Education
The Contesting Governance Platform organizes several educational activities. Take a look at this page if you are interested in learning more about out educational activities. If you have an idea for a new educational project on Contesting Governance related topics, please get in touch with us by sending an email to contestinggovernance@uu.nl.
Current Education
Re-imagining Security Minor
The multi-faculty minor Re-Imagining Security deals with issues related to security, violence, human rights, international politics, and power, in a interdisciplinary way. The minor is made up of four courses offered by the Cultural Anthropology Department, Law School, History Department, and Utrecht University College. The minor is embedded within Institutions for Open Societies (IOS), one of the strategic themes of Utrecht University, and will be offered as a pilot in the academic year 2023-2024 with a maximum enrolment of 25 students.
Open-Source Global Justice Investigations Lab
Globalization and the growth of digital technology has meant that knowledge and information can spread like never before. This also means that misinformation and fake news are on the rise, making it more important than ever that students develop skills of critical inquiry that cross disciplinary boundaries. Through open-source investigation techniques, students can learn to identify, document, verify, analyze, and evaluate open-source material such as news reports, social media posts, and satellite images. Their work can also contribute to reporting and advocacy around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by tackling issues such as food security and deforestation as well as human rights and international justice.
This course is open to students from all faculties and study programme levels but has limited space. If you would like to sign up, we ask you to submit a CV and motivation letter (max. 500 words) in which you tell us why you are interested in learning open-source investigative skills for global justice. Please explain what your disciplinary background is and how you see it being related to global justice issues and/or organisations; also, if you happen to have previous experience in the field of global justice and/or open-source investigations, please let us know.
Graduate Honours Interdisciplinary Seminars (GHIS)
During the past years, Brianne McGonigle Leyh and Tessa Diphoorn have been co-teaching in the Graduate Honours Interdisciplinary Seminars (GHIS). GHIS is designed for curious, open-minded and broadly societally interested students who are eager to develop interdisciplinary research skills that help combat these complicated challenges. GHIS facilitates the interaction between students and researchers to jointly explore perspectives in the context of real-life cases and research examples. In addition to sharing their experiences with interdisciplinary research, Brianne & Tessa focus on the notion of travelling concepts as a learning tool to explore interdisciplinarity in education. In these seminars, students make short podcast episodes wherein they explore a particular concept from their respective disciplines. Several episodes have been incorporated into the series Travelling Concepts on Air.
Additionally, in the academic year 2024-2025, students made the following podcast episodes: