Anthropology

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).

Access to modern energy is seen as fundamental to reducing poverty, and improving education, livelihoods and health across the global south. Yet in the context of climate change and the UN's sustainable development goals the question of what kind of energy is appropriate for whom has become more important than ever. Meanwhile, the quest for new reserves of fossil fuels and attempts to increase the use of alternative energy is transforming relationships between the global south and the global north.
This course approaches the study of energy, fuel and electricity in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the Pacific as the study of social, cultural and political change. We will explore both the role of energy in post-colonial projects of nationalist modernization and the place of energy in contemporary projects of socio-economic development. Students explore the social and cultural politics of oil, coal, hydroelectricity, wind, and solar. And they shift focus between big infrastructure projects, like dams and coal plants, designed to generate electricity for people living on the grid to small, decentralized infrastructures projects designed for those living off the grid.

Modern nation-states rely on borders to govern mobility as “migration.” In the context of globalization, migration governance and the public debates and societal contestations around it have become increasingly salient. This interdisciplinary course addresses different phenomena of migration and borders, paying attention to the historical contexts and the complex and contested nature of migration governance. Drawing on social, legal, cultural, historical, and political perspectives, and engaging grassroots movements and audio-visual works, the course focuses on European and German policies, institutions, practices, and debates over migration and borders. Also the Berlin level is discussed, particularly by guests and in relation to local contestations. The course takes distance from the nation-state and borders as normative frames, introducing critiques of methodological nationalism and critical perspectives emerging from (everyday) practices of migration and antiracist movements. Borders are explored as complex, contested practices / relations at the intersection of race, law, gender, control of labor, international relations, and other factors, creating (global) social hierarchies and unequal access to mobility and other rights / resources.

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 examines the Caribbean, with specific attention to the historical, environmental, socio-cultural features of modern existence that have come to constitute Caribbean experience. Special attention is given to moving beyond a linguistically singular and myopic vision of the Caribbean, to one that emphasizes its complexities and contradictions through a comparative lens. While it explores the various routes of cultural formation, it also explores the social institutions that shaped the region and the processes of socialization and indigenization that took root.

Regarding transnational migration, the EU promotes a political reasoning between processes of consolidation and necessary conflict, between sovereignty and shared responsibility, between the right to define and delimit and the duty to negotiate. As the visibility of migration increases in various ways, migrants are often represented and imagined as a homogenous mass of “the other." This leads to a problematic understanding of migration as something to be controlled and governed from a top-down perspective alone. But the respective processes of negotiation on migration policy, within and across the outer borders of the Union, take place not only between the official institutions of nation-states, but on all scales of European populations. They also take place from a bottom-up perspective in the centers and at the margins of societies alike. This course departs from concepts of the anthropology of the state and of migration and students first gain an overview of EU-level migration polity. Diving deeper down we will start to change perspective: How do local activists develop and implement their own ways of welcoming migrants? Where do migrants work and how are they represented in trade unions? Finally, focusing on the history of migrant struggles in Berlin, the course encounters migrants’ viewpoints, which reach beyond the usual framings of ‘the poor migrant’ as ‘passive victim,' as a threat or as the ‘(anti-)hero’ of globalization. The course encounters viewpoints on the conflicts, compromises, resistances, solidarity, and social transformation shaping and shaped by recent migration movement to Europe.