Humboldt University Berlin

Ignorance looms large in our current political discourses. From the ignorance of epidemiological facts shaping pandemic policy and public compliance or willful ignorance of climate change which continues to perpetuate the reliance of fossil fuels to naive ignorance of epistemic exclusions that to reproduce marginalizations on the basis of race and gender, ignorance takes center stage in key public debates. With so much putative ignorance around, one might get the impression that ignorance more than knowledge gives shape to contemporary political cultures. Yet, with a more careful eye towards how ignorance functions, it is clear that we are not dealing with a singular idea. Rather, there are multiple discourses around, definitions of, and practices built on ignorance. This seminar distinguishes between two particular modalities of ignorance: positive and negative ignorance. That is, 1) ignorance defined through the absence of specific forms of knowledge, and 2) ignorance defined in terms of someone’s positionality in and situated knowledge of a complex system. The course traces the first modality of ignorance via its deployment in current political debates such as climate change, racial marginalization, and intersectional feminism. In these discourses, ignorance functions as a foundation for critique, as a moral imperative, and even as basis for political activism. The second modality of ignorance, perhaps better understood in terms of aporia, can be found today in a variety of positive programs for dealing with complexity (aporetics) such as administrative decentralization, neoliberal economics, and even public sector design. The course introduces some of the epistemological and practical preconditions for such aporetic governance. Finally, the seminar asks what forms of research, ethical conduct, and political practices may be mobilized in response to or built upon ignorance and aporia.

This course takes a closer look at some of the historical developments that have shaped North American literature and culture, and have been shaped by them in turn. The course also addresses the question of how an understanding of history is informed by one's standpoint as well as social hierarchies more generally. Some of the topics the course discusses include the ongoing significance of settler colonialism; slavery and its afterlives; the American Revolution; the constitution of the United States; abolitionism; feminism; U.S. imperialism; the Civil Rights Movement, Indigenous rights movements; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the historical roots of the Trump presidency. The course foregrounds an understanding of ongoing historiographical debates and methods of interpreting primary sources.

Lower intermediate level B1 allows students to progress from the elementary command of language of the basic course level to the independent language use of level B2. Students develop reading, listening, writing and speaking skills in these courses with the purpose of improving the understanding of the lectures, seminars, and exercises in their own field of study in Germany. This helps students carry out assignments in their own subject successfully. The B1 level is split into two consecutive courses, the B1.1 course covers the first half of the level and the B1.2 course covers the second half of the level.

How has over 300 years of colonialism left its mark on Britain? Whilst some scholars assert that the British were indifferent to empire – that empire was acquired in a “fit of absence of mind” (JR Seeley) – others point to the many traces of empire left in British society and culture to this day. This course analyses these effects and legacies by focusing on the artefacts of empire. Empire seems to be everywhere across British history: in consumer goods and fashion, the built environment and the domestic interior, advertising, visual media and museums, as well as institutions such as the monarchy and the BBC. But is this culture of empire, or simply a random mix of influences from around the world? To what extent is this material culture mediated by narratives of colonial power and racial superiority? This course considers the conquest of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries and the onset of slavery in the Caribbean, then looks at the colonization of North America and parts of the Pacific, before moving through the British Raj in India and onto the colonial conquests of Africa and the Middle East, finishing with the end of empire after 1945 and the imperial nostalgia that feeds Brexit. Throughout the course the focus is on cultural objects, their context, and their interpretation.

At the center of this course is film as historical sources. The course presents and applies the methods for analyzing audiovisual sources, and it examines how historical events were depicted. Using the example of the history of National Socialism, students examine both documentaries and feature films with regard to their handling of National Socialism and its (audio) visual legacy.