Utrecht University – University College Utrecht

This course examines Black (Afro-diasporic) music and its impact on society in America and Europe. It reveals how Black Music functions as a form of cultural politics, a philosophy, and a way of building identity and community. It shows how Afro-diasporic musical production has been a central force in political movements and social transformations from interwar anti-colonial activism to Civil Rights campaigns, which has continued in the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement. This course engages with genres of music such as blues and spirituals, jazz, gospel, afro-futurist pop, and hip-hop. This course situates these genres in their historical context, listens to and performs them, and shows how the music – both individual pieces and whole genres - makes political and philosophical claims. This treatment of music serves as a form of critical thinking and engagement with scholarly traditions that give primacy to textual work. The course combines readings, historical case studies and biography, and music listening and making. It therefore enacts and models radically interdisciplinary approaches that connect text-based and embodied learning.

After completing this course students are able to:

1. identify the key arguments in a primary philosophy text by key thinkers in Western philosophy. (Assessment: final exam, class participation, reading questions).
2. critically assess the arguments in a primary philosophy text by key thinkers in Western philosophy. (Assessment: final exam, class discussion, essays).
3. represent their critical, cogent assessments of arguments from the main themes of Western philosophy in an essay. (Assessment: essays, final exam).
4. express their cogent philosophical arguments in class discussions and beyond. (Assessment: class discussion).
5. Main goal: After completing this course students have a solid, if basic knowledge of the main figures and main themes (e.g. epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, mind, language, science) in the Western philosophical tradition, from the Ancient world to the 20th Century. (Assessment: final exam).

Content

Philosophy is neither a science nor an art, yet it is the mother of many arts and sciences, which have achieved independence from it by developing methods and techniques of their own. This course is an introduction to the discipline of philosophy, its authors, its history, its methods, and last but not least, its arguments.

Philosophy comprises a wide range of subjects and a long history of human thought relying on nothing but itself. Its problems and arguments have for two an a half millennia helped to articulate religious and political movements, to inspire art and literature, and so to shape societies and civilizations.

            The course is an invitation to hear western philosophers from twenty-four centuries reflecting on such large questions as (1) What, basically, is there? (2) Do we really know what we think we know? (3) How should we act and who should we choose to be? These are theoretical questions, but many of them have enormous practical implications. The questions are tied up with each other: our view on what there is, is related both to our view on what insures reliable knowledge, and to our view on how to derive evaluation from description, or how to get from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. By tracing the connections between these questions, philosophy helps to articulate a consistent and coherent world-view.
            Designed as a self-contained first presentation of the subject that, at the same time, provides a basis for more advanced work, our course introduces participants both to the major areas of philosophy as it is currently conceived and to significant stages in its two and a half millennia long development. We study the philosophers themselves primarily in brief extracts from their own works, and try to put human thought in systematic and historical perspectives. In the process we exercise and develop our capacity for analysis and argument, as well as our reading comprehension and our ability to communicate these in writing.

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the functional architecture of the brain. While cognitive science has traditionally restricted itself to describing human and animal behavior at the functional level, neuroscience has focused on the understanding of biological processes and neuroanatomical substrates. As the brain is such a complex organ, cognitive neuroscience is inherently multi-disciplinary. Therefore, the course works towards an integrated understanding of information theory, cognition, neurobiology, and anatomy. This course provides in-depth coverage of two main research areas in cognitive neuroscience: perception and higher cognition. The course examines the neurobiological aspects of human behavior by focusing on neurological patients, non-invasive brain imaging techniques, and animal models where the underlying neurobiology is better understood than in humans.

This course focuses on the Spanish language but also on the history, geography, artistic works, traditions, and current events of the Spanish-speaking countries and their communities. Language learning constitutes 85% of course assignments, whereas culture assignments constitute 15% of the final grade. Tasks in various forms related to language and cultural are performed individually and in groups. Linguistic performance is assessed by through written and oral communication. cultural knowledge is assessed a cultural project in which students research and present a country of the Spanish-speaking world and/or delve into a related specific topic that is relevant for both our understanding of the Hispanic world and the individual interest of the learner.
 

This course engages with central concepts and debates in the anthropology of health, illness and medicine. It considers the specificity of local therapeutic communities as well as the processes that connect such systems of knowledge and practice. The production of medical knowledge and healthcare systems – including biomedicine – are also examined, for they, and their social actors, do not exist outside of culture, society and power relations. Drawing on both classic and contemporary studies, students are introduced to different theoretical approaches and consider their value for specific research topics. Topics addressed include the meaning of disease and healing; theories of embodiment, disability and reproduction; medicalization; new medical technologies; and global health. Finally, the course considers how the study of medical knowledge and practice provide a prism to understand social relations and contribute to more general debates concerning issue such as nature-nurture, structural violence, modernity, globalization or commodification. Weekly sessions include lectures introducing conceptual building blocks and key debates, followed by student lead sessions dedicated to subtopics and case studies. Students are required to come prepared and share insights and questions based on their reading accounts, complete two writing exercises and prepare one presentation and discussion session in teamwork with colleagues. Lectures and readings are occasionally supplemented by documentaries and guest lectures.

This ground-breaking course invites humanities, pre-med, and social science students interested in reading literature to experience the effects of ‘shared reading’: reading literary texts together, out loud, with communities such as people in care homes, schools, hospitals, prisons, or asylum seeker centers. Students learn the basics of how literary texts can "work" for readers, both in theory and in practice. The course discusses the issues in proving the positive effects of literary reading scientifically while seeing in practice when a text resonates with someone. Students take part in shared reading groups first-hand and examine under which circumstances shared reading can lead to comforting or transformative experiences.  The course connects students to other communities, and vice versa, as well as the community members to each other.

This course examines forensic linguistics. It covers legal language, forced confessions, investigative interviewing, authorship analysis, copyright infringement, earwitness testimony, linguistic disadvantage and the impact of power in real case outcomes.