Utrecht University

‘Geographies of Youth in Changing Societies’ studies how young people (between 4-25 years old) experience and use various places in changing societies, based on the premise that their experiences differ from those of adults.  The course examines what happens at the intersections of age and life-course (e.g. children, youth, teenagers, young adults), and places (body, home, street, neighborhood, community, city, urban, rural, (trans)national, trans local, global). The course considers young people’s lives from various but interconnected perspectives. Transformations in the context of globalization, migration and societal change define young people’s lives across the world. However, growing up in an increasingly interconnected world affects young people in different and unequal ways depending on local relations and historical contexts. This course contributes to the field by teaching how geographers and spatial planners understand and examine youth-related themes, youth’s positions in various societies and places, and their subjectivities and orientations in a constantly changing world with new possibilities as well as risks. The course provides an in-depth understanding of processes and dynamics that shape young people’s lives on various spatial scales. The places where we are born, go to school to, play, hang out, exercise, study and work are an important part of young people's lives, their everyday experiences and their identities. But young people’s relationships with these places are subject to ongoing transformations due to changing priorities, needs and aspirations across their life course. The concepts of childhood and adolescence are, however, relatively recent phenomena in Geography. Rather, in much scientific work by geographers and spatial planners, young people are seen as ‘adults in becoming’, even though the perspectives of young people on the world are qualitatively different than those of adults. The course consists of lectures and tutorials. Guest lecturers from the various sections within the Human Geography and Spatial Planning department introduce different perspectives on young people’s geographies. The first part of the course is an overview lecture that recapitulates youth as a socio-spatial construct. The geographies of youth are explored through relevant themes, such as identities and belonging, inequalities, and youth & public space. The second part of the course investigates a youth-related topic by working on their own research group project.

Celtic Studies covers enormous distances of space (Europe, Asia Minor, North and South America) and time, covering some 3000 years. Who were the Celts? Where were they? What language(s) did they speak? What did their Neighbours (Greeks, Etruscans, Iberians, Romans) say about them? This course gives an overview of Celtic Studies by looking at the history and culture of the Celts from the earliest period down to the 17th century and shall touch upon archaeology, Celtic inscriptions, the Classical world and aspects of the medieval Celtic Culture of Britain and Ireland as well as the modern Celtic heritage.

This course introduces the track on innovative and sustainable regions and sets the ground for the next course on themes. A broad perspective on innovation and sustainability is adopted. Innovation goes beyond creating economic opportunities only and addresses broader issues including quality of life and job opportunities for different types of workers; environmental sustainability and greening of firms and industries; the ability of regions to renew their profiles in response to major crises and to secure their economic development in the long run. Sustainability captures the ability of regions to innovate and renew itself and respond to major shocks (economically sustainable), to be socially inclusive (socially sustainable), and to green their economies (environmentally sustainable).

This introductory course in macroeconomics teaches the insights of macroeconomic theory from a real-world perspective. The course combines chapters from the Blanchard textbook and units from the textbook The Economy to present a picture of contemporary macroeconomic problems and theories.  The course starts with an introduction to key macroeconomic concepts, the use of models, the general equilibrium, and emerging properties. The second session focuses on economic fluctuations and the importance of multiplier effects. The next step is to analyze the importance and effects of fiscal policy. To provide a tool for analyzing the effects of policies, the wage and price setting model, and the Phillips curve are introduced. Special attention is given to the origins of inflation and the difference between supply and demand shocks. Next to fiscal policy, attention to monetary policy is given, after the role of the banking system in the economy is defined. The final session focuses on the specific problems that are related to the Eurozone countries; fixed exchange rates, the (non)optimal currency area, sovereign debt problems, and structural imbalances.

What is the optimal consumption choice for a consumer given her preferences and income? When will a manager of a firm decide to expand production? What are the costs for the government when it supports the farmers with a per unit subsidy and is such a subsidy socially efficient?  Should monopolies be regulated and if so, how? When does it make sense for a firm to introduce a variable-wage payment scheme? Which attitudes to risk exist and how does this influence behavior? Such questions are treated in this course. The course is specially designed for non-economics students. Assumed previous knowledge: Students are expected to have a good command of secondary school calculus (including simple derivatives).

The course focuses on cultural and artistic interventions in urban spaces and how they actively re-think and reconfigure the city. It investigates how cities can be used as platforms where new notions of citizenship, community, and the public sphere are being performed. Using concepts and theories from performance studies, urban studies, and public sphere theory, the course discusses how power relations are performed in cities daily, and how these can be critically revealed and (temporarily) disturbed through artistic interventions in public space. Next to discussing a variety of specific cases of public space intervention in class, students design and execute a small-scale intervention in public space with a small group., work on a series of assignments, and write a paper on a particular strategy of intervention. 

This course focuses on the estuarine, coastal, and marine processes and morphological features that determine the morphodynamic behavior of coastal systems. Coastal morphodynamics is defined as the mutual co-adjustment of coastal landforms and processes. Emphasis is on the behavior of sedimentary coastal systems, such as beaches and dune coasts, barrier island systems, tidal inlets, estuaries, and deltas. It includes the behavior of both sandy and muddy coasts. The time scales involved vary from less than a second (e.g., intra-wave processes; short-term) to decades (e.g., the coastal response to sea level rise; long-term). The course starts with the dynamics of wave-, tide- and current-driven processes and the effect on sediment transport processes and associated morphological change. The second part of the course deals with the morphodynamic character of different types of coastal systems. This is analyzed by discussing, evaluating, and quantifying the dominant processes, the relevant morphological features, and sedimentary products. Exercises, papers, and case studies are an integral part of the course and are used to develop skills in analyzing and solving coastal problems. The course also contains several lectures on coastal instrumentation (for example, remote sensing) and on the societal relevance of coastal processes in mitigating coastal erosion.

It is important to understand how public and private organizations work and how public and organizational policies are created. The course Public Administration and Organizations offers an introduction to the disciplines of Public Administration (focusing on the political science element of policymaking) and Organizational science. Central concepts and important theoretical themes are introduced, and the practical implications of theories are explored and practiced.

The course is structured around five fundamental questions that have shaped anthropological inquiry and the development of the discipline: What is society? What is culture? How are societies organized? What holds societies together? What makes societies run? With these questions as a guide, the course explores the evolution of anthropological thought about its main subject matter, namely, society and culture, and the methods that should be used to understand what they are and how they work. For each question, how society, culture, and their organization and function emerged as problems for anthropology, and the methods and theories that anthropologists have employed to explain them are examined. A variety of readings, from classical anthropological texts to more recent ones are used to chart a history of anthropological thought that pays particular attention to ethnographic method and questions of ethics in fieldwork. Reading assignments will be available on Blackboard.

This course explores ethics by examining different ethical theories and their influences on economics, governance, and business. The course follows the multidisciplinary approach that we take at the Utrecht University School of Economics and in its bachelor program to broaden your perspective on economics and society. It continues the approach taken in Multidisciplinary Economics, assuming that you have developed sufficient knowledge of the basics of economic thinking. This course trains participants to reflect upon this knowledge and discuss some alternative approaches. This course revolves around and integrates the central topic of Technology and Society, and the social impacts of business in addressing various themes, such as fairness, equality, social responsibility, and sustainability. Prerequisites Knowledge at the level of the course 'Introduction to Economics and Business Economics' is assumed.