Sociology

This course enables students from any subject major to explore gender and sexuality from a critical angle. By looking at the most popular debates from across the world, students examine how cultural makings of body, gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality have historically shaped and been shaped by wider social forces. The course visits foundational concepts and theories (feminist and queer theory) in gender studies which draw for example on philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. The lectures provide examples from across the globe, to enable students to question their very own norms, in the way people often fail to notice they exist. In seminars, students discuss their chosen examples from popular culture and facilitate discussion of current controversies around gender vis-à-vis the themes and theories covered in the lectures.

The purpose of this course is to explore how interpersonal relationships during childhood and adolescence and the brain interact to shape individuals’ psychosocial adjustment. Key concepts of brain development related to interpersonal relationships and brain plasticity will be discussed. Students will be able to understand the close link between individuals’ interpersonal relationships and our brain development. Topics include social brain structures, social and emotional self-regulation, brain plasticity, neurobiology of love, power of relationships, impact of early adversity, impact of interpersonal trauma, social phobia, psychopathy, and autism.

In the social sciences, we try to understand the behavior of individuals in collective settings. In such settings, the best course of action for the individual often depends on the actions of others. For example, the decision to dress formally or informally for a dinner party depends on how we think others will be dressing. Game theory is the formal analysis of decision making in such interdependent situations in which an individual’s best course of action depends on the actions of others. This course presents a non-technical introduction to non-cooperative game theory.

Starting from recent debates and problems like new nationalism, misogyny, political homophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism the course offers a historical inquiry into the construction and development of cultural differences marked through categories like gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion from the eighteenth century until the Holocaust. Through historical case studies, philosophy, and literature it looks at the way in which Western identity-discourse and its colonial subcode have formed dichotomies like self and other, black and white, the Orient and the West, male and female, worker and bourgeois, hetero- and homosexual, and how these differences became social inequalities. The course introduces gender as a category of historical analysis. Through a critical inquiry it reconstructs the paradoxes of a “dialectic of Enlightenment” (Adorno), that means the dark side behind its claim for reason, equality, brotherhood and freedom. The course traces and illustrates the ways in which the Enlightenment has provided a rationale to mark gendered, classed and racialized boundaries in science which, more often than not, resulted in inequalities. These inequalities became embedded in European society in such a way that the active, dominant subject came to be seen as white, male, and middle class. This discourse of dominance helped to carry out European colonialism and the imperial project. With the help of a literary analysis (Joseph Conrad HEART OF DARKNESS), the course introduces into the (critical) role literature can play within the dynamics of social change and cultural discourse. Furthermore, the course introduces into critical theories, like discourse analysis and the history of knowledge, postcolonial and gender/sexuality studies and studies on Orientalism. Thus, it examines the dynamic processes of the “history of sexualities”, their formation and contradictions, which emerged out of these processes. It reconstructs how masculinity and the image of man became a central trope of nationalism and colonialism. Last but not least, it asks how colonial and anti-Semitic discourse, stereotypes of the external Other (in the colonies) and stereotypes of an internal European Other (the Jews etc.) were intertwined and how we can better understand the Holocaust from a historical, multidirectional perspective.

This course focuses on different scholarly perspectives on ethnicity, nationality, ethnic groups, and nations. Divided into three parts, it begins by establishing an analytical framework for the study of ethnicity and nationalism that stresses the historic specificity and social construction of ethnic groups and nations. In the middle part, the course examines a range of ways in which ethnicity and nationality are experienced, legitimated, and reproduced in the modern world. The final part of the course is devoted to contemporary applications of these concepts: how ethnicity and nationalism manifest themselves in politics, culture, and everyday life. Combined, these three parts establish different ways in which ethnicity and nationality are modern social constructs.

This courses focuses on seven cities and moments in history where western culture has been especially significant for transformations affecting social and economic life. Each location includes a study of relevant philosophers. Topics include: Amsterdam 1650; Paris 1750; Jena 1800; Athens 400 B.C.E.; Vienna 1900; Berlin 1930; New York 1970.