Utrecht University

Our understanding of violent conflicts is influenced by the interpretative frames in which they are placed. The selection of a form and level of explanation for contemporary violent conflict is a serious political act in the sense that representations have political implications. The ways in which violent incidents are coded and categorized play, intentionally or not, a role in casting blame and responsibility. From colonial racism, to the Cold War ideological stand-off, and the War on Terror, different systems of knowledge have all produced authorities who define and interpret local incidents of violence, but also, and importantly, act upon these interpretations. The portrayal of a bar room brawl as an ethnic clash, car-burnings in French suburbs as a new intifada, and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a weapon of war are examples of how violent acts are increasingly framed in terms that are removed from the local settings in which they occur. This course examines this global-local dialectics of framing, in which a variety of actors fight a discursive battle over image, the justification of violence, blame, and accountability.

From the giant Mycenaean tombs, to the Athenian Acropolis and its Hellenistic and Roman legacy, this course introduces students to the highlights of Greek monumental architecture and fine-arts. The course covers the catastrophic consequences of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations and the emergence of the Greek polis in the final stages of Iron Age. It examines the impact of the introduction of democracy on the iconography and architecture of Classical Athens and the profound consequences of the conquests of Alexander the Great and following dissemination of Greek artistic forms in the Hellenistic world. This course not only studies these cultural developments through the textbook and seminars, but experiments with first-hand research on objects in archaeological collections. Students visit the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden. Practical classes in the Utrecht University Museum bring students in direct contact with ancient objects from domestic, funeral, and religious contexts. Students learn how to perform an archaeological autopsy on such objects with the use of scientific instruments. And finally, students showcase their skills in a short knowledge clip in power point, highlighting an ancient object, monument, or building.

In view of constantly diversifying spatial-temporal relations and inter dependencies, the course explains trends and aspects of mobility in an urban and global context. Students acquire basic knowledge of processes and factors that lead to the demand for, and development of, mobility. This enables them to identify effects occurring from current transport developments and to evaluate strategies and measures targeting related problems. The set of lectures focuses on characteristics of different types and modes of travel, theoretical approaches, and practical concepts in the field of transport geography. Combined with a GIS practical and group work to apply these approaches and related knowledge, the course delivers insights into topical issues in the field of transport policy and planning.

This course relates social media not only to the public sphere, but also to public organizations and public professionals. It uses a macro-, meso-, and micro-perspective on social media. Topics such as collective action, identity, participation, and privacy are discussed from various theoretical approaches. Insights from theory are combined with practical applications through guest lectures by practitioners who are using social media in their daily work or by citizens who communicate through social media to influence the public debate. This course requires a particularly active participation and a willingness to engage with various forms of social media. Students work in a team on a specific project to be presented during a seminar at the end of the course. All contributions are peer reviewed by fellow students. After completion of this course, students have learned to use blogs, tweets, and social network sites productively and have acquired knowledge of how these forms of social media may affect governance practices. Prerequisites include an introduction to public administration course.

3D Modeling pertains to all forms of creating, designing, synthesizing, acquiring, analyzing, and deforming geometric shapes in space. The applications are numerous: from computer graphics and the film industry, through computer-aided design (CAD/CAM) and architecture, to processing of point clouds and procedural modeling. The exercise is performed on the Blender open-source 3D-modeling environment. The following topics are covered: interpolating polynomials, Bezier curves, B-splines implicit surfaces, marching cubes subdivision and mesh representation structures polygonal meshes, mesh compression, hierarchy Delaunay triangulation, tetrahedralization, alpha-shapes LiDAR point clouds, RANSAC, reconstruction, CityGML normal estimation, principal component analysis progressive meshes procedural modeling, L-systems. Prerequisites for this course include a course on computer graphics, algorithms, and programming. The knowledge of linear algebra and basic calculus is very helpful for this course, but not entirely necessary; some of the basics are covered in the context.

Is euthanasia of demented patients in a progressed state morally permissible? When should doctors refuse requests for new technologies of assisted reproduction such as IVF? Do we have a moral duty to fund orphan drugs? What should government, industry, and individuals do in order to tackle problems like obesity or organ donation? Are new technologies to enhance the capabilities of human beings (cognition, social behavior and mood, or physical appearance) morally desirable? Medical ethics and public health ethics are interesting and complex fields of study. This course covers pressing ethical issues and how theoretical approaches, concepts, and methods may help us to deal with these issues. Students learn to identify and analyze ethical issues in the field of bioethics; recognize key ethical concepts, values, and theories that are relevant to ethical issues in health care; analyze, discuss, and reflect on a practical moral problem in the domain of health care; and critically reflect on personal ethical beliefs.

The central question to be addressed in this course is: what is meaning? The starting point for the development of the line of thought of this course is the opposition between two intuitions. The first intuition is that the basis of meaning is located in the mind. Students discuss and read the paradigm defense of this claim: Locke's thesis that the meaning of words is the collections of ideas associated with that word in the mind of the speaker. The second intuition is that the meaning of language resides in the connection between language and items in the world. The course then discusses how Frege tries to resolve these issues by introducing his fundamental distinction between sense and reference. The course covers Russell's extremely complicated writings on the theory of descriptions and touches on the philosophy of logical atomism that he developed together with the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. Strawson's criticism of Russell's theory of descriptions is discussed, followed by an examination of Donnellan's proposal to resolve their disagreement. The course then turns to a more formal approach to language and truth: Tarski's highly influential recursive definition of truth for a finite, formal language and his subsequent application of this theory to informal languages. This formal approach stands in sharp contrast to pragmatic approaches to language that is considered next. Austin's ordinary language philosophy is an attempt to analyze philosophical problems via an analysis of the way the words in which these problems are formulated are being used in ordinary language. H. P. Grice is also sensitive to the pragmatic aspects of language, but he favors a more systematic and reductive account of meaning. In sharp opposition to these attempts to provide meaning with a foundation either in the mind or in reality stands Quine's attack on the very idea that there are facts about meaning. According to many, the most important philosopher of the twentieth century has been Ludwig. Students read fragments of this work, with special emphasis on his attack on the Augustinian picture of language, the thesis that meaning is use, and the rule-following considerations. On that last topic, students also look at Kripke's controversial interpretation of these passages in Wittgenstein's work.