Dr. Betiel WASIHUN

English B2

Thursday, 16-18 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

What does it mean to live in a surveillance society? How does the digital age challenge questions regarding privacy, individuality and freedom? When does surveillance as care tip over into surveillance as control? And how does the Stasi system of vigilance prefigure contemporary surveillance culture? This course will on the one hand examine the impact of surveillance on society by looking at the multifaceted ways technologies, societies and the arts interact; and on the other hand, reflect on surveillance in a totalitarian context while comparing observation techniques in the GDR with contemporary surveillance methods. We will also explore how surveillance is represented in contemporary literature, film and popular culture. The course will map out important themes with regards to surveillance and its repercussions (e.g., visibility, identity, privacy and control). The course provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of surveillance and covers the latest research in the following major areas: 1. Relationship between surveillance, power and social control; 2. Histories of Surveillance: GDR and the Stasi (especially in the context of Berlin) 2. The concept of privacy; 3. Surveillance in the arts and popular culture.

Dr. Isabella FRANCHINI

English B2

German A2 (recommended)

Friday, 12-14 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

In no other city did the Cold War materialize itself more concretely than in Berlin. Set in the emblematic capital, this course offers students a glimpse of the Cold War, understood as both a stable bipolar system of spheres of influence in the European theater, and a dynamic, largely unstable, environment of power struggle (and resistance) in the so-called 'Third World'. Particularly in the Global South, superpower interference facilitated, exacerbated, and fueled internal conflicts, often leading to bloody proxy wars – which nevertheless allowed local actors to internationalize their greed and grievances. These conflicts might have seemed far away from Berlin – the quintessential 'frontier city' –, but the block confrontation had important consequences here as well. The Cold War’s lingering effects make its study essential to understanding the present. From the perspective of a free and reunited Berlin, students will have the unique opportunity of both studying and experiencing the past under the Iron Curtain, which divided the world, the country, and the city – and made, back then, Humboldt University the scientific center of the GDR, with its extensive networks to the Soviet world, only a mile away from the Berlin Wall.

Dr. Victoria BISHOP KENDZIA

English B2

Tuesday, 14-18 c.t. (There will be seven four-hour sessions: 18 April, 25 April, 2 May, 9 May, 16 May, 23 May, 6 June) 

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

Berlin’s rich museological landscape lends itself to in-depth exploration of Germany’s difficult heritage: How are the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially, remembered and represented? This course aims to enable the students to get to know a number of Berlin museums focusing on Memory and Post-WWII migration using anthropological methods and to critically analyze them within larger theoretical frameworks of “self” and “other” constructions. The aim is to explore the role of museums in rendering such constructions visible and therefore debatable. In addition to visiting the sites, there are scholarly readings and in-class discussions.  The discussions will be based on the museum visits and the students’ questions on the readings.

Dr. Margareta von Oswald 
Dr. Jonas Tinius

English B2

German A2 (recommended)

Please note the individual session dates:

Monday, 16-18 c.t. (17 April, 8 May, 19 June, 26 June, 3 July) 

Room: 408, M*strasse (Mohrenstrasse) 40-41, 10117 Berlin  

Friday-Sunday, 10-16 c.t. (2- 4 June)

Room: 107a, M*strasse (Mohrenstrasse) 40/41, 10117 Berlin

Archives do not just preserve the past, they allow for new questions about the present to emerge. They contain remnants of specific places and times, and they are the ground for new relations to spring and new connections to be made. In this seminar, we ask: Why archiving and for whom? How do archives shape societies and constitute knowledge? We will engage with “awkward archives” in Berlin – archives posing problems and causing disquieting frictions. In each of the seminar’s modules, we address a particular modern ideology through a particular Berlin archive, including the following: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Colonial Neighbours Archive of SAVVY Contemporary, Naomi Wilzig Art Collection, Museum of Natural History, a database of German colonial punitive expeditions, and the Hahne-Niehoff Archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The seminar focuses on field visits with methodological exercises, which introduce students to diverse ways of doing research that they will build on to articulate their own research outcomes in a multimodal portfolio. 

Dr. Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz

English: B2

German: A2 recommended

Thursday, 12-14 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

Berlin is a multi-cultural city with a diverse cultural life. The seminar will present this transcultural landscape connected to Asia. Starting with the fascination of collectors and travelers to Asia in the Barock period of the 18th century and the establishment of cabinets of curiosities, collections and material culture has lend contemporary relevance to ethnography, art history and anthropology. Asian collections and architecture presented in Berlin are confronted with the very colonial contexts from which substantial parts of them hail, giving contemporary relevance to the history of their origins. As issue today are questions of cultural heritage, cross-cultural methods and opening-up to non-western research, discourses, Arts and Asian communities.

Dr. Deniz Güneş Yardımcı

English B2

German A2 (recommended 

Friday, 14-18 c.t. (bi-weekly: 28 April, 12 May, 26 May, 9 June, 23 June, 7 July, 21 July)

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

The labour migration from Southern European countries to Germany, which started in the mid-1950s, had an important socio-economic and socio-cultural impact on the countries’ societies and influenced their film culture. German filmmakers began to feature the difficult lives of ‘guestworkers’ in films such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969). In the 1990s, second - and third – generation Turkish-German directors such as Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan marked the end of the so-called ‘guestworker cinema’ and started to create a transnational and diasporic cinema featuring a culturally hybrid Germany. Berlin (especially Kreuzberg) has always been one of the favorite settings in all of these migration movies. The transformation of Berlin’s first ‘guestworker ghettos’ to culturally hybrid urban districts over the course of 60 years is very well reflected in all of these cinema cultures. This interdisciplinary course crosses and connects the academic fields of migration studies, film studies, and cultural studies. In the first part of the course, we will explore how migration, immigrants, and diasporas are represented in cinema. The second part of the course then gets more specific and we approach the representation of Berlin in these migration movies.

Azakhiwe NOCANDA

English B2

Tuesday, 12-14 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

How do our unconscious biases impact the way we view people within the African Diaspora? The course aims to explore intersectional inequalities of citizenship and the politics of Belonging and how our unconscious biases impact the way we view (Black) Africans and people within the African Diaspora. The relationship between migration, social cohesion and national German identity has become an increasingly contentious political issue. Historically, the settlement of migrant groups and the formation of minority ethnic groups have changed the socio-cultural, political and economic fabric of receiving societies. We will explore the relationship between racial and ethnocultural diversity. Students are encouraged to the intentional notion of undoing – unlearning and dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutions – as well as persistent action to create and build alternative spaces and ways of knowing, particularly concerning the Black (African) Diaspora. Berlin will be used as a case study for themes covered, however, students are encouraged to reflect on their own identities and the expressions of various identities around the city. Class sessions will be composed of lectures, online discussions forums and an excursion through Berlin’s Black History. Course materials and readings are designed to give special emphasis to the African Diaspora initiatives and perspectives of shaping their own history. Ultimately the course provides students with a wide interdisciplinary introduction into the othering of (Black) Africans, so that students can interpret contemporary African issues with an informed historical background.

Julia DE FREITAS SAMPAIO

English B2

German A1

Tuesday, 16-18 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

The phrase “Germany is not a country of immigration” has been said by German officials multiple times, and yet, Germany is the second most popular destination for immigrants (just after the USA). But how has this country, which less than 100 years ago was home to one of the most racist and xenophobic regimes that have ever existed, is now home for so many immigrants? In this class we will explore the history and the laws behind it and, even more, we will hear the stories first hand from immigrants living in Berlin. As the course takes place in Berlin, the city will be our study case. From tours organized by refugees, walks in the diverse Berliner neighborhoods and interviews with immigrants, this class aims to give a more in depth, first hand insight on the condition of immigrants living in Germany. That, without forgetting to take history, law and geography into account, for a richer understanding of the processes that have transformed this city (and country) over and over again.

Samuel PEREA-DÍAZ

English B1

Tuesday, 10-12 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

The course focuses on mapping and listening to acoustic territories in Berlin. It allows academic research for exploring and understanding the city by sensing aural environments. Structured in theory and practice, the central questions of the course are: which sonic elements can we encounter in navigating historical and contemporary maps? Which methods of research and practices exist in the act of mapping with sound? How can we generate sound maps? The course reflects the city’s cultural, social, and political dimensions from a transdisciplinary approach through analyzing and creating maps by listening. It allows students to explore auditory territories, gain strength, and develop knowledge and individual perspectives on cultural and urban studies. The mapping methods are practice-based on field recordings, soundwalk, and sound diagramming exercises. The academic readings and discussions will introduce the student to the field of sound studies.

Dr. Stefanie RINKE

German B2

English B1

Thursday, 10-12 c.t.

Room: 0323-26, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7  

Berlin is called the most sexually open capital of Europe today. In clubs, bars, workshops and festivals, a broad range and mix of sexual orientations are created in different and also crossing scenes and sex-positive spaces. Homosexual, transgender, tantric, polyamory, sex-positive and BDSM-oriented persons meet and celebrate and create new sexual techniques and lifestyles in so-called sex-positive spaces. The government of Berlin has already recognized the economic dimension of the liberal sexual culture. What does liberal sexual culture exactly mean? What kind of historical roots are important to analyze, e.g. the anonymity of the big city, the homosexual movement and the golden twenties? What was and is avant-garde and when does it turn into commerce? Four subitems will structure the seminar: Sex-positive spaces, LGBTQI+ and Gender-Fluidity, Kink and Tantra, alternative porn films and literature. Excursions and interviews with experts will be part of the seminar. We will work with texts and films, and students will develop their own research question and project. This course is taught in German.