Communication

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 reviews organizations and workplaces with a focus on how to enhance relationships with the organizations. Organization Theory is a branch of social sciences that is particularly interested in the why, how, and when multiple individuals join efforts to reach a common goal. It is a multidisciplinary subject drawing from disciplines such as arts and humanities, educational sciences, psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, and politics. These multiple lenses through which we view organizations make Organization Theory a fascinating and relevant topic to explore and examine at any stage of your study program. The main topics covered in this course are organization-environment relations, organizational design types and culture, leadership development, HRM and well-being, and managing diversity and inclusion at work.

The course discusses the role of cultural policy in the age of platform giants and how the digital media ecology of major platforms creates inter-dependencies with other platforms, established cultural institutions, legacy media, public service institutions, digital creators, and users. The course begins with a discussion on the platform society and how the notion of digital cultural politics relates to cultural, media, and communication policy, as well as the internet and cultural industries. It lays the foundations from the perspective of dominant platforms and platform providers, with a specific focus on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube. The second part of the course looks at the inter-dependencies that these platforms generate between themselves and cultural institutions, analyzing cultural institution’s use of platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The third part of the course focuses on data politics, user rights ethics, and discrimination. The final part of the course is composed of a day-long workshop where students work on themes and topics of their own choice as part of their final project. This course is taken in conjunction with the course Cultural Policy – Theory, Method & Analysis (HMKK03611U), a compulsory but non-credit-bearing course that provides students with adequate tools to conduct research within the field of cultural policy, with an emphasis on the relationship between theoretical framework, methodological design, and analysis.