CIVICA ESR
COURSE CATALOGUE

How many times have you produced an original insight, only to be told that your writing interfered with conveying your ideas? Academic writing requires conceptual clarity and coherence. But it also demands clarity and cohesion at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. This workshop will run students through the basics of academic writing with a focus on concision and clarity. Topics include how to eliminate unnecessary words and phrases, as well as the importance of employing active verbs, parallel construction, and short sentences. Students will come away with more confidence in how to edit their own writing, as well as a better understanding of which grammatical rules matter, and which can be safely ignored.

Seminar offered by Dondena Research Center (Fall 2024 seminar series) ----- November 25th 2024 12:45-2:00pm (UTC+1) ------ CIVICA ESR can attend ONLINE only. Zoom meetings link will be available upon registration. ------ SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: Demographic projections aim to outline the probable future of a population in terms of total size and structural components. This type of analysis is used by policymakers as a knowledge tool for understanding population aging trends, as well as a basis for developing additional predictive models. The potential uses of demographic projections are numerous, ranging from healthcare and social security planning to urban development and environmental-energy needs, from organizing educational infrastructure to planning transportation networks. Since the mid-1980s, Istat has been committed to presenting official demographic scenarios for the country at both national and territorial levels, and since 2016, this has been done through a semi-probabilistic model developed in a fruitful partnership with Bocconi University. Alongside the broader national and regional demographic model, which outlines the probable future of the resident population in its dynamic and structural aspects, additional predictive models have been introduced over time. Among these are a model for family forecasting and one for analyzing territorial depopulation. Today, in response to increasing demands for demographic sustainability information, a new model is being developed to capture transformations in the working-age population and to identify the country’s human potential in terms of labor market participation rates. The seminar aims to present the main methodological advancements underlying the models, as well as to outline the key scenario assumptions.  ----- BIO: After graduating in Demographic Statistical Sciences, Marco Marsili joined ISTAT in 1994 with a scholarship, and since 1996, he has been part of the Institute as a researcher. In 2021, Marco became a Research Director. As a demographer, he has dedicated his career to production and research, conducting surveys, and developing methods and processing products in the socio-demographic field. Today, Marco is the head of the Population register, demographic and living conditions statistics within the Directorate for Social Statistics and Population Census.
Teachers:

• Marco Marsili ()

4-hour workshop. Time: 9 am to 1 pm. This workshop offers a space to develop your teaching persona and reflect on your relationship to teaching. You will examine your strengths and interests as a teacher and build on them. You will also consider your challenges, and how to work with them, integrating the so-called weaknesses as a part of your teaching persona.
Teachers:

• Carol Kiriakos (European University Institute)

The CTDP - Facilitating Online Synchronous Learning is a fully-online webinar lasting 1h 30min which will be held on November 29, 2024 from 3:30 to 5:00 pm (Italy timezone). The webinar link will be available soon. Once you have received the Acceptance email, please make sure to write to civica@unibocconi.it to receive the link. ----- MODULE DESCRIPTION: at the end of the session participants will be able to identify and apply best practices for setting up their online teaching environment, and managing interaction in an online environment. ----- BIO: Professor Beatrice Manzoni is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Knowledge Area of 'Leadership, Human Resources, and Digital Technologies' at SDA Bocconi School of Management, where she serves as the Director of Executive Programs such as "Intensive HR Management", "Advanced HR Management", "The Leader Coach" and "Creativity at Work". She previously held the position of Coordinator for the Executive Master in Strategic HR Management from 2008 to 2014.
Teachers:

• Beatrice Manzoni (Bocconi University)

Are you feeling unmotivated when it comes to working on your PhD? A lack of motivation can show up in many ways. Whether it’s procrastination, feeling low, getting distracted by other tasks, feeling incapacitated and unable to move forward – it’s often a vicious cycle. When we don’t feel motivated, we end up accomplishing very little and this results in us feeling even less motivated than before. Join us for an online workshop as we explore a range of tips and tools for maintaining motivation throughout your doctorate.

In this 90-minute workshop, we look at how to approach academic writing as a conversation. We explore the broad principles underlying academic writing – what makes academic writing distinctive, how to situate your argument within a broader literature, and how to structure a coherent argument.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Evgeny Pashukanis’ The General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), a good occasion to (re-)examine this classic of radical legal theory. In The General Theory of Law and Marxism, a landmark text of Marxist jurisprudence, Pashukanis argues that after the revolution contract and property are not to be replaced by new concepts of proletarian law. Rather, the legal form as such, and hence law in its entirety, will disappear. The reason is that private law, whose basic categories, he argues, constitute the foundations of law in general, is intrinsically bourgeois, based as it is on the idea of the voluntary market exchange of equivalents (goods, services). Therefore, with the disappearance of the form of the equivalence relation between commodities, also its corresponding legal form, with its basic categories of contract, property, subjective rights et cetera will become obsolete and wither away. Pashukanis’ work, his life, and the revolution were intertwined in a very dramatic way. After the October Revolution, he became a prominent Soviet legal scholar, and held important bureaucratic positions, but then fell out of grace under Stalin, who had very different plans for state and law than their withering away. Pashukanis was arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’ in 1937, after which he ‘disappeared’. During this seminar we will engage in close reading of this landmark text. Moreover, we will discuss its relevance today: Does the commodity exchange fully determine the law? Does private law constitute the basis for law in general? Are constitutions plausibly understood in a fully materialist way? And what about fundamental rights? Is class struggle central to a proper understanding of the law? How to think society after law? Why has the law never withered away anywhere? Is communist jurisprudence plausible after the Soviet Union? Is Pashukanis’ rationalism and universalism Eurocentric? Could there be an EU without law? If Pashukanis is right then what should I do? No specific prior knowledge of Marxism, legal theory, or other is required.
Teachers:

• Martijn Hesselink ()

This workshop will give insights into ethics in academic research. We will speak about good practices, as well as misconduct in academic research touching upon topics such as academic freedom, research integrity, and data protection. We will give an overview of the role of the ethics committee, and what to consider when designing a project with view to applying for ethics review. At the end, there will be a forum for the audience to ask questions. Speakers: Herman G. Van De Werfhorst, Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences and Chair of the EUI Ethics Committee Julia Hiltrop, Administrator of the EUI Ethics Committee
Teachers:

• Herman Van de Werfhorst (European University Institute)
• Julia Hiltrop (European University Institute)

This professional development event is part of the Teacher Development Programme and aims to explore the dynamic realm of digital tools that can help us to improve our processes in teaching and research. The webinar will have a practical approach that will include both elements of digital pedagogy and concrete examples of tools that can be used by professionals in the teaching and research processes. Participants will be encouraged to experiment with different tools andreflect on how integrating the recommended tools can enrich their research and teaching practices
Teachers:

• Mirela Alexandru (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration)

Do you have a challenging relationship with your academic supervisor? Do you feel unsupported and discouraged in your interactions? The relationship we have with our academic supervisors is a crucial component of completing a PhD, yet very often these relationships come under strain and leave us feeling disempowered. Come along to this workshop as we explore strategies for enhancing your relationship with your supervisor in a confidential and safe setting.

Nomothetic accounts of politics have postulated a deductive framework to explain political outcomes, in principle applicable across space and over time. In this framework, self-interest is the driving force of human action, dictating decisions based on two ingredients, both exogenously given: preferences and institutions. Within this set-up, culture has been treated as a residual quantity, devoid of any any analytical power. The purpose of this course is to unpack and scrutinize this residual, bringing culture to the forefront of political analysis. The seminar offers an in-depth exploration of theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of political culture. Political culture, as a field of study, intersects various disciplines, including political science, economics, public policy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology. This course aims to define and understand culture using social science tools, addressing fundamental questions about its origins, transmission, and evolution.
Teachers:

• Elias Dinas (European University Institute)

The course is a semester-long, foundational course for doctoral students preparing for their role as teaching assistants and future scholar-teachers. This course also forms the basis of the comprehensive certificate program for teaching in higher education offered by the Yehuda Elkana Center for Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education Research (The Elkana Center). The course fosters an understanding of the university teacher as a professional scholar ready to engage in teaching informed by research, models of good practice, a spirit of inquiry, and critical intellectual engagement. Our approach to teaching in higher education combines knowledge of theoretical foundations, a strong practice orientation, and an appreciation for collaborative, inquiry-driven, and technology-enhanced learning environments. This course will allow for the development of your own teaching approaches and values through a combination of reading, reflective writing, and practical tasks. You will gain a research-driven foundation for your work as twenty-first century scholar-teachers through the study of key issues and experimentation in a variety of approaches. First in a two-part sequence providing a systematic approach to teaching fundamentals, focusing on the design and delivery of lessons/sessions. https://elkana.ceu.edu/foundations-teaching-higher-education-yelc6101-and-yelc6103
Teachers:

• Tamara Kamatovic (Central European University)
• Mátyás Szabó (Central European University)

Different kinds of analog and digital data play important roles in contemporary societies and economies around the world. Global data governance is hence highly contextual and often characterized by the intricate interplay of law and infrastructure and shaped by a broad array of public and private actors. Recently, digital data has become a focal point of regulatory efforts in the European Union and around the world. This seminar explores conceptual questions of “data law” such as: How should we think about “data” and “information” from a legal perspective? How can private and public actors establish jurisdiction over data? Who owns data? What data should be “open”? What will future data sharing infrastructures and collective data governance arrangements look like? The seminar transcends the established (but likely unsustainable) divide between “personal” and “non-personal” data (such as weather, ocean, machine, or business data). It is hence not a course in data protection law as such. The idea is to center “data” as a regulatory object – in line with the EU’s dominant regulatory approach – and to critically evaluate the assumptions that underpin the EU’s regulatory agenda in comparison and contrast with the evolving regulatory landscape in the United States, China, India, and elsewhere. The seminar integrates insights from (critical) data studies and media and communication studies and discusses the potential for and challenges of conducting inter-disciplinary work in this domain. Data law questions and problems arise in many contexts – the seminar will be attuned to researchers’ own interests and projects (facilitated through short presentations). Attendance and active participation required. Assignments include response papers and a short presentation that links the seminar topic to the researchers’ own research agenda.
Teachers:

• Thomas Streinz (European University Institute)

Prefigurative politics are rooted in revolutionary thought, in particular anarchist thought. The idea is to organise the revolutionary movement in the image of the society it wants to establish. Prefiguration is closely related to the precept of congruence of means and ends. For example, if we want our post-evolutionary society to be non-violent then our revolution must be non-violent too. This seminar explores the implications of prefigurative politics for law. Can law be prefigurative? How does the idea of prefiguration relate to the notion of nonreformist reform which is currently popular in Law & Political Economy (LPE)? Does prefigurative politics risk ending up being quietist or privatising politics if we establish prefigurative communities and lifestyles? And what does prefiguration mean in the shadow of a still existing framework of (constitutional) law, where the state, private property, the police and prisons, and capital markets continue to be constituted and shaped by law? No specific prior knowledge is required for this seminar.
Teachers:

• Martijn Hesselink (European University Institute)

4-hour workshop. Time: 9 am to 1 pm. This workshop examines how to foster engagement and participation in online teaching sessions. When teaching online, you are competing for the participants’ attention with potential distractions. Compared with classroom teaching, there are more situational factors out of your control. We will look at the aspects that you as a teacher need to consider in order to make the most of your online classes. After this workshop, you are better aware of the psychological/emotional side of online interaction, and how to make it support your teaching.
Teachers:

• Carol Kiriakos (European University Institute)

The law impacts technology. Technology impacts the law. Beyond these basic truths, the interaction between law and technology is all uncertain. Some voices pretend that the law limits innovation that stems from technological change. Others believe the exact contrary. The 2023 kerfuffle over the call to temporarily ban research on generative Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) systems best exemplify the issue. Perhaps, both views are true. But can they be true at the same time, and in relation to the same laws and technologies? In what circumstances does one view dominate the other? Do other regularities govern the relationship between law and technology? Can they be seen in patterns or trends? And do these deep structural relations hold true across areas of the legal system, and across technologies? This course’s core aim is to supply a framework to address these questions. Today, we do not have the beginning of a good answer to predict how law and technology work together. Our limited state of knowledge is unfortunate. Technology is key to human flourishing. And the law is a necessary institution of any human society. Neither of them is about to disappear anytime soon. Absent a systematic understanding of the ways in which law and technology interact, incomplete approaches proliferate in the legal literature. Some works regrouped under the umbrella term law and tech (“law & tech”) tend to approach the issue holistically. But that scholarship focuses predominantly on the legal problems raised by technology (Tranter, 2011). And law & tech’s methods are not entirely satisfactory, in particular, because they predominantly default to existing law’s traditional interests in line with the culture of precedent, and understandably decline on selecting new values which is what policy and lawmakers must do all the time. Outside of that field, the relationship between law & technology is treated on a siloed basis. For example, the emerging legal scholarship on AI pays only marginal interest to prior ethical discussions in relation to human cloning, DNA sequencing, or gene editing. The “compartmentalization” of legal research (Bernstein, 2007) is clearly a problem, given the largely “combinatorial” nature of technology (Arthur, 2011). Last, most of the law and technology scholarship focuses on digital, leaving other important technological fields like bio chemistry and others subject to substantial legal uncertainty. Overall, very few clear and actionable takeaways about the relations between law and technology emerge from the literature. This course represents an attempt to overcome this state of affairs. It is based on four key propositions: one, there are deep structural relations between law & technology; two, the deep structural relations between law and technology can be studied and described; three, a bargain between law’s demands for ethics, and technology’s demand for efficiency structures legal and technological outcomes, and many deep factors like technological literacy or the timing of policymaking affect the bargain; four, some general lessons can be derived from an empirical study of law and technology’s relations.
Teachers:

• Nicolas Petit (European University Institute)

We all know that we learn in different ways. But what are the consequences of this for our teaching? Do we really take this into consideration when planning our courses? Maybe we plan our courses according to our own preferences for learning? During this session, we will first look at different preferences for learning, including your own preferences. We will then apply this on your teaching, and you will have the opportunity to review this, and see how you perhaps could change it? Finally, you will learn about ideas that other participants have about how they could change their teaching. After this session you are expected to be able to: - Recognize the diversity of ways of learning. - Analyze your own teaching in relation to different preferences for learning. - Assess and adjust your own teaching to various contexts.
Teachers:

• Pär Mårtensson (Stockholm School of Economics)

Second in a two-part sequence providing a systematic approach to teaching fundamentals, focusing on course design and assessments. Participants must previously take Foundations or contact elkanacenter@ceu.edu for exemption. “Learning by Design” is a semester-long, intermediate-level course focused on how students learn and how instructors can facilitate student learning. Building on Foundations of Teaching in Higher Education (which is a prerequisite), it shifts the focus even more firmly from the teacher to the student. In their roles as designer, facilitator (and assessor) of learning, course participants explore how they can guide students in their learning and how to make that learning longer lasting and more significant. During our sessions we will unpack assumptions that surround student learning, delve into theories of how students learn, and explore corresponding principles and approaches to teaching that seek to align learning, teaching, and asessment. We will discuss how to better understand your students, recognize several implications of student diversity for student learning, and explore how to support different types of learners and different types of learning. We will explore, at some length, how to assess student learning, including assessment design, grading, and feedback. Throughout all of this, we will constantly reflect on our own growth as scholars in the process of becoming facilitators of learning.
Teachers:

• Tamara Kamatovic (Central European University)
• Mátyás Szabó (Central European University)

The cross-disciplinary field of “infrastructure studies” has recently captured the imagination of legal scholars interested in global and planetary ordering, technology regulation, securitization, and other topics. But what does it mean to “think infrastructurally”? This seminar discusses ways of engaging productively with insights from other disciplines that have studied infrastructures across space and time, in particular in the field of science and technology studies (STS): How do infrastructures differ from systems, networks, or platforms? How are infrastructures regulated – and how could they be regulated differently? Which infrastructures underpin regulation – and can infrastructure itself be understood as a form of regulation? Thinking infrastructurally can open-up pathways for analytical, critical, and normative inquiries from law and policy perspectives. The seminar will be attuned to researchers’ own interests and projects (facilitated through short presentations). Attendance and active participation required. Assignments include response papers and a short case study presentation of an infrastructure of relevance to the researchers’ own projects.
Teachers:

• Thomas Streinz (European University Institute)

Law and economics (L&E) is a scholarly approach that provides an economic perspective on legal institutions and the law. L&E utilizes formal and empirical economic analysis to understand the law. If the results of such economic analyses show that the explanatory power of economic theories is lacking, L&E also engages in the reconsideration of economic theories themselves. The course aims to introduce L&E as a methodological approach while being mindful of its normative assumptions and implications. It will first discuss the historical development and contemporary significance of L&E. The course will then explore several substantive policy areas: contract law, liability, antitrust, economic regulation, environmental law, behavioral law and economics, and technology. Guest lecturers will be invited to contribute to the course. Participants commit to the following: Prior reading of 2 to 4 scholarly papers or cases before each session. The papers will be discussed as the course progresses.
Teachers:

• Nicolas Petit (European University Institute)