Germany

This lecture series seeks to analyze North America via the analytical lens of movement/movements. Whether one follows cable news coverage on Latin American refugees, learns about supply chain disruptions due to COVID-lockdowns in newspapers, or follow BLM protests on social media accounts: on a daily basis people are witnessing various forms of “movement.” These range from people on the move, items being shipped to humans joining forces in order to pursue common goals. Admittedly, these are not recent phenomena. Migration, international trade, and political advocacy by social movements have been with us – and shaped our societies – for centuries. Yet, looking at those seemingly distinct events and phenomena from a multidisciplinary angle provides fruitful new insights. The lectures hence address the issue of “movement” from various theoretical and disciplinary angles. Ranging from historical accounts of the labor movement to podcasts as an “audiomovement,” this series intends to make sense of the multi-faceted nature of movement/movements.

This class is predicated on the neuropsychology of auditory phenomena. Processes of human response to aspects of daily life such as conversation and music are explored via the reading of detailed research papers and in-class discussion of relevant topics.

This course sets the basics for an understanding of multimodal communication between humans and multimodal interaction between humans and machines. The course begins with clarifying the basic principles of human-human communication and human-machine interaction. The course then describes the processes taking place in humans when perceiving auditory, visual, and tactile signals, as well as how these perceptions are integrated in order to form a multimodal perception. The signals can be generated and received by machines which are able to interact with humans in limited domains. The set-up of such machines is discussed, and limitations as well as potential solutions to overcome these limitations is explained.

Students discuss the relationship between far right politics and liberal democracy. Focusing on Europe, students examine questions such as: How do far right mobilizations reflect wider structural forms of marginalization in society? Are mainstream political actors complicit in the normalization of exclusionary populist discourse? Does structural racism and other forms of discrimination/domination provide opportunities to far right actors? At the end of the seminar, students work in groups on ideas for counter-measures and present these as a project.