The ideas for a completely new interdisciplinary elective (in random order) that are still in the race can be found below:

• The politics of fashion
• Post-humans in the Anthropocene: a relational inquiry into humanity futures, other species, and the environment
• Prototyping the future of media: the crash course in the latest tech trends
• Cash rules everything around me
• Environ mental health
• Dutch footprint
• The meaning of life in a world without work
• (Ir)rationality of man: foundations of good decision-making; living the experiments
• The pharmaceutical industry: what are the limits?
• Science, open up! Open science in different disciplines

Read the detailed description of the courses below or cast your vote directly here for your top 3. Anyone with a UvA ID can vote for his or her top 3 online. By doing this, you give three points to your number one, two points to number 2 and one point to your number three. Please note that you can only cast your vote once.

You can vote until Monday 18 November 12:00. The five courses with the most points go to the finals on Thursday, November 28, 17:30 to 19:30, in de Brug.

With this challenge, the IIS wants to give students a say in the way education is organised at the Institute and within the University. The Challenge gives you the chance to make your vision on education a reality. The winning course will be launched in September 2020.

The politics of fashion

Yasmine Ben Abdessalem

The main guideline of this course is the importance of politics in the fashion process: before the conception, during the production, and during the consumption process.

Disciplines: Fashion theory/history – politics- development

• It would explore broad themes linked to the fashion industry and its impact on countries on domains like employment, production and fair trade. The whole cycle of production – consumption- post production issues related to fast fashion.
• Also explore how clothes denote social rank, status or political and class affiliations and aspirations
• Provides an analytical perspective on protest dressing, cultural appropriation to show that fashion is inherently political. 
• Finally, it could discuss trade policies, and the environmental challenges that the fashion industry has to overcome in our era.

Post-humans In the Anthropocene: a relational inquiry into humanity futures, other species, and the environment

José Bernardo / Pedroso Couto Soares / Amalia Calderón / Clémentine Dècle

This course will be taught in English. It will explore the notion of the Post-human in the Anthropocene. It will investigate the perception of the human as a mutable condition within the context of the new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which nature is radically transformed by one single dominant influence, the homosapiens. To understand the contemporary paradigms, the first theme of the course will explore the post-human in the context of corporeality and bio-technological progresses. The second theme explores the relational position of human beings with other species, and the ethical, socio-political and ecological implications. The last block will focus on the Anthropocene, bringing together the previous topics in contact with our contemporary geological era, the Anthropocene. We will challenge the students to reposition their perspectives over their relations with nature, animals, bodies and geography, and to delve into the possibilities of other envisioned futures.

Prototyping the future of media: the crash course in the latest tech trends

Ola Bonati / Laura Ghitoi

The course aims to bring in different perspectives from New Media, Computer Science Artificial Intelligence studies and create a unique space where those disciplines work together. By discussing topics like privacy in the data era, appification, the evolution of algorithms, ethics of AI and more; this course will provide students with a broad understanding of current trends. These trends will then be approached from a theoretical perspective as well as in practice by the method of prototyping. The course will be carried out in 8 weeks and during that time students will attend weekly lectures and tutorial (workshop) classes. The goal of this course is to equip students with a new perspective that they could acquire from each other but also from the unique format of the class. The program is up to date with recent debates and assumes inviting guest lecturers as well as workshop facilitators.

Cash rules everything around me

Roderick Burger

“Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” – geïnspireerd door een interview met Abraham Jack in the New York Times. Dit vak gaat dieper in op de (groeiende) ongelijkheid tussen klasse en cultuur waarmee studenten geconfronteerd worden tijdens hun studententijd. Hoe vormt ongelijkheid verschillende aspecten van de universiteitservaring?

We gaan dieper in op publicaties over klasse en cultuur, met de specifieke focus op de studententijd, omdat juist deze periode met het huidig leenstelsel interessant is om te onderzoeken. Studenten zijn onderdeel van hun eigen vak, wat een etnografische invalshoek opent. Het vak moedigt studenten daarmee aan om na te denken over ongelijkheid, maar ook hoe beleid en praktijk invloed hebben op het studentenleven. Het vak hanteert een kwalitatieve benadering. Onderwijs moet gelijk zijn voor iedereen en sociale verschillen uitvlakken of zouden in beginsel niet uit moeten maken. Welke sociale processen spelen er hier in Amsterdam? Zijn deze te vergelijken met andere universiteitssteden in Europa en Amerika?

Environ mental health

Rosa van der Laag

Environ mental health gaat over de mentale problemen die men als individu kan krijgen door klimaatproblematiek. Denk hierbij aan vliegschaamte en keuzestress bij boodschappen tot aan de hoop verliezen. In dit vak kijken we naar wat verschillende disciplines ons kunnen leren over gesprekstechnieken, media, voorbeeldrollen, hoop en nog veel meer onderwerpen die de mentale gezondheid beïnvloeden.

Dutch footprint

Ilse Niessen

In 16 weeks time by means of interdisciplinary lectures and creative assignments, students will get a better insight in the Dutch footprint in areas of sustainable initiatives, food(waste)/ agriculture / cattle, energy + transport, waste management, (circulair) economy, politics, and clothing. These lectures will weekly focus on a different topic and also show alternative methods of how this area of expertise can be changed sustainably. Therefore, students can determine their own footprint, while trying to sustainably reduce their own foodprint and a chosen area in the Netherlands.  

The meaning of life in a world without work

Marvin Nusseck

Imagine a world without work: what would you do all day? More and more people start to doubt, whether it makes sense to work five days a week on a “bullshit job”, having the feeling to not contribute anything to society. Being busy from nine-to-five, and barely have two days where you can actually do what you like.

The current discussion makes us feel like we do not have to worry about this anymore, because ‘automation’ will free us all from the duty of work. Maybe capitalism has managed what John Maynard Keynes predicted in the 1930s, that because of the automation of first our physical and later our cognitive labour we will barely have a “fifteen-hour week”. Maybe we reach what Karl Marx imagined in the midst of the industrial revolution, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, …, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”.

The objective of the course is to give students an understanding of how technological change could affect the concept of ‘work’ as we know it today, what impact this has on society and what concepts can be considered to make this transformation tolerable in future.

(Ir)rationality of man: foundations of good decision-making: living the experiments

Henrik Pröpper

The concept of rationality seems ingrained in all segments of society; it is institutionalized into our judicial system, into political and medical decision-making processes and economic models. Our society is organized around the (metaphysical) belief in human rationality. However, one could ask: are we really the rational beings we assume to be? And if not, what are we? Daniel Kahneman and (the late) Amos Tversky have shown since the late sixties that ‘cognitive illusions’, heuristics and biases constantly influence human decision-making. This fundamental understanding and ground-braking alteration in psychologists’ perception of reality has however not penetrated into our collective consciousness. Therefore, this course will take you on the journey of human decision-making.

The pharmaceutical industry: what are the limits?

Pepijn de Reus

Increasingly there are reports in the news that medicines are excluded from basic health insurance. There is great uncertainty about pharmaceutical companies and how their development costs work, with the commentaries of many as a result. In this course we will teach students how the development of a drug works (roughly). It would be nice if a pharmacy lecturer came to tell this (biochemistry / pharmacy). Subsequently, a business administrator from the industry is invited to explain how they market their product (business administration / economics). Then someone from the Ministry of Health will tell how they determine a medicine is admitted to the basic insurance, and how these negotiations with the company proceed (public administration / economics). Finally, it would be interesting if a medical ethicist came to talk about his / her vision of the process. Where could things possibly change? (philosophy / ethics).

Science, open up! Open science in different disciplines

Iris Smal / Myrthe Veenman

Have you ever found the perfect article for your project, but then discovered you had to pay to access the article? Have you ever wondered why? This is one of the questions that will be discussed in the course Science, open up!

Open science is basically just science done right. Transparency and openness are core values of science. People should know exactly what you did to acquire the results that you have. However, this is not always the case and it is affecting the quality of scientific research. The replication crisis in psychology, but also in other sciences such as biomedical science and economics, made this abundantly clear. The Open Science movement has been around for a long time, but with current developments in science it gained a lot of traction. In this course, the philosophy behind (open) science will be discussed as well as the history of the Open Science movement in different disciplines. The mechanisms underlying the replication crisis will be discussed, from human biases to the publication system. You will learn how Open Science practices can counteract these mechanisms and you will learn how different disciplines implement Open Science and what difficulties they run in to.