Humboldt University Berlin

What are the methodological implications of queer theory? What makes an article or a research project 'queer’ or ‘feminist’? This course provides students with a practical exploration of queer theory and feminist perspectives in research methods. We examine how societal norms and power structures impact research, including research design, data collection methods (such as surveys, interviews, and observations), data analysis techniques, and ethical considerations in research. We explore a range of concepts, such as intersectionality, homonormativity, and anti- and inter-disciplinarity, and discuss how they could shape and inform sociology and research. After covering these key concepts, we focus on ethnographic methods and address the ethics of conducting research with vulnerable groups, including the importance of consent, confidentiality, and reflexivity. Throughout the course, students develop critical thinking skills, engage in discussions and debates, and conduct research tasks under the supervision of the instructor. The course hosts guest speakers who are experienced in gender and sexuality research in Germany.  

Archives do not just preserve the past, they allow for new questions about the present to emerge. They contain remnants of specific places and times, and they are the ground for new relations to spring and new connections to be made. In this seminar, we ask: Why archiving and for whom? How do archives shape societies and constitute knowledge? We will engage with “awkward archives” in Berlin – archives posing problems and causing disquieting frictions. In each of the seminar’s modules, we address a particular modern ideology through a particular Berlin archive, including the following: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Colonial Neighbours Archive of SAVVY Contemporary, Naomi Wilzig Art Collection, Museum of Natural History, a database of German colonial punitive expeditions, and the Hahne-Niehoff Archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 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.

The labor migration from Southern European countries to Germany, which started in the mid-1950s, had an important socio-economic and socio-cultural impact on the countries’ societies and influenced their film culture. German filmmakers began to feature the difficult lives of ‘guestworkers’ in films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969). In the 1990s, second - and third – generation Turkish-German directors such as Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan marked the end of the so-called ‘guestworker cinema’ and started to create a transnational and diasporic cinema featuring a culturally hybrid Germany. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been one of the favorite settings in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin’s first ‘guestworker ghettos’ to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures. This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. In the first part of the course, we will explore how migration, immigrants, and diasporas are represented in cinema. The second part of the course then gets more specific and we approach the representation of Berlin in these migration movies.

The subtitle to Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death captures both the tone and the overall project for this seminar as: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. From this point of orientation, an exploration of the Kierkegaardian oeuvre will unfold that focuses on what he believes to be the earnest need of attending to the dual existential tasks of self-examination and the strengthening of the inner being through spiritual upbuilding. In “building up” from his spiritual diagnosis on the various forms of existential despair – and by way of his cycle of discourses on the “lilies of the field and the birds of the air” – this course will ultimately arrive at Kierkegaard’s proclamation of “how glorious it is to be a human being.”

Berlin is called the most sexually open capital of Europe today. In clubs, bars, workshops and festivals, a broad range and mix of sexual orientations are created in different and also crossing scenes and sex-positive spaces. Homosexual, transgender, tantric, polyamory, sex-positive and BDSM-oriented persons meet and celebrate and create new sexual techniques and lifestyles in so-called sex-positive spaces. The government of Berlin has already recognized the economic dimension of the liberal sexual culture. What does liberal sexual culture exactly mean? What kind of historical roots are important to analyze, e.g. the anonymity of the big city, the homosexual movement and the golden twenties? What was and is avant-garde and when does it turn into commerce? Four sub-items will structure the seminar: Sex-positive spaces, LGBTQI+ and Gender-Fluidity, Kink and Tantra, alternative porn films and literature. Excursions and interviews with experts will be part of the seminar. We will work with texts and films, and students will develop their own research question and project.

This course deals with syntactic change in the history of English (in comparison, in particular, with German and French). Phenomena to be discussed will include the loss of inflectional morphology, the loss of free word order, the change from OV to VO word order, the loss of verb movement and the development of do-support, and the shift from a general verb-second language to a residual verb-second language.

This course examines the rise of humanitarianism as a dominant way in which both powerful and weak actors conceptualize and respond to a range of social problems and processes, such as political conflict, emancipation, poverty, and migration. This is core terrain for anthropology, because the figure of the human lies at the center of humanitarian discourses and forms of action.  In this course we historicize humanitarianism and ethnographically investigate the possibilities and limits of humanitarian frameworks and action as ways of confronting the challenges that face our world.

The course focuses on mapping and listening to acoustic territories in Berlin. It allows academic research for exploring and understanding the city by sensing aural environments. Structured in theory and practice, the central questions of the course are: Which sonic elements can we encounter in navigating historical and contemporary maps? Which methods of research and practices exist in the act of mapping with sound? How can we generate sound maps? From a transdisciplinary approach, the course reflects the city‘s cultural, social, and political dimensions through analyzing and creating maps by listening. It aims to allow students to explore auditory territories, gain strength, and develop knowledge and individual perspective on cultural studies and urban studies. The mapping methods are practice-based on field recordings, soundwalk, and sound diagramming exercises. The academic readings and discussions introduce the student to the field of sound studies.

This course introduces Bachelor students to the evolution of African literary canons from the late 19th to the 21st centuries. Emphasis is laid on acquainting students to central debates that have preoccupied African writers and how these debates have unmasked the complexities of African societies before and at the dawn of colonialization. In exploring the texts, developing basic skills such as reading, interpreting, analyzing, and critiquing novels, short stories, drama, and poetry is a major objective of the seminar. Further, debates regarding the historical and cultural contexts of the literary productions shall be engaged in the course of the seminar. To have a better appreciation of African literatures, texts, and critical discourse from the African Diaspora shall be part of the literary corpus. The course also discusses major theoretical approaches to literature such as, structuralism, narratology, new historicism, and African feminist critical perspectives. The postcolonial theory is, however, a major critical discourse in the seminar.