University of Oslo

This course introduces major themes and approaches from the field of global intellectual history in 17th-20th century history. It looks at early modern "connected history" approaches, the history of enlightenment-era travel and travelogues, the history of colonial-era cultural and textual knowledge (orientalism, ethnography), the traditions of thought emanating from Atlantic slavery, the rise of humanitarianism and of international law, the political thought of empire, (multi-)cultural identity and hybridity, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. The course offers orientation on how global history has shaped thought, and on how the different forms of globality or globalization that can be observed throughout modern history have been understood.

This course introduces the new, interdisciplinary field of Corporate Sustainability Law, which identifies and analyzes the multi-layered regulatory framework that intends to promote corporate sustainability. Corporate sustainability concerns the contribution of business to sustainability, which is necessary if we are going to be able achieve overarching sustainability goals in this decade of action towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The course positions the discussion of business in the unsustainable reality of our time, and analyzes how business can create value in a sustainable way. Creating sustainable value is, amongst other things, contributing to the protection of human rights, ensuring decent work, and fair taxation. Sustainable value creation is also about contributing to mitigating climate change, reversing biodiversity loss, and phasing out novel entities such as microplastics. It discusses sectors such as the energy sector, the food industry, and the fashion industry, as concrete examples of the unsustainability of business as usual. The course draws on extensive comparative company law and corporate governance research as a basis for analyzing and discussing these developments in the EU and the national developments, including the Norwegian Transparency Act (‘Åpenhetsloven’). The course provides a thorough understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the dominant and of newer, more progressive approaches to the company. The core themes of the course are corporate purpose, governance of the business (including of global value chains), and the evolving duties of the board.

This course introduces the biology of fungi, which play important roles in most ecosystems, as decomposers, parasites or symbionts. It covers the immense diversity in the fungal kingdom, their ecology and nutritional modes, as well as their life cycles and genetics. As fungi play important roles in society and in circular economy, the course also considers applied aspects of fungi. The course has a practical component where students work experimentally with fungi in the lab and learn to recognize characteristic species in their natural habitat during a one-week field course.

This course studies legal rules on data protection — i.e., a set of norms that specifically govern the processing of data relating to persons (personal data) in order to protect, at least partly, the privacy and related interests of those persons. The main focus of the course is on European data protection law, primarily the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Article 7 and 8 of the the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, along with case law pursuant to these instruments. Special attention is given to the core principles of data protection law, along with rules on "data protection by design" and automated decision making.

This course covers the interactions between geology and human activities and gives an overview of environmental problems and challenges in geosciences. It deals with water- and soil-resources, contaminated sediments, carbon capture and storage (CCS), the use of micropaleontology in environmental studies to establish reference conditions, impacts of mining activities, climate change from a perspective of natural variation, sustainable use of natural resources, and waste- and pollution control.

This course focuses on advanced algorithms and architectures for deep learning with neural networks. The course provides an introduction to how deep learning techniques can be used to design important parts of advanced autonomous systems that exist in physical and cyber environments.

This course unfolds the institutions, treaties, procedures and practices of intergovernmental organizations, providing perspectives on the evolving rules and normative standards defining international human rights, the actors involved, and the processes and means by which they are monitored and their implementation is promoted. Students gain knowledge about institutions and procedures, selected rights and the obligation of states; and analyze challenges and achievements of the international human rights regime through country studies.

This course provides an introduction to systems with multiple agents/units/robots that mutually depend on each other’s behaviors in order to evaluate their own or collective system performance. The course covers theory for strategic interaction between self-interested agents as well as more altruistic agents working explicitly together in complex distributed environments. Game theory and swarm intelligence are central parts of the course curriculum.

This course presents an overview of research frontiers relating to international and domestic climate policy, politics, and government; comparative politics discussions related to climate change, such as the role of democracy, economic development, and corruption in shaping countries’ commitments to climate change mitigation; and political theory discussions relating to just climate transition, and ways to ensure accountable and democratic support for climate action. 

This course gives an in-depth study in basic methods and practical tools for basal language technology (methods for automatic analyzation of language-based data). It covers both rule-based techniques, such as phrase structure grammar, and approximations with a starting point in machine learning, such as vector space semantics and classification. The course takes a look at some applications of methods for issues within language technology such as tagging, parsing, and text classification (such as sentiment analysis). The course has a strong practical component, with use of relevant tools and projects with written reports, among other things, which are required to qualify for the exam.