Free University of Berlin

This seminar course will engage with key readings and positions in the wider field of anthropology of ethics and morality as they have been shaped and discussed within and beyond anthropology. We shall be engaged in critical readings of programmatic texts and different kinds of approaches, focusing in particularly on the readings of ethnographies (as articles, or key chapters). Readings will include work on the ‘ethnography of moralities’, and particularly approaches focusing on the workings of ethics in ordinary everyday life (e.g. Lambek, Das, Keane, Fassin), as well as the anthropology of Islam (e.g. Mahmood; Hirschkind; Marsden, Schielke), and overall conceptual approaches (e.g. Laidlaw; Faubion). We may also engage with earlier writings (to grasp the history of intellectual trajectories), and with particular writings on human sharing, suffering and persevering, trying to assess what we can gain from here. Critical readings of these approaches and their critical reception, particularly within the field of interpretive and existentialist anthropology, will guide our course discussions – which seek to address aspects of ethnographic description and critical conceptualization in a balanced manner. Thereby, we will also pursue recent questions about the integration of ethical perspectives and/or moral universes from the global South into theorizing (asking how much/ how far this may have been done); and we will consider decolonial demands for theory to work with and be built on concepts from the global South (e.g. Menon 2022). Which kind of concepts, and what kind of writers from there could enrich, enhance, or re-focus recent approaches and debates in an adequate manner? These are open questions, for critical and open-minded engagements in close readings.

In this course we want to explore together how German music changes and which historical contexts are reflected in popular music. We will look at selected artists and songs from German music history and discuss their cultural and musicological meanings. The course deals with German music history and its most formative works. The focus is on the period from 1920 to the present. The aim is to bring together historical developments with their manifestations music and to discuss which changes, especially in popular music, can be identified and analyzed musicologically. We will look at compositions, song lyrics and historical backgrounds in order to gain an understanding of the developments that led us to the forms of contemporary German music.

This seminar focuses on interpersonal attraction and close relationships. These topics, introduced in the Social Psychology lecture, are examined in more depth in this seminar and enhanced by discussions based on the students’ perspectives and experiences.

The serialization of Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860 is often regarded as the birth of a new type of fiction in Victorian England that came to dominate the literary market in the 1860s: the sensation novel. Even though recent criticism has widened the remit of the genre to include examples from earlier decades, Collins’s novel of mystery, deception and murder exerted an unprecedented cultural influence: readers (like the seasoned novelist W. M. Thackeray) are reported to have sat up all night ploughing through the pages of Collins’s doorstopper in a frenzy to find out what happened next. The novel became a singular object of consumption in other respects as well: ladies with money to spare could treat themselves to Woman-in-White fashion and Woman-in-White perfume, and music lovers could dance to Woman-in-White waltzes. Other novelists followed Collins and created ever more exciting ‘novels with a secret’, and the 1860s alone saw two further genre-shaping examples with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). This overwhelming popular success prompted conservative critics to rail against these titillating productions: the novelist Margaret Oliphant was appalled by the representation of sensation fiction’s heroines as “fleshly and unlovely”, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry L. Mansel, condemned sensation authors like Collins, Braddon and Charles Reade for offering cheap literary fare and – more dangerously – for “preaching to the nerves” of their readers. In this seminar, students will read two long sensation novels (The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret) and one shorter example taken from the genre of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) – a form that can be fruitfully traced to the sensation novels of the 1860s. We will place these novels in their rich historical and cultural contexts and engage with the immediate responses to the genre. We will study sensation fiction’s generic predecessors (such as the Gothic romance and the silver-fork-novel) and weigh its significance for modern forms like the crime novel and the psychological thriller.

This seminar examines the role of diasporas as non-state actors in the transnational realm. We will look at conceptual and theoretical approaches to diaspora policies as well as empirical cases of diaspora engagement in international policies. A special focus will be laid on postcolonial perspectives on diasporas as political agents and challenges they might pose for the study of international relations as well as for policy practices.

This course provides a broad survey of contemporary methods, approaches, and thematic concerns within the expansive and internally differentiated field of Critical Geography, emphasizing its stakes for grappling with a “long twentieth century” (in Giovanni Arrighi’s words) profoundly shaped by the rise and fall of U.S. hegemony. How might questions of space, time, and cartography need to be rethought, not only in the twilight of the historical period Henry Luce famously dubbed “the American Century,” but in light of the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the geological force of humanity threatens to unfold across a timescale that exceeds even human existence? How might a critical geographic imagination illuminate the uneven prospects and perils of this time of uncertainty and transition? In exploring such questions, we will engage Marxist, feminist, Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, posthuman, environmentalist, affective, and abolitionist geographical traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Natchee Blu Barnd, Neil Smith, Katherine McKittrick, Anna Tsing, André Mesquita, William Cronon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Lauren Berlant, among others.

More and more companies and government agencies find themselves in the press and courtrooms for data privacy and security law violations. Given the rapidly increasing technological options to collect and commercialize personal data, this area of the law is rapidly growing. This course will prepare law students for the challenges and opportunities of international data privacy law, with a particular focus on United States Federal / California privacy law and European Union / German data protection law. Objective of the lectures is to familiarize students with the typical legal problems arising from the conflicting interests in data and privacy in today's global economy and society, in particular in the areas of law enforcement, commerce, media and employment. The significance and practical relevance of domestic, international and foreign national laws is rapidly increasing for individuals, government officials, business people, attorneys, judges, and legislators around the world. We will look at how data processing and laws affect individual privacy in the various areas, including government and private surveillance, press reporting, commercial treatment of financial, health and communications information, and direct marketing. Topics covered include common law, constitutional and statutory rights and obligations regarding data privacy, data security and legal protection for databases under California, U.S. Federal, European Union, public international and other countries' laws, including, for example, the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, rules on spamming, wiretapping, homeland security surveillance, and employee monitoring.

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.