Czech Republic

This course introduces the concept of strategic management through case analyses, and considers the basic direction and goals of an organization, the environment (social, political, technological, economic, and global factors), industry and market structure, and organizational strengths and weaknesses. The course focuses on the strategic management of the company in a dynamic global context. Strategic Management combines the knowledge and skills of the highest levels of management and corporate management in the long term and is considered the key to success. The study of the external environment and internal resources and capabilities of the company, in order to guide strategic decisions, is addressed. The course is based on readings and case studies of companies around the world, with special attention to regional and national contexts.

This course provides an overview of the dynamics of the global financial and international monetary systems. It develops knowledge of the fundamental concepts needed to understand foreign direct investment, financial flows, international trade, and investment deals. As political risk and economic exposure to global events have become more immediate, special attention is given to the 2007-2012 world banking crisis, the role of central banks in the stabilization of national economies, national debts, and the specific economic challenges to which individual countries have been exposed in varying ways. Alternative views and policy measures to help struggling economies overcome the economic and financial crisis like contracting (or expanding) government spending are assessed and critically analyzed.

Tracing the history of beer from China in 7000 BCE, through to the impact of U.S. federal law and European Union regulations, this course explores the determinants and drivers of the economics of beer. This course includes an examination of the labor market and brewing, technology and innovation, national beer market trends, media and marketing of beer, new and emerging beer markets, cultural and political factors impacting the beer market, and the decline and rise of local, import, and craft beers.

This course awakens for the active spectator, in terms of aesthetics, cultural capital, and politics, new utopian ways of being, dreaming, interpreting, looking, and thinking as so many forms of “labor” and of “movement”. Combining these promotes an ecology of dialectical questioning and thinking about new, utopian post-capitalist forms of beauty, equality, and freedom for the twenty-first century. These movement and labor forms are dialectically subject within the space of the cinematic frame and institution to both regressive-capitalist and progressive-emancipatory-post-capitalist forms, in relation to the world system, of affective, cognitive and monetary circulation. The seminar thus draws on and explores egalitarian and novel non-hegemonic ways of engaging gestures, ideas, images, and scenes in films from a range of postmodernist/postwar global films and world-auteurs: Chantal Akerman (Belgium), Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany), Terrence Malick (USA), Alain Resnais (France), Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR), Agnès Varda (France), and Orson Welles (USA). Cinema as the art of forms of movement thus is evaluated anew. Attention is given to those cinematic moments and scenes that teach and that train us in new non-dominatory and emancipated viewing strategies of movement and circulation as so many utopian forms of thinking, looking, and individual/collective being. In so doing, it considers arts and forms of movement and circulation as not only subject to capitalist commodification, but also as modes of active engagement, interpretation, and thinking that take place precisely in a shared space for post-capitalist common content, creation, and thought in post-capitalist and emancipated utopian forms of circulation. The role of cinematic silence and of the unconscious in film culture is also given critical coverage.

The course introduces a special segment of popular culture in a historical context: the impact of the Cold War on science fiction film. It also considers how, as media technology developed between 1945-1990, nuclear threat, the arms race, and space race also inspired film and television directors to tell stories about a potential future. The course covers great movies born inside the Western and Eastern block, and discusses the different periods of Cold War (Thaw, Détente, etc.) thematized science fiction.

This course introduces and discusses historical developments and theoretical reflections of interactive media and looks at important authors, texts, and arguments. It explores various perspectives to analyze interactive media and uses these perspectives to illuminate selected cases. Topics include technological determinism; a Marxist base for digital superstructure; digital economy; history of the internet revisited; cyborgs and cybercommunities; cyberpower; digital texts, digital minds; artificial worlds, cyber bodies, and digital self; and alternatives to the West.

Through the use of a wide range of clips and relevant texts, this course looks at two kinds of propaganda in films, the overt and the covert, and the different categories within each type. The course makes a distinction between a the propaganda film that does not disguise its intentions to influence and even to convert audiences; and those films that have an ideology embedded in them, be it a western, thriller, comedy, or melodrama. The course is mainly structured chronologically and takes a contextual and intertextual approach to the subject while seeking out the specificity of cinema. It is supplemented and illustrated by the use of clips from films and one or two complete feature films, to which historical and critical analyses are applied to view films from different perspectives. In other words, the course explores how to "read" films.