Germany

Short stories are sometimes revised into longer texts. This can happen for various reasons, ranging from aesthetic refinements to commercial considerations (for instance, the 1950s trend to rework multiple science fiction short stories published in genre magazines into “fix-ups” so as to capitalize on an expanding book market). This seminar will address a selection of American short stories from the second half of the 20th century and their subsequent adaptation, expansion, or incorporation into novel or novel-like formats. Analyzing the individual texts and the changes they undergo from one version to the next will enable us to consider issues of form, genre, narrative, and intertextuality. Texts will include The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950); Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953); Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966); Tracks (Louise Erdrich, 1988), and Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1995/2017).

Throughout history, people have always worked, not only to survive, but also to create material and social conditions that allow them to recover and reproduce. However, Karl Marx (2004 [1867]) has shown that the way people work is shaped by the unequal relations of production between those who must labor to survive and those who can enjoy the labor of others. But how is work different from labor and other activities, as another German philosopher, Hannah Arendt (2013 [1958]), once noted? And what role does work play, for example, for different societies where the distinction between work and non-work is not so clear (Spittler, 2015)? This is the task of this seminar, which aims to introduce classical (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]; Godelier and Ignatieff 1980) and contemporary anthropological and non-anthropological studies of labor that incorporate a variety of issues such as gender (Narotzky, 2014), "race” (Stuesse, 2016), postcoloniality (Appel, 2019), and intimacy (Schields, 2023). The seminar aims not only to deconstruct "Western" notions of work and labor, but also to explore how these notions cannot be reduced to a physical activity, usually performed in an industrial or agricultural setting. Care work and domestic work (Amrith, 2017; Parreñas, 2011) are equally important forms of labor that have often been neglected in social theory. Moreover, with the development of new digital technologies and infrastructures, this seminar will also address new forms of digital (Gregg, 2011), post-Fordist (Hardt and Negri, 2000), affective (Muehlebach, 2011), and platform (Jones, 2021) forms of labor. It will offer methodological tools to examine the meaning of labor in people's everyday lives and its various entanglements with their environment, as well as to understand the emerging labor struggles that address past and contemporary exploitation and discrimination (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2008).

This course introduces the various theoretical traditions and research fields of feminist political science. First, the heterogeneous field of feminist theories is presented (liberal feminism, radical feminism, socialist feminism through to intersectional, queer feminist and postcolonial approaches). Selected concepts and subdisciplines of political science are then discussed from a feminist perspective. Using the example of selected research fields, the previously introduced theoretical perspectives are subjected to critical reflection.

In this project-based workshop course, the background and effects of topics related to environmental justice such as environmental racism, gender issues, disadvantage due to physical impairments and social differences in the city are examined. The discussion-based debate during the event is to be expanded by a media project in which a selected topic is creatively addressed.

You will not only learn about content expertise, but also different methods and the use of different media. This includes:

• Expertise in the meaning of environmental justice and the background and consequences of the prevailing discrepancies
• Expertise in the ecological foundations and ecosystem services in the city
• Different perspectives from different disciplines by working on topic-specific literature
• An ability to reflect on urban infrastructure through a combination of ecological and social expertise regarding environmental justice
• Discussion skills as well as presentation and moderation skills in interdisciplinary exchanges with other participants from different study programs
• Creative process of developing and implementing a media project from finding a topic to presenting the final result
• Scientific and fact-based development of a creative media project and formulation of socio-political demands and solution approaches in a project report
• Be able to apply learned specialist knowledge and critical considerations regarding environmental justice not only to urban areas, but also to transfer them to everyday living environments

Ever since Berlin became the capital of the first German nation state in 1871, it has attracted the attention of German as well as international writers and has featured prominently in fictional as well as non-fictional texts. Observers and visitors from other parts of Germany and from abroad have described and commented on Berlin as the German capital and its political relevance for the nation as a whole, but also as a place that they saw as quite different and disconnected from the rest of Germany. Opinions on the city have always been divided: At different historical junctures and from varied angles, authors have looked at the city with awe and admiration, or with skepticism and bewilderment, highlighting its liberty, modernity, and vibrancy on the one hand, or its ugliness, authoritarianism, or chaos on the other hand. In this course, we will read short literary and journalistic texts by American, English, Swiss, Austrian, Dutch, Russian, and German authors, written between 1870 and 2023 (some originally published in English, some translated into English), describing and commenting on Berlin in imperial Germany, during the Weimar years, in National Socialism, in divided Germany, and since unification. Studying these texts, students will engage with relevant aspects of Berlin history, society, and culture, while reflecting upon the challenges faced with when reading texts from different periods and referring to historical events and figures. 
 

Berlin is a city layered with history: a palimpsest of ruins, reconstructions, and marks of the past, even of futuristic imaginations that are now history. These layers can seem romantic and invited the modern flaneur to imagine Berlin alongside other cosmopolitan and urban projection screens. But the multi-layered city also implies a casting aside, a covering up, digging up, and hiding. The ruins of Berlin tell a story of an injured city, whose wounds are variously exposed to lay the finger on the wound of historical reckoning, or plastered in a vain attempt to heal, or return to a state prior to injury, as artist Kader Attia put it about the city of Berlin. The city as a multi-layered palimpsest thus reveals psycho-affective and political strategies of future-making and heritage-mobilization. In this seminar, we trace and dig into the difficult, awkward, eerie, uncomfortable heritage of the city and speak to stakeholders involved in its transition: curators, activists, artists, citizens. The seminar will produce a modular book-case, which can be unpacked into a mini-exhibition, featuring students’ own profiled “difficult heritage” sites of the city with a brief problematization. These loose pages will be put together in a box to create a mobile, modular book-exhibition. Among the sites that may be visited are: Zionskirche, Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, Stasi Archive and headquarters, Humboldt Forum, Holocaust Memorial and the Sinti Roma Memorial, exhibition "looking back” at Museen Treptow-Köpenick. The seminar focuses on field visits with methodological exercises, which introduce students to diverse ways of doing research that they will build on to articulate their own research outcomes in a multimodal portfolio.

In this course we will examine how existing network layers are protected, how to verify the security of a protocol, and how to improve the dependability. We will specifically learn about the common vulnerabilities in the current Internet, such as botnets, viruses, denial-of-service attacks, etc., and design principles to overcome these issues in the future. We will also learn about the security benefits and challenges of network virtualization technologies, about air-gapping, as well as automated network testing methods and fuzzing.

In contemporary building design, sustainability has emerged as a fundamental element. With the growing urgency of climate change and limited resources, the imperative to create buildings that prioritize minimal environmental impact and maximize human comfort has also intensified. Sustainable building can make a crucial contribution in this regard. But what defines a sustainable building and how can a building be designed in a sustainable way? The course provides both theoretical and practical learning materials to address this question. Participants will acquire general knowledge and skills in the fields of sustainable building and building performance simulations. They will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the interactions between various factors when designing or conducting evidence-based analyses of a building's sustainability. Key topics will include: principles of sustainable buildings, future trends, chances, and aims of sustainability by buildings, functional and aesthetical quality of buildings, systems for environment friendly energy supply, thermal comfort and indoor air quality, fundamentals of building performance simulations, and simulative analysis of buildings. The first two weeks cover the theoretical segment and the subsequent two weeks consist of collaborative work on small-scale projects with supervision from lecturers. Furthermore, there will be three excursions in Berlin, where attendees will experience real-life examples of sustainable buildings and plants.

It has been one of the fundamental assumptions of the philosophy of mind that there is a basic similarity between information processing in computers and in human cognition. This similarity is thought to allow to use one type of information processing as a model for the other type: Human cognition is thought to provide standards for the ascription of consciousness to artificial systems in the Turing Test, conversely, Deep Neural Networks are thought to provide insight into information processing in human cognition. Recent developments in scientific research and in computer technology, however, have cast severe doubt on this assumption. After a quick look back at the original assumption, the seminar will discuss more recent papers discussing both the use of artificial systems as models for human cognition and the use of human cognition for the attribution of higher cognitive abilities to artificial systems like large language models. The seminar aims at specifying criteria that can help to distinguish between valid and invalid inferences from one system to the other.

Since at least the 1980s gender has been considered a "useful category of historical research." In this class we will use this lens in order to understand major events and developments in U.S. history. By focusing on gender as a relation of power in social contexts we will explore changing images of masculinity and femininity as well as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. In addition to that, we will also discuss intersectional connections to other categories of identification (e.g. race and class).