Leiden University College

This course starts with a critical assessment of development as a particular, historically grounded and morally colored enterprise. The course assesses how changing ideas about gender roles and relations prevalent in the Global North affected efforts to develop societies in the Global South. Students not only scrutinize how certain populations came to be imagined and targeted as objects of development, but also reflect on how women and men in the Global South have understood and expressed their own ideas about social change and their place in the world. To this end, students reflect on different ideological, instrumental, and critical approaches to development and ask what is at stake when gender is constructed as a development concern around discourses of equality, empowerment, and social justice. In the next part of the course, students closely assess the changes and continuities in gender structures during precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. In this light, the course broadens the scope from Western-initiated development efforts to social change more generally and discusses the diverse impacts of globalization on gendered realities in different parts of the world. Key themes that are addressed: poverty, sexual and reproductive health and rights, education and empowerment, environmental politics, rural and urban change, as well as work and gender relations inside and outside the home. Whereas for long (Western-trained) academics, policy makers and development professionals equated gender with women's issues, it is now widely recognized that masculinity is as much a social construct as femininity and deserves critical attention too. Therefore, this course gives ample attention to men's issues too.

Public health nutrition is a multidisciplinary area of expertise. To solve global problems in nutrition and health, physiological, and biomedical aspects as well as the social and behavioral context are important to take into consideration. This course focuses on understanding the main function and determinants of diet and its relationship with major global public health challenges (eg. infectious diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular disease). Also, the course focuses on translating evidence from epidemiological research to public health policies and health promotion programs, both at the local, national, and international level. The course addresses common study designs and methods to evaluate the role of nutrition in public health as well as intervention programs addressing nutrition (e.g., behavior, food choice) and/or its societal context (eg. food policies, legislation of food fortification, and food supply at work and schools). A background in biology or chemistry is recommended as a course prerequisite.

The aim of this course is emphatically not to answer the question of the definition of culture, nor is it to provide a history of the development of culture. Rather, the course starts from the notion that culture creates meaning and allows us to understand ourselves, others, and the world in specific, constructed ways. What may seem natural to us, might in fact just be cultural convention, imprinted on us from such an early age that we have come to understand it as natural. This course examines how traditional cultural views on the world, concerning the uses of language, processes of othering, gender etc., have been studied, taken apart and criticized over the last few decades. In doing so, the course deals with several of the major theorists concerned with this process of deconstruction. The course necessarily deals with a limited selection of perspectives and objects. From the many methods of studying culture (anthropological, archaeological, biological, art historical, sociological etc.) the course uses the framework of Cultural Studies, a relatively recent field of study within Humanities. Furthermore, in order to focus discussions, the course takes three case studies as a starting point in the discussion sessions: the novel FOE by J.M.Coetzee, the artwork EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERY by Renzo Martens, and the documentary PARIS IS BURNING. These are discussed in light of different theoretical frameworks, allowing the study the following topics, each tightly linked to major theories in studies on culture and each functioning as a context for the analysis of cultural phenomena: language as construction, knowledge/power, the death of the author, Postcolonialism, processes of "othering." gender, and cultural memory.

This introductory course gives students a critical understanding of the core principles of journalism. Students explore what news is, how news values have developed through time, and they gain insights in the specifics of reporting, news writing, and interviewing. They learn to critically reflect on these specifics in light of current debates about what journalism is and should be in a digital and global age. Students develop journalistic skills by writing news stories and critically self-reflecting on the journalistic principles that guide their practice.