Collaborating on Crisis Studies in Sweden and the United States: Problem Solving via Digital Technologies

About the course

This transatlantic digital course trains students in conducting problem-solving group work on how U.S. and Swedish societies, both past and present, make sense of crises. The course is centred around multi-week collaborations of students from Uppsala University and Augustana College predominantly using online platforms and virtual meetings. It offers you a rare opportunity to collaborate with peers across the Atlantic using digital technologies.

The course compares the different ways that the United States and Sweden have faced challenges relating to for example politics and democracy, economy and labour, diplomacy and foreign policy, environmental sustainability and climate change, public health and pandemic response. Each semester, the course will cover a selection of these themes. By drawing on research in fields such as American Studies, Scandinavian Studies, language and rhetoric, political science, and history, the course seeks interdisciplinary understandings of crisis while teaching collaborative methods for addressing it.

Outline for distance course: The course is based on scheduled digital seminars, group work, and independent studies. Teaching and examinations take place in the online learning environment and via virtual meetings with students from Uppsala University and Augustana College. The teaching is mainly conducted through study instructions, exercises, and virtual discussions. Access to a computer with internet connection, webcam and headset is a requirement. Taking a distance learning course provides you with a significant degree of freedom to choose when you wish to study. Note, however, that the course requires as much effort as a regular campus course.

Read about the American students' experience of the first instance of the course.