HPOB00901U Portuguese and Brazilian Studies - Introduction to Area Studies

This course introduces to the reformed interdisciplinary Area Studies approach as taken in the program ”Portuguese and Brazilian Studies” since the reopening in 2013.

Students learn to recognize, understand and apply the most important disciplinary perspectives, which are necessary to understand the complex social phenomena of the Portuguese-speaking world.

We start by studying the core theories, frequently used concepts, implied research objectives and constraints of each relevant discipline (history, political science, economics, sociology, cultural studies and sociolinguistics) and discuss how to combine them in an appropriate way in order to get to relevant findings about topics from the Portuguese-speaking world.

Due to the historical and geopolitical specifics of the studied area, which includes colonies and developing countries, we furthermore learn about how to use postcolonial/decolonial studies and critical global studies to better understand these countries beyond a Eurocentric view.

The curriculum also includes the learning and training of academic techniques and skills such as information searching, reading strategies, making oral and poster presentations, writing critical response and other types of academic papers, as well as teamwork skills.

The course is taught in English and works in tandem with the course ”Introduktion til den portugisisktalende verden” where the students have the opportunity to put into practice the theoretical and analytical skills by applying them to “cases” from the Portuguese-speaking world.