The theme for the 1^st year as well as the 1^st Year Project is “Comparative Cultural and Social Analysis”. The 1^st Year Project is designed to follow up on course instruction by providing participants the opportunity to work independently, and across disciplines, with those concepts and methods presented during the courses. 1^st year instruction focuses primarily on the concepts and methods for analysing society and culture. Through this project, students will be challenged to go beyond mere recollection of facts, concepts, and theory; the project encourages development of a practical sensibility about the deployment of theory and method toward concrete research goals under constraints of time and other resource (praxis).

In Asian Societies from a Comparative Perspective (Sociology), students examine the relationship between the individual and society/culture, between actor and structure/system, with society itself analysed according to three categories: state, market and civil society. Society has been introduced as an economic system regulated by market mechanisms, certain economic structures and a set of politically economic institutions. The course presents concepts and theories for understanding and analysing various forms of “society and culture”. The course in Interdisciplinary Research Method 1 examines in more detail the fundamentals of method through the following analyses: How does one evaluate competing theories, how does one assess information from various, possibly conflicting, sources, which data should be used together with which theories, and other forms of research inquiry.

All courses deal with different socio-analytical and cultural themes under the common framework constituted by the concepts of state, market, civil society, communication and culture. From the content of the various courses, students can gather project ideas about political, economic, social and cultural problems – and in particular, problems that cut across such traditional categorisations.

Examples:

• Projects that focus on the relationship between industrial structure, growth and welfare and which, for example, include macro-economic elements from economics lectures and aspects of Japanese/Chinese welfare and on industrial, economic and social conditions from sociology lectures.
• Projects that focus on the relations and co-operation between countries and which build on theories about nation, identity, culture and state, on the international component of economics and on a review of foreign policy issues in Japan/China, Denmark, or another country.
• Projects on economic policy, using macroeconomic theory as a basis, could incorporate analyses of political-economic institutions in Japan/China, Denmark, or another country. The project would then view national structure and activities from a cultural perspective: which values are evident in the structure, and which concepts and values are expressed in their outward communication.