Aarhus University

This course explores the meaning of gender both in different academic disciplines and in contemporary culture. It provides an introduction to the history of the concept of gender and examines how different understandings of gender shaped history; that is, how they formed our present understandings of past historical phenomena. The course traces how gender and sex shaped individuals and society and how both reflect gendered ideas. It looks at deeply connected issues to gender and sexuality, such as the body, the state, and the mundane life of the past; but also reflects on ideas of resistance, non-conformity, and intersectional issues. Particular emphasis is placed on visual practices and global connections.

This course is designed to introduce incoming exchange students to the history of Denmark from the Viking Age to the present day. The course introduces some of the main events and central themes in Danish history. The focus is on political history, but the course also includes important developments in economic, social, and cultural history. The course equips students to engage in discussions of questions such as: what is "Denmark" and what is "Danish" about Danish history? What are the boundaries of Denmark and how have these changed over time? How is Danish history periodized and what have been the key turning points? How should we understand the impact of events and developments such as the Black Death, the Reformation, absolutism, agriculture or the welfare state? The course also considers Danish history in its different transnational (Scandinavian, European, and global) contexts, with reference to themes such as trade, war, colonialism, European integration, and globalization.

This course focuses on past diets, adopting archaeological, ethnographic, historical, literary, linguistic, anthropological, and heritage studies perspectives. It discusses what diet did we evolve to eat, how technological development changed our dietary habits, what role food played in past cultures, how food-related decisions affected societies, what effects food globalization had on traditional diets, when subsistence activities started impacting environments, and what is human food and the omnivore’s dilemma. Teaching introduces how we study food consumption in the past. The core of the course overviews the prehistory and history of foodstuffs and diets, as well as the issues arising from them. The concluding sessions focus on ongoing debates on food and diet, conducted in the light of the interdisciplinary approaches adopted in the course and through an understanding of dietary history.

This course deals with meaning-making in art, its perception, and its cognitive basis. It has a special focus on visual works of art - that is, on how artists construct meaning in vision - but also integrates literary texts. In both domains, it conveys insight into the way in which artists creatively exploit fundamental properties of both visual and textual processing in order to produce given meaning effects. It shows how artists’ formal techniques are attuned to the properties of the visual and cognitive system, notably on the basis of recent findings in neuroaesthetics and the psychology of perception. Furthermore, this course provides a general insight into the reasons why artists’ meaning-making techniques are so efficient. Therefore, it develops the necessary tools for the precise analysis of meaning in visual and textual media, also outside the purely aesthetic domain.

This course provides an overview of the historical development of India and South Asia. It addresses questions of Indian and South Asian historiography, covers the main continuities and changes in Indian and South Asian history, and identifies important personae and events. The course develops the general ability to understand key processes and events and their local/national and global relevance for the region today.

This course enables students to work strategically with internal communication in organizations. The purpose is threefold: to understand, explain, and critically reflect on key concepts, theories, and models relevant to the internal communication in organizations; use these to critically analyze, discuss, and assess examples of internal communication in organizations in different situations and under the influence of different contexts; and plan, prepare, and evaluate internal organizational communication material. The course covers key aspects of strategic internal communication in organizations and introduces key concepts, theories, and models within the field of internal communication, including knowledge of opinion formation as a phenomenon, organizational structures, the role and function of internal communication in an integrated strategic perspective, the interaction between communication and organization, and communication between management and employees. The course also deals with the planning and preparation of different types of strategic internal communication in relevant internal communication channels and media such as employee magazines, newsletters, intranet, and internal social media. The course is relevant for students who wish to work with internal communication in a strategic perspective, particularly focusing on managers and employees as active opinion makers of internal communication in relation to specific organizational situations and challenges.

This course examines multiple interactions/connections/confrontations between popular culture products and acts of political and social protest/resistance in the historical and contemporary English-speaking world. It demonstrates how the political and cultural worlds collide/intersect as they study the uses, meanings, symbolic language, motives, and activations of popular culture works in the context of collective acts of protest. The course not only looks at the obvious tension between popular culture and protest, when the former is defined solely along the lines of the "mainstream," but the overlooked and fertile infusion of the two, as in the connections between the abolitionist movement and slave narratives, between the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, between working class activism and realist writing, between modernist experimentation and feminism, between carnivalization and the LGBT movement, between the Windrush Generation, Reggae, Black British poetry, etc. It also explores the activation and sometimes adaptation of popular culture within contexts of collective acts of protest for greater rights/influence/power for marginalized groups organized around gender, sexuality, ethnicity/race, class, generation/age, etc. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this course draws on concepts and theories from history, literary studies, political communication (among potentially other options), applied to the study of the connections between popular culture actors and their works and sites of collective action. The course firsts gives a general introduction to the core concepts and theories of the course, followed by modules organized around various genres of cultural production, including (but not exclusively) music (e.g. slave songs, Jazz, Reggae, Hip Hop), theatre (e.g. musical theatre, Vaudeville, literature (e.g. slave narratives, Harlem Renaissance, performance poetry, post-colonial texts, graphic novels), visual arts (e.g. Black Arts Movement, protest graffiti), physical monuments (e.g. Confederate statues, imperial figures). The course thus examines the ways that popular culture is mobilized to advance the collective causes of marginalized and disadvantaged groups in their historical and contemporary struggle for liberation and equality, and how "high" as well as "popular" literature play a role in this.