Germany

What does it mean to live in a surveillance society? How does the digital age challenge questions regarding privacy, individuality, and freedom? When does surveillance as care tip over into surveillance as control? And how does the Stasi system of vigilance prefigure contemporary surveillance culture? This course on the one hand examines the impact of surveillance on society by looking at the multifaceted ways technologies, societies, and the arts interact; and on the other hand, reflects on surveillance in a totalitarian context while comparing observation techniques in the GDR with contemporary surveillance methods. The course also explores how surveillance is represented in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. The course maps out important themes with regards to surveillance and its repercussions (e.g., visibility, identity, privacy, and control). The course provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of surveillance and covers the latest research in the following major areas: 1. Relationship between surveillance, power, and social control; 2. Histories of Surveillance: GDR and the Stasi (especially in the context of Berlin) 3. The concept of privacy; 4. Surveillance in the arts and popular culture.

This course covers the basics of mathematical and logical foundations of theoretical computer science and the distinction between syntax and semantics. Students acquire the ability of structured reasoning in the sense of carrying out simple mathematical proofs, and they are able to apply simple abstraction techniques to switch between propositions at different levels of abstraction. They master the treatment of formal languages with their counterparts of grammars, finite automata, and push-down automata. Course topics include sets, logical propositions, proof notation, and proof techniques; relations, orders, maps, equivalences, quotients, and cardinality; words, languages, and expressions; Chomsky-hierarchy, grammars, and syntax trees; automata, push-down automata, and pumping lemma; and non-determinism.

This course introduces the subfield of urban anthropology through the lens of politics, protest, and collective action that claims a right to the city. It explores how urban life is the setting and substance for the production of political agency, how the city is a medium of political communication, and thus how it constitutes a repository of dynamic but unstable political possibilities. The course takes a performative approach to city-making, in which the urban—what it means, what it is—is continually brought into being through the actions and arguments of its denizens, from Ultra football fans and disenfranchised workers to favela dwellers and guerilla artists. In particular, the course explores how the urban sensorium (the sounds, smells, and sights of the city) is a site of social and political intervention.