Utrecht University

This course is an introduction to the study of speech production and speech perception, targeting first-year students in Linguistics, and other students interested in language and speech. Students get an overview of the most important topics in articulatory and acoustic phonetics, and speech perception. This includes intonation, tempo, and rhythm in spoken language. Questions that come up for discussion are: What is language, what is speech, and how do language and speech relate to each other? What is sound, and what is speech? How are speech sounds generated by the speech organs? What are the physical properties of sound, and how can speech be analyzed, altered, and synthesized using its physical properties? What are speech sounds, and how can we study them? How does the human ear function, and how are speech sounds perceived? What are melody and rhythm in speech, and what role do they play in speech communication? How do listeners recognize spoken words?

This course takes a multidisciplinary approach to understand how complex social behaviors, like morality and empathy, arise from a brain network that has evolved to support much simpler mechanisms. The course covers the social brain's basic anatomy, how this brain is driven by simple hormonal mechanisms, how these factors can underlie complex social behavior, and how they influence psycho pathology in its many forms. Prerequisites include a general understanding of psychology and the biological foundations of behavior.

The world is becoming smaller. Different parts of the world are interacting with ever-greater intensity. Globalization and the changing balance of global power are prompting historians to explore history of other cultures and examine the mutual influences and relationships between various regions and cultures throughout history. This global perspective also affects our view of history and artefacts from the past. The course offers an introduction to this new and dynamic scientific discipline. Participants acquire the skills they need to effectively study visual cultures. Students also explore the histories of various cultures: East Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Amongst other issues, the course will focus on globalization, imperialism, cultural cross-fertilization, ethnocentrism, modernity and post-colonialism. Students practice interpreting visual sources and reflect on the way in which cultures are represented in museums and the academic world.

This course provides students with advanced tools of game theory and shows the usefulness of this approach by analyzing several examples. This course is an intermediate course on game theory and strategic thinking. Concepts such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed, and applied to games played in class. Concepts are studied using examples of situations with conflicting interests drawn from economics, politics, business, and elsewhere. Game theory is a way of thinking about strategic situations. One aim of the course is to teach students some strategic considerations to take into account when making choices, specifically in situations of incomplete information. A second aim is to predict how other people or organizations behave when they are in strategic settings. Students learn new concepts, methods, and terminology. A third aim is to apply these tools to settings from economics, business, sociology, politics, and elsewhere. The course is problem driven (theory is taught by solving several problems). The mathematics required for this course does not go beyond calculus. Nonetheless, the ability to think mathematically and logically is a great asset.

This course provides an overview of the main developments in research centering on social networks which exists in the fields of sociology, economics, psychology, and anthropology. Important theories and theoretical aspects, which explain the emergence and the consequences of social networks, are discussed. This includes, for example the notion of the “strength of weak ties”, the focus theory, as well as different perspectives on centrality and how we are all connected. Finally, students read and discuss a number of research problems and topics on which social network studies focused. Examples of these topics are: social networks in organizations, online social networks, social networks and health, and negative social networks. The research questions underlying these topics are reconstructed and answers provided by empirical research are discussed. In addition, attention is paid to the different kinds of methods that can be used to collect network data as well as the analysis of such data. During the course, students choose a topic of their interest on which they write a paper in groups of two students). The papers consist of a review of the literature as well as an empirical study carried out by the students on the basis of this literature.

This course offers a general introduction in the recent history of eastern Asia from ca. 1850. The course traces the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of eastern Asia since the reforms in nineteenth-century Japan up to the emergence of the Chinese Giant in recent years. Attention is given to issues such as colonialism, war and decolonization, the Cold War, and the turbulent modernization processes in Asian societies. Above all the course looks into the conditions for and effects of the dramatic economic growth after World War II. Central to the analysis is the role of state institutions for the development of Asian economies, but also the role of the Cold War, the United States and the reforms in China after 1978, the effects of neo liberalism, and the fascinating blossoming of Asian cultures. The course offers the fundamental knowledge that enables students to understand the present-day world and the position of Asia in it.

Young people's sexual development, behavior, and upbringing have changed drastically over the past few decades. While sex used to be a topic people simply would not talk about as short as 50 years ago – especially when it came to youth - young people's sexual health had become a priority in research and public health policy today. While many concerns exist about young people's sexuality (e.g., regarding the impact of exposure to Internet porn and online dating apps), the sexual health of youth in the Netherlands is relatively good, compared to many other countries. Recent research even suggests that young people's sexual health has improved over the past decade. This raises the question to what extent societal developments relate to young people's sexual development and behavior. This course analyzes young people's sexual development and behavior. It does so by addressing different theoretical models explaining young people's sexual behavior (e.g., the evolutionary, socio-constructivist, and bio-psycho-social model); analyzing potential determinants and consequences of (un)healthy sexual behavior; and linking scientific research to (recent-) societal developments and debates, both in the Netherlands and worldwide. Lectures are provided by experts from a variety of organizations, including Utrecht University, Rutgers, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP), and the University of Amsterdam.

This course focuses on the practices which contribute to good public governance. Students are empowered as future public leaders with the analytical skills to assess success and the practical skills to communicate the results of their analyses to both academic and applied audiences, in a range of policy domains. Firstly, the theoretical and practical concepts of success in public policies, public agencies, collaborations, and in local government are discussed. Each week, students work in groups to write and present blog posts (to be published on the Successful Public Governance research program web site). These memo-style blog entries begin as syntheses of canonical works, and advance through the term towards highlighting theoretical controversies and empirical applications, with the goal of developing innovative arguments and insights into the literature(s) on governance success. This format prepares students for positions of leadership in a range of disciplines by requiring not only thorough theoretical fluency and application familiarity, but also the ability to accessibly contextualize and communicate analytical results to academic and practitioner audiences.