Utrecht University

This interdisciplinary course trains students in cultural critique: making invisible power relations in media, art, and culture visible. Students are provided with theoretical tools to become aware of how gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, but also social class, and religiosity impact the production, consumption, and interpretation of communication, literature, film, language, (art) history, games, and social media.  Emphasis is placed on the way in which representations are never neutral, but always partial, biased, and implicated with processes of inclusion and exclusion. Building on feminist and post-colonial theory, students learn to analyze how media and cultural expressions are formed by sexist, racist, heteronormative, transphobic, and Eurocentric norms.  The question of how scientific knowledge is created and how science contributes to hierarchical power relations are examined.
 

This course examines theoretical concepts and approaches to genre, with an emphasis on the relationship between concept/theory and associated analysis method/approach. In the tutorials, the considerations discussed in the lectures are deepened. Close reading of literature helps to elaborate further on classical approaches to genre, and different ways of textual analysis (formal analysis, narrative analysis). Discourse analysis is also practiced in the tutorials. This course also works on repertoire knowledge: several television programs are shown as examples of specific genres and genre developments. The acquired knowledge and skills are used in an individually and independently performed genre analysis.

This course examines the historical origins and development of welfare states. In addition, the course analyzes the principles and values underlying the welfare state such such as (different conceptions) equality, personal responsibility, and exploitation; and different philosophical proposals about how trade-offs between different principles and values should be made. The course interprets the welfare state as an idea, practice, and set of institutions in a historical and philosophical context; analyzes contemporary debates about the welfare state from a historical and philosophical perspective; and discusses crucial social and political themes related to the welfare state from an interdisciplinary perspective.

This course provides an introduction to the criminology discipline. First, the development of the discipline is examined; then the discipline through a thematic approach is reviewed. Next, the course goes into several criminological thematic areas, such as property crime, white-collar crime, violent crime, state and corporate crime, and transnational organized crime. Moreover, the course peaks into penology, victimology, and government reactions to crime. The course places these criminal phenomena in the contemporary late modern context and their significance for understanding current crime and crime policy discourses as they appear, for example, in the media. The course also reviews social scientific ways of doing research, common in criminology, and students learn to connect empirical data to criminological concepts, on a basic level. Finally, participants learn to understand and analyze English scientific texts, write a social scientific paper, argue in a scientific manner, and read media messages critically.