| source Universitetet i Oslo (48) |
level Advanced course at bachelor's level (X) |
department |
This course deals with American culture and society from the 1930s to the 1970s as reflected through films of the period. Hollywood is the great dream machine that sold a seductive image of American life to the world, but it also helped to reproduce the national identity around iconic images of cowboys, frontiersmen, and sturdy yeomen farmers and through the themes of self-making, new beginnings and pastoral re-creations. In the same period of time the USA underwent fundamental change. The rise of the great cities of the new industrial America had many different effects, but one of them became very important to American popular culture: the rise of the criminal underworld. Ruled by gangsters and populated by hoodlums, pimps and prostitutes, the underworld was also an expression of the poverty and alienation of large segments of the American working class. These conditions helped give birth to the American naturalistic novel, “hard-boiled” popular fiction, and photo-journalism.
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In The Uprooted (1951) Oscar Handlin claimed, "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." This was an overstated but natural reaction to the neglect of the role of immigration and ethnicity in American history books until that time. Today, that dimension of the nation’s history is accepted as important to understanding nearly every aspect of American society, past and present.
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While supplying a thorough introduction to government and politics in the United States, this course emphasizes a series of historical developments that have altered America's political processes and institutions, focusing on those that cause controversy and challenge the maintenance democratic principles in the republic. These critical issues include the rise of media-based mass parties, the nationalization of politics, the development of an "imperial" presidency and judiciary, persistent inequality, low voter participation, and the growth of the national security state.
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America, the world’s go-it-alone, you’re with us or against us, sole superpower—that is the picture presented by the G.W. Bush administration in the international mass media since 9/11, 2001. But the United States has been massively in the world, influencing many countries more than any other nation for a long time, especially since the Second World War. Today complaints about the behavior of the globe’s military, economic, and cultural hegemon are legion and feed debates over anti-Americanism in many parts of the world. What accounts for this situation? How did the U.S. become the world’s sole superpower and what explains its current (and historical) behavior in international affairs? This course will pursue an interdisciplinary search for answers to these and related questions. With commentary from a range of ideological perspectives, it will provide material for searching out the determinants of America’s international impact—in the historical development of the U.S. and its internal affairs; the country’s policymaking institutions and political processes; major statements of American foreign policy to the present, and the development of global interconnectedness in matters of economics and culture.
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Although, and perhaps because, the United States has no state church, Americans are a deeply religious people. From the earliest beginnings of American history, diverse religious traditions competed and coalesced, forming a nation that was both uniquely religious and uniquely secular. Religious faith has been the crucible through which Americans negotiated differences of national origin, race, ethnicity, and class to negotiate a common identity. Gender roles and ideas have also been intertwined with American religion. More recently, sexual orientation and what constitutes a family have again illuminated the relationship between religion and public policy in the United States. This course presents religion as a central aspect of American history.
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As evidence of the gravity of environmental degradation rolls in from scientific work on climate change and species extinction we are left to stare at a bleak picture of possible eco-system collapse and political turmoil. Various proposals from politicians and governments have been made to tackle these issues, but the solutions are difficult to arrive at for a number of reasons. One important reason is that environmentalism raises radical questions about our present way of life—including our methods of agriculture, power-generation, spatial organization, and economy. Simply put, our way of life makes too many demands on the earth’s biosphere. The United States has had an important hand in creating these problems, but Americans have also cultivated a tradition of green thinking. Modern environmentalism or the green movement arguably began in the United States in the 20th century, and discussions of nature, earth and environment continue to pose important intellectual questions.
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The focus of the course is academic writing. This course will function as both a final, integrative study for students who finish their studies with a BA and an introduction to research to prepare those who continue on to an MA. Emphasis will be placed on theoretical issues within American Studies and provide a perspective for integrating what students have learned in the individual NORAM courses.
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This course is a continuation of PSY1010 and PSY2011 in the sense that research methodological concepts and principles are subjected to further elaboration. Research problem, design, measurement and analysis of empirical data will still be the foci of attention. These components of the research process will be considered in an integrated framework to facilitate inferences according to Cook and Campbell’s theory of validity. This framework includes inferences regarding statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, construct validity and external validity.
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This course focuses on developmental resilience, emotion, identity and moral functioning. Childhood resilience is the phenomenon of positive adaptation despite significant life risks. Identity formation, moral understanding, prosocial and antisocial behavior will be analysed in a contextual and life span perspective. Lectures will cover central developmental issues in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Investigating risks and resilience, identity and morality have caused scientists to rethink their prior assumption about the causes and courses of adaptation and psychopathology. Psychosocial development will be understood as a complex interplay between the individual and the social/cultural environment.
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The course provides in-depth analyses about classical and recent findings on the relation between cognition, emotion and language from a psychological and developmental perspective (biological, socio-cultural, differential, abnormal and applied studies will also be discussed). A large range of cognitive, emotional and language phenomena as well as theories and methods will be examined. The course seeks not only to transmit knowledge about cognition, emotion and language (their relation and development) but also to promote a critical and reflective attitude toward this knowledge.
Score: 9.989721 Details | Listing | Web page
Only students admitted to the course may take part in instruction and tuition and sit for the examination.
Score: 9.989721 Details | Listing | Web page
Anthropologists have established a strong tradition for the study of Buddhism, particularly in Theravada Buddhism (South and South-East Asia), while the anthropology of Mahayana Buddhist societies (Himalaya, China, Tibet, Mongolia) is developing rapidly. The course discusses theoretical debates in the anthropological study of Buddhist societies using empirical data from both Theravada and Mahayana societies.
Score: 9.989721 Details | Listing | Web page
Anthropologists have established a strong tradition for the study of Buddhism, particularly in Theravada Buddhism (South and South-East Asia), while the anthropology of Mahayana Buddhist societies (Himalaya, China, Tibet, Mongolia) is developing rapidly. The course discusses theoretical debates in the anthropological study of Buddhist societies using empirical data from both Theravada and Mahayana societies.
Score: 9.989721 Details | Listing | Web page
Informed knowledge of Islamic law and Institutions is of importance for understanding the developments and transformations of today’s pluricultural world. In this course you will learn about the sources and objectives of Islamic law and about the historical development of Islamic legal thought. Moreover, the course will focus on Islamic institutions: religious, jurisprudential, educational, social and charitable. Finally, the course will discuss the issue of Islamic law and modernity and provide insight into reformists’ trends in Islamic legal thought.
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The autumn semester will be spent in India (mandatory). A course in spoken Sanskrit is held there. Moreover, the students are required to participate in other activities (such as training in writing on palm leaves, manuscript reading and conservation, Sanskrit drama courses, exchange with Sanskrit students, etc.). In the spring semester, spoken Sanskrit and classical Sanskrit are continued.
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The course is primarily meant for the South Asia area studies language students – in Hindi, Urdu or Sanskrit. The course offers an opportunity for bachelor students to write an essay on a largely independent basis. The student will select a theme out of the areas of specialisation after consultation with one of the teachers in the South Asia section. During regular meetings the teacher supervises the progress of the essays. The teachers and their areas of specialisation are:
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The course includes an introduction to topics such as what is the ethnographic region called Norden and what are the topics anthropologists have singled out as typical for this region. The course highlights notions about gender, social class, attitudes about nature and recourse use and harvest.
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This course provides students with a basic introduction to anthropological perspectives on the relationship between people and nature. The course is divided into three components:
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The broad aim of this course is to introduce students to anthropological perspectives on development. We will discuss issues such as the anthropological critique of development discourses, local appropriations and consequences of development projects, questions of power and knowledge, alternative modernities, globalization and the importance of new social movements.
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Medical anthropology includes studies of health, sickness, medicine and treatment in a comparative perspective. The sub-discipline has ties to both classical anthropology (religion, magic, possession, witchcraft) and contemporary research into the body and poitical economy.
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Globalization and Europeanization are two terms with buzzword status – everyone uses them, but all too few understand their true meaning. This course corrects such a state of affairs, and does so in two steps. We begin by developing some conceptual tools for linking the global and European to the national and domestic. Then we look at a series of instances where globalization and Europeanization appear to have been at work. These include the international political economy, global human rights, security policy, and – within Europe – how the European Union hits home on its member states.
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The aim of this course is to give an introdction to how the challenge from international terrorism and various forms of insurgencies influence security policy today. These threats have become the dominant element in the thinking about international security, and also how the define their security interests and prioritize their resources.
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The extreme problems of human rights, uneven growth, inequality and poverty in post-colonial countries are often about power and governance. Although much of the dilemmas are international and not just confined to the Global South, change presupposes effective politics. And such politics in turn rest with collective action among people and organisations that can rarely come together but on the local and national level. This course focuses therefore on the problems of power and governance as articulated in the post-colonial countries themselves. The aim is to provide the participants with a basis for critical and independent analysis of such issues in both working life and in more specialised studies on the master level. The means to this end is to discuss theories and arguments that relate to the most central themes such as state-building, the politics of resources and capital accumulation, state-society relations, political cleavages, clientelism, popular organisation, democratisation and peace building, and international support for the latter.
Score: 9.989721 Details | Listing | Web page