English

The seminar provides insight in the political situation of various states such as Myanmar, Syria, and Ukraine, and analyzes reasons for flight and implications for the receiving states. It outlines opportunities and challenges for the integration of refugees and explores human rights, especially refugee rights in the world. Students define a research question and investigate reasons for refugee movements and the paths of forced migration (especially in the Mediterranean Sea). The course provides an international perspective on displacements in other parts of the world (especially Southeast Asia, the European Union, and West Africa). It discusses these questions with experts and active NGO members in an open atmosphere to analyze and consider the situation of refugees today.

Consumer behavior is an exciting, dynamic, and growing field of marketing that draws on different social science disciplines (i.e., psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology). The field uses these perspectives to examine individual and collective consumption behaviors in various cultural, social, economic, and environmental settings. This course examines how and why consumers think, feel, and behave the way they do and what this means for marketing products, services, ideas, and experiences.

This course investigates how the cinematic medium represents, inspires, and shapes our understanding of presence. It examines the changing contours of the cinematic medium in the electronically networked digital mediascape of our time. Key topics include the concept of new media, artificial intelligence, robots and cyborgs, genetic engineering, XR (extended reality), and gamic media.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the declining years of the Victorian era saw the outpouring of a creative freedom that rebelled against the morality of the preceding generation. Writers, artists, and critics challenged the boundaries of given understandings of sexuality, technology, and art. Known as “decadents” or “aesthetes,” many of these creative thinkers of the last two decades of the Victorian era explored homosexuality, scientific understandings of the human body, Empire and the detective form, and Gothic doublings of the self and Other. This course investigates the literary, artistic, and cultural climate that constitute “turn-of-the century” England, and examines the worlds of art, publishing, law, and literature that defined this time period.