Communication

This course deals with a range of aspects of Internet research including theoretical, practical, and ethical aspects. The course utilizes three approaches to explore the topic. The first approach looks at how the Internet can be used as a research tool. How can data collected through the Internet help us understand the world around us? This includes the use of search engines, online databases, and other digitally-generated resources, such as the discussion pages for Wikipedia articles, hyperlinks, and Facebook profiles. The second approach looks at research of internet phenomena, such as social network sites, search engines, and more. The third approach uses internet-based tools or data to study online phenomena. The course examines how the Internet can be used as a research tool, and how to research the Internet. Throughout the course, special emphasis is placed on different aspects that set the Internet apart from other media environments: multimedia interactive contents, recorded behavior, technological and social structures, as well as its capacity to act as a social environment in its own right. While the main class focuses on discussing the conceptual and theoretical implications of Internet research, the tutorial includes a practical orientation, where students practice using new tools.

This course discusses communication in a professional setting. Topics include: communication in business; active listening; empathy; assertive behavior; non-verbal communication; the importance of feedback; constructive criticism; constructive debate; difficult conversations; intercultural communication; written communication.

This course debates contemporary issues in a Socratic manner inspired by Michel Sandel's lectures and Ian Shapiro's views on Enlightenment philosophy, which placed great faith in the power of human reason to understand the true nature of our circumstances and the idea of progress in human affairs as means to control, and perhaps even improve, our environments and our lives. Through different roles, students adopt different positions to think about sensitive issues related to conflictual situations from points of view that are not necessarily based on their personal convictions. Topics are inspired from the Council of Foreign Affairs: What is a Moral Foreign Policy.

This is a hands-on course that invites students to discover and engage with artists who have come to Berlin from abroad. Berlin’s thriving and dynamic arts scene has long drawn theater-makers, writers, actors, poets, musicians, and visual artists from all over the world. This course examines the experience of displacement and dislocation, the challenges of mobility and the demands of integration, but also the positive aspects of finding oneself in a new place and making it one‘s own, establishing a life and finding a community here. In addition to this theory-driven component, students also learn and apply basic journalistic skills as part of a hands-on exploration of the worlds created by these artists from abroad, in Berlin. Finally, students meet and speak with artist guest speakers from a range of fields, in addition to doing a deep dive on the life and work of one artist from abroad, who they profile for their final project.