Courses in 2018
Constitution-building in Africa
History has seen several waves of constitution-building in the 20th century with an unparalleled boom starting in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin wall. And while experts recently announced the end of this boom in new constitutions after the Cold War, the world is witnessing another wave of constitution-building, this time predominately in Africa.
Collaborative Local Government for an Open Society
The 2018 Training School on “Collaborative local government for an open society” is one of the long-lasting series of summer courses for Ph.D. students interested in local government issues. It is co-organized by the European Urban Research Association and Standing Group for Local Government and Politics of ECPR, and gives an opportunity to develop the understanding of comparative local government studies in Europe and to discuss Ph.D. dissertation with experienced professors of different disciplines and coming from different countries.
Funding Journalism in the Digital Age
The biggest challenge to media freedom and independent journalism today is the systemic political corruption in which private interests shape the decision-making process in state bodies and institutions. Increasingly, a model of captive, politically instrumentalized news media financed by owners, corporations, social and political groups, or governments, is becoming dominant in most parts of the world. This has significant consequences on independent media and journalism.
Geospatial Solutions for Water Management
With the recent adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the call by UN Secretary General for a “revolution” in the use of data for sustainable development, geospatial technologies have tremendous potential to effectively and efficiently monitor SDG progress. In the fifteen years since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the amount of data available, as well as data collection and processing methods have changed substantially.
Innovations in Disaster Risk Reduction
The Innovations in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) workshop will highlight recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and how they are empowering both decision-makers and citizens to play a proactive role in managing disaster risks and providing more effective disaster response. The workshop will build upon experience and expertise in ICTs and DRR by both UNDP and a diverse network of organizations, who have come together over the past several years to train environmental professionals in the field.
Mediation Theory and Skills
This intensive one-week course facilitates the exchange of ideas and cooperative projects among mediation scholars, practitioners, trainers, and students in the East and West. In addition to offering an introduction to mediation, the program provides a teaching and training template for mediation training for scholars and practitioners from around the world to adapt for use in their home countries.
Moral Epistemology
The course will explore issues related to the nature and justification of intuitions, the concept of a reflective equilibrium, the ideas of moral testimony and moral expertise, how disagreement in moral matters affects our accounts of moral knowledge and evolutionary debunking arguments of morality.
Each thematic area will be examined separately. For each area, a lecture will address the most important themes, followed by discussions in seminar format. Students will be required to prepare the corresponding collection of principal texts found in their reader.
Policies and Practices in Lifelong Learning at Universities
The introduction of lifelong learning (LLL) in European universities has been discussed extensively at policy level since early 2000 in various contexts and with different arguments. Among others the arguments of the so-called knowledge society and its need for a qualified workforce, the European demographics and the extended university's mission have all been invoked to highlight the importance of lifelong learning and the role played by universities in helping communities and individuals to meet professional and societal challenges.
Romani Identities and Antigypsyism
The Summer School will focus on the nexus between Romani identities and antigypsyism. Antigypsyism is a core concept of critical Romani studies, and can be used methodologically, analytically and theoretically as a way of understanding the position of Roma in Europe historically and in the present moment. A growing body of scholarship grounds our understanding of antigypsyism in the Europeanization of the Roma issue and neoliberal regime expansion following the fall of communism.
Strategic Human Rights Litigation
Human rights litigation is one of the methods by which civil society organizations can bring about social change. This course for human rights professionals will develop the skills and knowledge needed to successfully bring cases to the regional human rights systems and the UN Treaty bodies, and to use those cases to achieve practical change.
Territorial Sovereignty in the Age of Migration
The importance of territory in the current world order is undeniable. Recent years have seen an explosion of empirical and normative scholarly interest on the impact of migration, globalization and state succession on territorial sovereignty across many disciplines. In addition to the more “traditional” territorial disputes, mass migration has raised new dilemmas over territorial ownership, peoplehood and statehood.
The Biological and the Social between 1900 and Today
This summer school will examine critically the ways in which the social sciences and biology have been historically bound up over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the beginning of that period, social and political theories exerted their influence on the knowledge produced by biological disciplines, while the social sciences built their understanding of human societies by drawing on what biology could tell them about human nature.
The Dignity of Man in Western Intellectual History, Esotericism, and Art
The ambition of humans to elevate themselves beyond their natural means and to acquire transcendental insight and power is as ancient as our cultural history. The goal of this course is to highlight some aspects of this ambition that are related to Western Esotericism, thus to provide a solid picture of some key phenomena of mysticism, magic, and occult trends in intellectual history. Special attention will be paid to the historical period of late Antiquity to the early modern, as well as the post-Romanticism era.
The History and Metaphysics of the Concept of Laws of Nature
The purpose of the course is to acquaint course participants with recent work on the history and metaphysics of the concept of scientific law and related concepts that are central to the development and understanding of science. These concepts are important to philosophical accounts of both science and to metaphysics. While there has been a great deal of active research on writing on the metaphysics of laws and also on the history of the concept of laws there has been little interaction between researchers involved in each project.
The National and the Transnational
Some see the current nationalist turn in politics worldwide, with its crackdowns on international migration, proposals to limit trade and slash budgets for humanitarian and development aid, as the beginning of the end of globalization.
The Precautionary Principle in Sustainability Transitions: Thinking forwards, Looking backwards, Acting
The precautionary principle is a key principle of environment governance. It poses challenges to both environmental science and environmental governance because it applies to 'situations of scientific complexity, uncertainty and ignorance, where there may be a need to act in order to avoid, or reduce, potentially serious or irreversible threats to health and/or the environment, using an appropriate strength of scientific evidence, and taking into account the pros and cons of action and inaction and their distribution' (EEA 2013, p. 681).
Thinking About the Possible
Thinking about the possible and impossible and exploring counterfactual (“what if?”) scenarios are fundamental aspects of the human mind. The boundary conditions for counterfactual thinking, and the extent to which it shares the same underlying cognitive machinery with related abilities such as episodic future thinking and pretend play, are currently the subjects of substantial debate in philosophy and psychology.