Waseda University

This course approaches gastronomy as a source of history, social practices, and public diplomacy. This course reflects on the limits and potential partiality of cultural diplomacy initiatives. Taking examples in South America as case studies, the course explores the role of gastronomy as a tool of soft power for the promotion of national images, their limitations and the potential role of gastronomy to raise awareness on history, society and cultural diversity. Thus, this course treats gastronomy as a means of communication and sustainable development that can promote human security.

This interactive lecture-based course seeks to identify what it is people mean when they invoke the term "culture." It critiques "culture" in different contexts to examine whether it is a defensible position to justify the activities of different actors, while examining our own position, critique it, then develop a defensible stance that defines and understands culture/s. Students consider how culture is transmitted, how it evolves, the different values it promotes, whether culture has boundaries, and critique the concepts of gender and nationality in culture.

The course focuses on: 1) Identity, considering how culture/s use tools to create and maintain individual and group identity; (2) Cultural Legitimacy, where the ideas of cultural relativism, consumerism (Pop v Mass) are addressed; (3) Language, examining how cultures utilize the media and discourse to reinforce values; (4) Taboo, wherein the class critiques real world contemporary examples that may challenge one's values, ethics and morality; (5) Reflection on the way human brains process and make sense of the information in the worlds society creates, and (6) technologies, through application to contemporary and future societies.

Finance is the study of mechanisms on asset transactions, risk management, and investment decisions. After reviewing the basics about financial markets, such as who trades what instruments and how they trade the instruments, this course covers the major finance theories, such as mean-variance portfolio theory, capital asset pricing model (CAPM), arbitrage pricing theory, multi-factor models of risk and return, and efficient market hypothesis. The course also investigates several empirical studies for understanding whether the existing theories can explain the reality of the markets.

This is an intermediate English linguistics course which should be taken after studying the basics of linguistics. It provides students with the basic knowledge of English Language Teaching in secondary education in Japan from a practical point of view and investigates how one's knowledge of English (not only structural but also communicative) can be used to improve learners' abilities to use English. 

Course Prerequisites:  Enrollment in at least one or two of the introductory courses of linguistics offered at SILS (Introduction to Applications of Linguistics and Introduction to English Linguistics). 

This course examines politics in transitioning and young democracies. Drawing upon research on “new” democracies in various regions of the world, this course focuses on democratic consolidation, political accountability and quality of governance, while discussing how well political institutions function in new democracies. The course also examines some of the common challenges to governance in new democracies. 

This course provides instruction and practice in the art of philosophical reflection and the skill of critical argument through the study of some of the core (Western) texts in the humanities and social sciences. While the focus is on analytical reading and critical thinking, there is an equal emphasis on expressing and presenting one’s ideas in writing, as well as engaging in dialogue on how to interpret and explain concepts and the practices they capture. 

This course introduces the principles of evolution and the major events in the history of life, while providing a basic understanding of how scientific methods are used in the field of evolutionary biology and how evolutionary thinking is applied to issues in biological diversity, animal behavior and modern human biology. The goal of the course is to develop a scientific way of thinking about the facts of life, including the evolution of human beings. 

Preferred prerequisites: Introductory/intermediate biology courses.

This lecture course examines the interaction between capitalism and different forms of government. First, it introduces the discipline of political economy. In this connection, it examines the classical theories of the interaction between politics and markets. Then it focuses in more detail on how the economy affects politics, and how politics—in particular, political interests, institutions, and ideas--shape economic outcomes. It looks at both developed and developing countries, asking how economic growth and development is affected by politics. It concludes by considering the place of political economy in analyzing firms and markets.

This course provides opportunities to conduct simple experiments and observe chemical phenomena, so students can gain a firsthand understanding of chemistry in their everyday life. Then, the course addresses the similarities and differences between student observations and the theories (principles and mechanisms) described in textbooks and other sources.

Sociolinguistics is a field of linguistics which examines the relationship between language and society, as they mutually influence each other. This course introduces basic concepts of sociolinguistics and explores both micro and macro sociolinguistic studies, reviewing various cases from the micro interpersonal interaction levels to the macro institutional and societal levels. The course covers language and power; thought and representation; ethnography of speaking; language and gender; language change; regional and social variation; multilingualism; language attitudes, as well as language policy and language planning issues in various social contexts from around the world. Although the course introduces concepts of both micro and macro sociolinguistics, it emphasizes language policy and language planning issues.