Constellations
AUC encourages students to broaden their horizons and enhance their interdisciplinary knowledge and skills. Until the 2022-2023 academic year, students principally learned about and practiced interdisciplinarity by following theme courses in their major and by taking a Big Questions course in the Academic Core.
No more theme courses from September 2023
From 2023-2024, theme courses have been removed in line with the five-year strategy AUC NEXT. The change seeks to support new avenues for interdisciplinary learning by facilitating mobility between the three majors. Instead of theme courses, students choose a Big Questions course and follow a minimum of two courses in each major other than their own.
Course "constellations" guiding interdisciplinary study
To further support students’ mobility between majors and help them discover synergies between the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences, AUC is developing course constellations. From 2024-2025, six constellations will be developed that relate to VU and UvA research themes and focus on important societal challenges.
What is a constellation?
A constellation consists of 12 to 14 courses spanning AUC’s majors that examine complex societal issues. While students continue to concentrate on courses in their major, the selected courses in a constellation will help them discover new pathways through the curriculum to form multidisciplinary perspectives and explore courses they may previously not have considered. It's a source of inspiration for (prospective) students and not mandatory to do these constellations. Starting in 2024-2025, the course constellations will include:
- Cognition and Imagination: This constellation will focus on topics like the nervous system, senses, consciousness, media and the arts.
- Digital Worlds: This constellation will focus on topics like information systems, artificial intelligence, digital transformations, games, privacy and security.
- Energy and Climate: This constellation will focus on topics like system earth, climate change, energy transition, and governance and legislation.
- Health and Society: This constellation will focus on topics like human health, (international) public health, bioethics and health technology assessment.
- Human Development: This constellation will focus on topics like evolution, the anthropocene, social and cultural change, migration and urbanisation.
- Order and Complexity: This constellation will focus on topics like stability and resilience, cybernetics, origins of life and universe, material worlds and networks.
Please note: the constellations are not mandatory, it should be seen as a source of inspiration for your own study programme.
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1. Cognition and Imagination
100-level courses
- Periods and Genres: Modern
- Periods and Genres: Early
- Psychology
- The Human Body - Anatomy and Physiology
- Introduction to Literature
200-level courses
- Cognitive Psychology
- Cognition Lab
- Modernism and Postmodernism
- Brain and Cognition
- Philosophical Logic
300-level
- Cultural Studies of Affect and Emotion
- Neuroscience
- The Empathic Brain
- The Art Market and Culture Industry
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2. Digital Worlds
100-level courses
- Introduction to Media Studies
- Programming Your World
- Artificial Cognition: Pattern Recognition
200-level courses
- Digital Habits, Digital Lives
- Perspectives on Games
- Machine Learning
- Genes, Bioinformatics and Disease
- Data Futures Lab
300-level courses
- Media Lab
- Queering Media Studies
- Text Mining
- Mind Reading – Multivariate Pattern Analysis
- Political Communication and Data Analytics
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3. Energy and Climate
100-level courses
- Introduction to Environmental Sciences
- Environmental Economics
- Introduction to Climate and Sustainability
200-level courses
- Environmental Law & Policy
- Risk Management and Natural Hazards
- Cases in Cultural Analysis
- Literary Ecologies
- System Earth
300-level courses
- Global Environmental Governance
- International Sustainable Development
- Modern Philosophical Texts
- Climate Sciences: Past and Present
- Molecular Sustainability
- Case studies in Energy, Climate and Sustainability
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4. Health and Society
100-level courses
- Introduction to Health and Wellbeing
- Introduction to Public Health
- Health, Resilience and Human Flourishing
- Challenges of Food and Nutrition Security
200-level courses
- Bodies on Display OR Portraiture & the Body
- Gender and Sexuality
- Epidemiology
- Nutrition and Health
- Medical Anthropology
300-level courses
- Film & the Body
- Addiction
- Human Stress Research
- Challenges in Health and Society
- Lifestyle & Disease
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5. Human Development
100-level courses
- Classical and Modern Anthropological Thought
- Early to Modern History
- Ecology: From Soil to Society
- Perspectives on Economic Thought
200-level courses
- The History of Ideas
- Urban Utopias
- Urban Ecology Lab
- Empire and its Afterlives
- Development through an Equity Lens
300-level courses
- Contemporary Postcolonial Literature
- Decolonization in Historical Perspective
- Conservation & Restoration Biology
- Human Evolution
- Contemporary Sociological Thought
- Legal and Social Philosophy
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6. Order and Complexity
100-level courses
- Introduction to Cultural Analysis
- Life, Earth and Universe
- Law, Society, and Justice
- Classical and Modern Political Thought
200-level courses
- International Political Economy
- Nations, Nationalism and Modernity
- Philosophy of Science
- Econometrics
- Dynamical Systems
300-level courses
- International Crimes
- Media / Environment
- International Disorder: Past and Present
- Modelling Real World Problems