Free University of Berlin

The firm plays a central role in contemporary capitalist societies. Firms not only shape economic outcomes, but also concentrate power and produce conflict within society. Understanding the firm, therefore, requires moving beyond a purely economic perspective to examine how firms organize power and authority within broader social and political contexts. The course uses case studies and empirical examples from the United States to assess the applicability of theoretical perspectives. The first block introduces foundational theories of the firm, emphasizing the centrality of the means of production in capitalist societies. The second block focuses on the role of workers and the organization of labor within the firm. This section covers workers’ relations with capital and output, as well as the division of labor and changes in bargaining power. The last block explores multinational corporations as central actors in globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and examines how the expansion of global value chains and accelerating technological change have increased their power and transformed their role in society.

This course is conducted as an interdisciplinary seminar, with student-led discussions on major works in the emerging field of Existential Risk Studies. Students survey the literature in roughly chronological order, discuss several works of dystopian fiction and film, and delve into the political and ethical debates surrounding the threat of human extinction. Topics include contemporary debates in philosophical ethics, science, asteroids, and politics, concerned primarily with anthropogenic threats such as nuclear disaster, climate change, and misaligned Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).  

Social media plays a major role in how people express themselves, interact with others, and construct their identities. It both reflects and shapes social interactions and norms, particularly those related to gender. In communication science, social media content represents an important research object for examining gender-related discourse. In this seminar, students learn how to conduct the six-step thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of YouTube comments in order to address gender-related research questions. They learn the full research process, from organizing and preparing the data to initial exploration and in-depth analysis. Students are introduced to qualitative data analysis software (e.g., MAXQDA) and gain hands-on experience in coding, categorization, and the systematic interpretation of the data. By the end of the seminar, students are able to conduct a thematic analysis independently to answer their own research questions.

Contradicting is a fundamental practice in journalism’s construction of reality. This ranges from showing “both sides of a story” to making contradictions themselves newsworthy. Yet, in a media environment where multiple competing claims exist side-by-side, how do journalists adjudicate between contradicting statements and sources? And how does journalism itself become an object of contradiction in this environment? This seminar tackles these questions by combining praxeological theoretical approaches with research on journalistic epistemology. First, the course discusses the key concepts and theories of contradicting as they relate to journalism as an institution of knowledge production. Building on this theoretical foundation, students analyze how journalism navigates contradiction in two ways: first, how it manages contradicting claims in its coverage, and second, how it responds when its reporting is contradicted by outside sources. For this, students analyze self-selected examples of journalistic reporting to apply these theoretical frameworks to concrete examples. By the end of the seminar, students are able to formulate a concise research question and critically analyze journalistic content.

In this course, students explore the questions of do conventional rules, rules that exist as a matter of social fact, truly bind people? People often feel as if they do. But how could it be that whether one is obligated to, say, greet one's neighbors, depends on whether one lives in a small town or a big city? It also does not seem as if one's obligations are dependent on contingent facts about where one resides. This course explores both attempts to reduce these obligations to general moral obligations and attempts to argue that some obligations are genuinely social.

In this class on the B2/C1 level according to CEFR, students learn to understand complex texts on subject matters, and to sort statements and findings into new categories. They work to identify the position and opinion of an author, and to summarize and weigh information from different sources. Students practice to express themselves clearly and confidently in written and spoken form on relevant topics, and to contribute to university discussions. This course has a specific focus, such as academic communication, or working and producing academic texts.

From the intensifying assaults on abortion rights in the United States to the targeting of LGBTQIA+ communities and the racialized policing of bodies, gender and sexuality remain key sites of cultural and political struggle. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and amid escalating far-right attacks on healthcare access, trans rights, and gender-affirming care, the lecture series “Gender, Sexuality, Power: Critical Perspectives on the US and Beyond” examines how gendered and sexual norms continue to shape public life. The series brings together researchers from the Free University Berlin and international colleagues whose work advances current debates in Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies. Approaching the topic from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, the speakers trace how power has been organized through gender and sexuality, both historically and in the current political moment.

The course covers a selection from the following topics: homotopy sets, homotopy groups and the Hurewicz theorem, fibrations and cofibrations, generalized homology theories and spectra, bundles and classifying spaces, characteristic classes, low-dimensional topology, geometric group theory, spectral sequences and cohomology operations. The methods presented are illustrated by applications to various classical problems in algebraic topology.

Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 Toward a Feminist Theory of the State remains one of the most influential works in feminist theory and is the most comprehensive statement of radical feminist philosophy. This class is dedicated to a semester-long close reading of the text. Central to MacKinnon’s thought is the attempt to develop an autonomous theory of sexist domination on the basis of sexuality. Students critically reconstruct this theory and examine its relationship to theories of class and gender based domination, as well as its opposition to liberalism and liberal feminism. Over the course of the semester, the book guides the class through many of the core themes of feminist philosophizing, including the social ontology of gender, feminist epistemology, sexual and reproductive freedom, the role of sexuality and pornography in patriarchal domination, and feminism’s relationship to law and the state. MacKinnon’s thoroughgoing social constructionism with regards to gender and sexuality is of particular interest, as in recent years radical feminism has sometimes been invoked to justify trans exclusionary views. MacKinnon herself has since firmly rejected this use of radical feminism. Accordingly, the class, too, examines her rejection of biologicist models of gender and the queer potentialities of radical feminism. Finally, the class discusses how radical feminism in general, and MacKinnon’s thought in particular, currently experiences a revival in feminist discussions about sexual freedom and the politics of desire.

The climate crisis triggers intense emotional reactions in many people – from fear and grief to guilt, anger, or hopelessness. But how are these “climate emotions” to be understood philosophically? Are they rationally justified or irrational overreactions? Can emotions reveal moral truths about climate change to us? And what role do they play in our moral action? This seminar examines these questions and climate emotions from various philosophical perspectives. Students engage with classical and contemporary theories of emotions, explore the epistemic and moral significance of emotions like eco-anxiety or climate guilt, and ask about the connection between emotional involvement and moral responsibility. The seminar combines systematic philosophical reflection with the analysis of concrete phenomena and invites critical questioning of both classical philosophical categories and one’s own emotional relationship to the environmental crisis.