German

Modern societies are committed to the principle of collective autonomy: no longer bound to a transcendent authority, the citizens determine the political structure of their coexistence. But how is this subject of democracy to be understood? Who belongs to the people? Who does not? And on what ontological basis is there something like the "unity of a nation"? The seminar discusses these questions in dealing with the classics as well as newer texts in the field of democratic theory and history of ideas. In the process, students should pay attention to current challenges: how can we relate collective autonomy, understood as the sovereignty of a concrete people, to universal human rights? Are there any conceptions of “the people” that do not exclude “the foreigner”?

This course enables students to approximate their competence in speaking and writing German as well as their vocabulary to the native-speaker level. This includes understanding connotations and idioms as well as using stylistically and situationally appropriate forms of communication. Special attention is given to the improvement of communicative skills in academic contexts. Students are able to understand lectures and presentations and to participate in academic discussions. Sophisticated authentic texts help students gain relevant information about the culture, politics, and history of Germany and other German-speaking countries. At the end of this course, students have acquired effective reading and listening strategies concerning various literary genres and media and work with larger excerpts of German literature. In-class discussions are based on literary and non-literary texts, enabling students to exchange information, ideas, and opinions on an academic level. The final project includes an academic paper, a presentation, and the direction of the ensuing discussion in class. Textbook: MITTELPUNKT C1 (“Lehrbuch” and “Arbeitsbuch”) by Albert Daniels et al. In this course, instruction is based primarily on authentic/original texts from print media, literature and specialist literature.

More than half of the world's population lives in cities and far more people depend on cities for their subsistence. The urban world has long stimulated sociologists and scholars from related disciplines to think about a large number of issues that constitute urban life or are constituted by urban settings. Some of these issues are typically urban, some of them merely highly visible in exaggerated forms in the city. Early sociologists saw cities as the ultimate expression of the anonymous industrial society where Gemeinschaft lost its meaning. So from the start, urban sociologists have linked capitalism, urbanism and modernity.

This course covers the following topics: the historical emergence of the landscape to its present appearance through the interaction of natural and anthropogenic factors; the impact of current land use and social processes on current and future landscape development and its impact on the natural balance and society; an overview of the broad semantic field of the terms landscape, cultural landscape, and natural landscape as well as their use in social and professional discussion. In general, the possibilities of environmental and landscape planning instruments are addressed, to react to the mentioned processes and to actively influence landscape development. Students learn about current challenges that play a key role in the further development of environmental planning as well as in the environmental assessment of projects and plans on the basis of current research approaches and results. The course content includes: the transformation of classical constellations in the human-environment-relationship and increasing also "green" sustainability competitions; important theoretical references without which the classification of good professional practice is hardly possible; how the effectiveness of environmental planning and assessment can be measured, how relevant methodological approaches can be designed (including strengths and weaknesses analyzes) and how the expected effects can be tracked; which manipulations can also be subject to environmental planning and testing and with which quality assurance approaches can be countered; the field of tension between established forms of participation to increased direct democratic participation and how this can be fruitfully taken up in planning and decision-making processes; the central issue of freedom of information and access to environmental data in their dimensions and practical implications, including the more difficult.

The search for the origins of the modern world leads back to the nineteenth century. In addition, there are many parallels to the nineteenth century in the world of the twenty-first century. The lectures, planned thematically rather than strictly chronologically, center around the role of revolutions and emotions, monarchy and liberalism, religion and assassinations, gender relations and global historical contexts. Lines of continuity make clear that many phenomena (such as democracy or emancipation) of today are best understood if they are traced back to the nineteenth century. The course seeks to make this complex, evocative and contradictory century more familiar to all those interested, by constantly seeking out the connections and contrasts to the present.

Within the framework of an academic conception of time, progression, and development, this course provides an overview of the development of various theories of language change and the history of language. Particular attention is paid to locating each major theory within shifting attitudes and focuses in the field of historical linguistics, as well as analyzing and categorizing each theory as it pertains to the methodologies used, the structural approaches, and philosophical conceptions of language.

Geography is a space-based science, whose overriding cognitive interest is dedicated to the collection, analysis, and explanation of complex spatial relationships that relate to the natural and anthropogenically created environment. Since the 1960s, leisure and tourism research has become an important sub-discipline of geography. Tourism geography deals with spatial structures of tourism in destinations of the supply and demand side on different geographic scale levels as well as with tourist-related processes and functions that produce them. In addition to phenomena of tourism, the course also covers leisure activities. The course deals with theories and concepts of tourism organization and development. It explains and analyzes the fundamentals as well as current trends, products, and problems in the tourism sector. The main focus is on three groups of topics: conceptual themes (e.g. tourism as a system, community based tourism, sustainable tourism, tourism and climate change, moral/cultural/ethical); topics that analyze relationships between globalization and tourism (e.g. regionalization trends, tourism and security); topics that explain various trends in tourism (e.g. demographic change, lifestyle tourism, dark tourism, world heritage tourism).