Humboldt University Berlin

The course approaches legacy of the settler colonialism in Germany and the U.S., and it critically explores the forms it takes such as hobbyism, Indianthusiasm, Indigenous identity theft, cultural appropriation, and environmental racism. It also provides space for Indigenous voices regarding the issues, thus bringing the decolonizing approach into practice. Participants are expected to create their own research projects approaching the central research question from more specific dimensions (historical, cultural studies, and decolonial perspectives).

This seminar invites participants into a process for deepening their/our understanding of key concepts and practices in the digital mediation of culture, in the interests of a greater shared awareness and agency within the overwhelming, epochal processes referred to generally as digitalization. In lectures, readings, site visits, and group discussion, the course offers useful theoretical bases for approaching digitalization as a/the process at work on culture today. It practices critical skills for exploring and evaluating digital mediations of cultural heritage (both on-site at Berlin museums and online). And it empowers scholars/thinkers/artists/designers as producers of digital culture mediations with practical tools for developing and pitching effective concepts. The course takes Berlin’s cultural landscape as a field and the newly completed Humboldt Forum as a special object of study, drawing on the teacher’s professional experiences from 2015 to 2020 in the development and implementation of the Humboldt Forum digital concept for offer on-site and behind-the-scenes perspectives. The course invites participants to identify the issues, questions, or processes in culture that most concern them and support them in formalizing and refining constructive proposals of their own.

This course focuses on the therapeutic relationship between physician/surgeon and patient, at a time of major socio-economic change, political turmoil, and advent of the clinical gaze in medicine. After a first phase of contextualization, the course is organized in thematic subsections, in which text pertaining to these questions as well as some historical sources is read and discussed. The course examines the economic dimension of medicine and the impact it has on patients’ agency in the therapeutic relationship in a context of competition between surgeons, physicians, and other health practitioners. The course also focuses on the question of pain management and the sensory experience of surgery before the advent of anesthesia. Finally, there is a focus on the doctor/patient relationship in institutional contexts such as hospitals and prisons, with a deeper look at the case of military surgery. The colonial context, while not at the heart of this course, is also included. The question of power dynamics between physician and patients, including questions of in particular of class, race, and gender are present throughout.