Aarhus University

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.

The objective of the course is to develop the student’s knowledge of English morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics at an advanced level, as well as their knowledge of the history of the English language. The course introduces the detailed grammatical analysis of English, which includes the analysis of the constituent structure of English words and clauses. It also introduces historical variants such as Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Late Modern English, as well as the historical basis for the present-day social and regional variation in English.

Music and language are culturally ubiquitous forms of auditory-motor communication that share many structural features but also differ along several key dimensions. This course addresses the extent to which human processing and production of music and language relies on shared versus distinct mechanisms, at the levels of brain and behavior. Specifically, it reviews basic structural similarities and differences between music and language, and introduces state-of-the art research providing insight into how these structures are processed at the levels of brain and behavior. The course discusses basic cognitive neuroscience literature on music and language perception and production and provides opportunities to critically evaluate and engage with scientific literature. Moreover, students develop testable hypotheses regarding mechanisms of music and language processing, and generate practical experimental designs to test their hypotheses.

This course introduces students to the distinct communication activities related to social marketing, including the practice of achieving societal change for the benefit of the greater social good through the integration of commercially inspired skills and tools with other approaches. Sustainability, diversity, health, and community development have all become global societal concerns. Social marketing communication is therefore a much-needed individual and organizational proficiency for popularizing these concerns in a credible manner and for inferring voluntary behavioral changes among specific target audiences. The course provides relevant theoretical insights within social marketing communication, cause-related marketing communication, and commercial marketing communication. It also develops expertise in employing analytical tools belonging to narrative and discourse studies for working with and developing social marketing communication materials across various media.

This course introduces art, images, and vision in the digital field and various aspects of the roles technology plays in our creation, circulation, and use of images today. The main focus of the course is how contemporary image technologies shape us culturally on an everyday basis and how contemporary visual art can help us understand this. The course introduces works of art and theoretical approaches in the field and concretely analyzes how works of art and other image practices use specific image technologies. By combining theoretical insights and concrete analyses of works of art and everyday image practice, the course provides critical understandings of how humans and machines make sense of images today.

Like the human body, the human skin has an elaborate history, and now—perhaps more than ever—it calls for serious critical study. This course takes skin as a point of contact between historical and contemporary encounters. Skin troubles notions of identity, notably in legend and art. In more recent times, skin is a contentious site of systemic racism. Thematically structured, this course addresses a wide range of issues, including skin as corporeal and conceptual threshold; skin as multisensory organ; skin as artistic support; architectural skin; flaying; sacred skins; skin as anatomical curiosity; skin art; skin pigment; the skin of materials; second skins; literary skin; skin and the self.

This course first focuses on history and culture, starting with a brief historical view of Danish society since 1800. It then analyses culture both from a history of ideas perspective and by exploring Danish cultural values. The course thereafter takes an institutional approach to various sectors of Danish society, providing more in-depth descriptions of, among other things, the Danish political system, its labor market structures, welfare regime, education system, most important industries, civil society, and the relationship with the European Union. This version of the course also focuses on the international institutions in which Denmark is embedded and on the internationalization of the Danish economy and Danish firms. This entails a dual focus on internationalization and comparison with other countries and markets. The course comprises a student project work module where students do either a comparative study with a focus on a particular feature of Danish society, (e.g. elements of the business regime, welfare regime, labor market and their development) or an analysis of how a given Danish sector has been transformed by internationalization. 

Ecotoxicology addresses how chemicals released into the environment impact the biota. This course thus covers all aspects from release of chemical through transport and transformation outside the biota to uptake and effects within the biota. The main body of the course is concerned with distribution and effects within the organism from molecular interactions, impact on organ systems and how these effects at the individual organismal level can translate into highter level biologica, effects in populations, and communities. The course introduces important toxicoloical tools, illustrated in theory and practice and outlines the fundamental elements in chemical risk analysis.

This course discusses the challenges of an increasing demand for meat, milk, and eggs produced in a manner that is environmentally sound and socioeconomically acceptable. It focusses on the production cycles of pig, cattle, and poultry production under Danish conditions. The course investigates the effects of management, housing, breeding, nutrition, productivity, health, animal ethics and welfare, resource consumption, and environmental impact of livestock production. It explores a range of different livestock production systems and works with the opportunities and challenges of implementing sustainable practices within them.