what the study of infrastructure can contribute to anthropological knowledge. Topics include: the promise of infrastructure; how infrastructure can broaden our understanding of the political; what happens when infrastructure does not work, remains unfinished, or fails; how infrastructure challenges or supports social inequalities and discriminations; and how alternative infrastructure can be imagined. Drawing on a range of ethnographic case studies, the course advances the capacity to interpret existing materialities and structures, including their failures and unintended consequences; as well provides a solid understanding of some of the key theories and analytical approaches that inform this field of study, and their methodological and ethical implications.

This course studies Celtic mythology with a main emphasis on Irish and Welsh mythological texts. It provides an understanding of Celtic mythology from before Christianity and how this tradition has continued into the Christian era.

This course offers a productive and student-centered entry point to studying, understanding, and appreciating the American cultural mosaic through the (hi)stories that Americans have been telling themselves in an ongoing process of defining who they are—and, who they are not—vis-à-vis other cultural communities. It is through these narrative (hi)stories that first contact is often made not only with American identities, values, and mores, but also historical events and/or eras, ideological fault lines, and social (in)equalities. The course advances students’ understanding of specific American eras, historical contexts, locales, themes, issues, and fault lines through popular cultural "texts," ranging from literary texts and music to film, television, and video games.

The course describes marine food chains from primary production to fish and top predators. It places emphasis on how the life history of species is adapted to physical oceanographic conditions and seasonal and geographical production in northern waters. The course also addresses key environmental challenges.

This course provides an introduction to Ibsen’s dramatic production, emphasizing its historical context. It analyzes the plays as part of and influenced by social, political, and cultural forces, and as part of changing aesthetic and artistic norms. The course examines selected works against the background of changing literary, theatrical, and cultural paradigms in Ibsen’s own time and pays special attention to Ibsen’s renewal of the dramatic tradition. It investigates his plays not only as dramatic texts but also through historical performances from Ibsen’s time.

This course focuses on the complete employee lifecycle, with a particular emphasis on personnel selection and development. The competencies of work and organizational psychologists are relevant at all stages of the employee lifecycle in the field of Human Resources. The course covers  attracting, selecting, and developing the right individuals, as well as exemplary recent developments and current issues in HR such as hybrid work and work-life policies, knowledge sharing, and artificial intelligence in HR. The course is graded on a P/NP basis only. 

This course provides a thorough introduction of the range of behaviors found in animals, and of scientific methods used to study animal behavior in the field and in the lab. It integrates knowledge from a range of fields, including ecology, evolutionary biology, physiology, and psychology. The course covers the main genetic, physiological, and developmental mechanisms underpinning individual behavior; the main historical developments leading to the current state of the field of animal behavior, including the role of the nature-nurture debate; central evolutionary theories used to explain animal behavior; and concepts and theories, such as proximate and ultimate explanations, fitness, altruism, optimality, and game theory. It develops skills in critical reading of scientific literature, ability to design experiments to study animal behavior, and making an ethogram from observing animal behavior. 

The course provides a comparative understanding of mobility and migration patterns in prehistory. It examines theoretical approaches that explore human adaptation towards changes in society related to migration or increased/decreased mobility. The course is transdisciplinarily linked to subjects like anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and geochemistry. From anthropological models, it engages the societal causes and causations of mobility and migration. Linguistics is implemented as a tool to understand connections between languages and different forms of cultural movement, and novel approaches from the natural sciences like ancient DNA and isotope analysis are explored to further contextualize physical mobility. The course also implements a practical component where the theory from the lectures is put into practice in laboratory work (in a broad sense). Scientific approaches are explored to get a source-critical perspective on how to frame and understand contact between and within cultural groups.

This course introduces a variety of central algorithms and methods essential for studies of statistical data analysis and machine learning. It is project-based and through the various projects it exposes fundamental research problems in these fields to reproduce state-of-the-art scientific results. The course provides an opportunity to develop and structure large codes for studying these systems, get acquainted with computing facilities, and learn how to handle large scientific projects. Throughout the course, good scientific and ethical conduct is emphasized.

This course  looks at a number of criminal trials, both high-profile cases and everyday proceedings, to understand how judicial proceedings have changed over a long time period while also retaining some essential structures. Through deep reading of sources from each trial as well as secondary literature, it considers how notions of "fairness," "due process," "evidence," or the "law" have evolved and how trials reflect normative expectations that are specific to and indeed highly revelatory of their respective temporal, spatial, and social contexts. The course investigates if and in what ways modern trials differ from their predecessors, how meaningful comparisons can be made, and whether or not there is a hard, systemic core to the "law" as opposed to politics, society, and culture which can be identified and studied by historians. Case studies include the trials of Jesus, Jeanne d'Arc, and the alleged witch Tempel Anneke, as well as the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and cases from international tribunals such as those for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. No prior legal knowledge is required.