Aarhus University

This course introduces the extent of the global agriculture and food production and its geographic location. Through a combination of lectures and exercises, the first part of the course identifies the factors that influence and adjust the global need for and production of food, as well as of the global trade with food. It then looks at the impact of different climatic and soil conditions on plant and livestock production in specific regions. In the project work, students go into detail in an individual area.

This course provides an introduction to basic elements of animal behavior and application of ethology (i.e. the study of animal behavior) in relation to livestock farming and keeping of domestic animals. Furthermore, it provides an understanding of how different types of behavior are affected by management and the external environment to enable assessment of these factors on animal welfare. Topics include: domestication; behavior and physiology; motivation; factors controlling behavior; learning and cognition; normal and abnormal behavior in selected farm animal species; human-animal relations; and behavioral variables as welfare indicators.

The course is for students who wish to improve their oral presentation skills and gain insight into the basics of research communication. It introduces students to the key characteristics of oral communication, academic argumentation and knowledge criteria, and rhetorical strategies for successful oral presentations such as the classic means of persuasion, disposition, information strategies, and nonverbal delivery.

This course considers what and how the humanities can contribute to key debates about environmental crisis, climate change, overconsumption, biodiversity loss, and sustainability. This course provides a general introduction to the emerging field of the environmental humanities, as well as to other forms of transdisciplinary and collaborative environmental scholarship in which humanities thinking plays a key role. The first part of this course introduces a selection of key humanities ideas about human relationships with place, technology, and the more-than-human world, drawing insights from across multiple disciplines and cultures. It also provides a concise overview of selected conversations and debates in the environmental humanities, presenting theories, issues, concrete examples, and case studies. The second part of the course explores collaborations between the humanities and other fields, including relation to natural sciences, as well as the relationship between scholarship, action, and intervention in relation to environmental humanities research. This part of the course includes an outdoor fieldtrip in addition to in-class activities. The course includes a number of guest lecturers by Aarhus University staff members affiliated with the Aarhus University Center for the Environmental Humanities as well as the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) group in order to bring a diversity of perspectives and examples of current research to the course.

This course provides a fundamental knowledge of important sociological theories and approaches in order to analyze current political and economic conditions. It introduces important societal conditions and issues of a political and economic nature, including social conflicts, political movements, finance, crisis, debt, work, consumption, integration, management, and organizations. The course presents sociological approaches to the analysis of these issues and encourages analysis and reflection on society at a local, national, regional, and global level, as well as considering the role of individuals or groups in society. The course focuses on working with different forms of empirical data as well as recent research literature.

This course provides fundamental knowledge of the issues, insights and methods of psycholinguistics. It also trains basic methods for data collection, data processing, statistical analysis, academic argumentation and presentation. The course includes various cognitive models which form a bridge between language as a communicative phenomenon and language as part of human biology. The course provides insight into and experience of using basic tools connected to the planning, implementation, and statistical analysis of a scientific experiment. The course also provides insight into some of the psychological and neurobiological processes which are the foundation of language. Students also acquire skills in quantitative research which can be used in independent work. The course is closely linked to analytical courses in phonetics/phonology, grammar, semantics and pragmatics, and to courses in conversation analysis, language development, and sociolinguistics.