The biggest challenge to media freedom and independent journalism today is the systemic political corruption in which private interests shape the decision-making process in state bodies and institutions. Increasingly, a model of captive, politically instrumentalized news media financed by owners, corporations, social and political groups, or governments, is becoming dominant in most parts of the world. This has significant consequences on independent media and journalism.

The Innovations in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) workshop will highlight recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and how they are empowering both decision-makers and citizens to play a proactive role in managing disaster risks and providing more effective disaster response. The workshop will build upon experience and expertise in ICTs and DRR by both UNDP and a diverse network of organizations, who have come together over the past several years to train environmental professionals in the field.

The purpose of the course is to acquaint course participants with recent work on the history and metaphysics of the concept of scientific law and related concepts that are central to the development and understanding of science. These concepts are important to philosophical accounts of both science and to metaphysics. While there has been a great deal of active research on writing on the metaphysics of laws and also on the history of the concept of laws there has been little interaction between researchers involved in each project.

The precautionary principle is a key principle of environment governance. It poses challenges to both environmental science and environmental governance because it applies to 'situations of scientific complexity, uncertainty and ignorance, where there may be a need to act in order to avoid, or reduce, potentially serious or irreversible threats to health and/or the environment, using an appropriate strength of scientific evidence, and taking into account the pros and cons of action and inaction and their distribution' (EEA 2013, p. 681).

The course is designed to familiarize participants with the increasingly influential, though still controversial thesis that thinking is a kind of experience, and that conceptual mental content is constituted by a proprietary, sui generis kind of non-sensory phenomenology. In addition to the familiar sensory kinds of experience – visual, auditory, olfactory, etc., there is, according to this view, a cognitive kind of phenomenology. Just as there is “something it’s like” to have visual, auditory, etc.

In recent decades Internationalization-at-Home (IaH) has been viewed by many European universities as a solution for providing students the global competencies required from professionals working in an interconnected society. The goal of IaH is to transform classrooms and campuses into spaces that intentionally promote intercultural, international, and global learning.

This intensive one-week course facilitates the exchange of ideas and cooperative projects among mediation scholars, practitioners, trainers, and students in the East and West. In addition to offering an introduction to mediation, the program provides a teaching and training template for mediation training for scholars and practitioners from around the world to adapt for use in their home countries.
 

Recent philosophical discussions about discrimination have focused on what makes discrimination wrongful in paradigmatic cases, such as in examples involving sexist hiring committees or racist university admissions procedures. The purpose of this course is to provide a forum within which to build upon these foundations by exploring the further complications that arise in more controversial cases of the kind that we encounter most commonly. Throughout the course, we will explore questions such as the following: