Utrecht University

This course critically examines the various key approaches which have dominated international development debate and underlie the multifarious development practices and policies of the last few decades. Using a perspective on the different channels, the main actors, and institutions involved, including new donors, private sector, international organizations, and international agreements that impact development processes in the global south. Focus is on the interfaces between academic paradigms, practitioners’ approaches, and the debate on questions of international cooperation and development in society at large. The course deals explicitly with the ethical and moral aspects related to development cooperation. The multidisciplinary character of this course makes it well suited for students of other programs, who may approach development issues from their own respective disciplinary backgrounds.

This course examines interactions of individual plants and plant communities with their abiotic environment, including ground and surface water regimes and biogeochemistry at the local scale. It looks at how these interactions are linked to hydrological processes at the catchment scale and how these interactions can be applied to conserve or restore water-dependent vegetation and habitats at the local level.

Community art involves all arts disciplines and can be found in all corners of the world: in immigrant working-class areas, in prisons, in rural communities, in (former) war zones, etc. In the Netherlands, for example, it is a rapidly expanding field that operates mostly, but not exclusively, outside of the mainstream or avant-garde. Because it challenges traditional notions of (autonomous) artmaking, community art reconfigures existing art theory and criticism in an attempt to validate itself both socially and culturally. This course provides a critical introduction to the practical and theoretical dimensions of community arts. As small, multilingual research teams, students conduct fieldwork in ongoing community arts projects in Utrecht or elsewhere in the Netherlands, film their results, and present this video to the class.

This course examines the fundamental laws of physics to biological problems. This concept-context course is structured around two weekly plenary lectures and two tutorials during which relevant biological case studies and examples are used to introduce the fundamental physical concepts essential in the study of biological phenomena. For instance, classical mechanics is applied to investigate oscillations important for the perception of sound, continuum mechanics to describe the flow of developing tissue, and statistical physics to investigate random motion of molecules. Although the language of physics is mathematics, the emphasis of the course is on physics, not mathematics. Students are introduced to the fundamental tools for quantitative descriptions, study different branches of physics, and learn to apply them to biological problems. Throughout the course, students engage with the material in a diverse set of assignments and computational exercises. This learning-by-doing strategy teaches students how to use considerations based on fundamental physical principles to develop a quantitative intuition about biological systems. Individual e-assessments enable students and teachers to monitor knowledge and understanding as the course progresses.