SoSe 2020

Moodlekurs für Austausch über Lehre am IfEE.

Dear all, 

thank you for your interest in this small research experiment. 

due to these times of pandemic that affects all of us, it is unsure how and if our summer semester at the Humboldt University will take place. Nevertheless, as a Masters Student of Anthropology/European Ethnology, I would like to try out some anthropological research on the effects of social distancing and globally imposed curfews on our everyday lives. 

Therefore I am asking the interested participants, to write a quarantine/isolation diary and share it with me. Your data will be handled most respectful- and anonymously. 

Where are you from and where are you right now? With whom do you live? How do you spend your time, what do you think about and how do you feel? What changed in your everyday life and how do you adapt to the restrictions of movement and to social distancing? What do you think does the future hold for us? What else is going on?

What are you personally going through recently during the Corona-Crisis? You can write about anything that is on your mind. 

How to participate:

1.       Write a diary that you are willing to share with me (in German, English or Spanish)

2.       Upload your documents here (only I will have access to them)

Thanks a lot in advance, for your interest, your trust and your stories. I am looking forward to working with you!

Melina Heimann (heimande@hu-berlin.de)

P.S.: This is not and official research but a single student's research experiment in order to improve and learn more and to make the best out of the current situation.

Wie transformieren digitale Medien aktuell das Feld von Museen & Heritage? Dieser Frage gehen die Studierenden anhand unterschiedlicher exemplarischer Phänomene nach: kontroverse Debatten zu Selfies an Museen und Gedenkstätten beschäftigen uns genauso wie der Umgang mit digitalen Bildplattformen, der Besuch virtueller Museen, die Entwicklung von Museums-Apps oder „Kultur-Hackathons“. Das Seminar bietet dadurch einen facettenreichen Einstieg in das Schnittfeld von Medien & Digitalanthropologie und Museum & Heritage Studies. Dadurch erhalten die Studierenden Einblick in ein zentrales Arbeitsfeld des Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) am IfEE und ein dort aktuell laufendes Forschungsprojekt zum Thema „Curating Digital Images“ (http://www.carmah.berlin/curating-digital-images/). Durch Lektüre zu verschiedenen relevanten Phänomenen arbeiten sich Studierende zunächst in das Feld ein. Im Vordergrund steht aber die explorative Erprobung ethnografischer Perspektiven anhand eigener Forschung durch Internet-Ethnografie (insbesondere über Social Media) und explorative teilnehmende Beobachtungen in Museen und an Gedenkstätten, woran die schriftlichen Modulabschlussarbeiten unmittelbar anknüpfen können.

Das Seminar ist offen für Vorschläge und Vertiefungswünsche der Studierenden und setzt auf hohe Eigeninitiative. Der endgültige Seminarplan wird gemeinsam gestaltet. Je nach Bedarf werden wir uns auch den an diesem Schnittfeld entstehenden Berufsperspektiven widmen und dazu Expert*innen aus dem Feld einladen.

Dear all,

many of us have made and continue to make disenchanting experiences, to say the least, in the German academic system. While it markets itself as a world of excellence, liberal egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, freedom and generosity towards scholars at risk, the reality of its structural labour conditions and culture of ignorance betray this image to be a grotesque misrepresentation. German academia is characterised by an ingrained and almost cultivated lack of consciousness towards multiple forms of discrimination (based on race, class, gender, age, etc.) and by related modalities of exclusion as well as paternalistic and infantilizing norms and practices particularly vis-à-vis international and non-naturalized scholars and students. As a system that has never been as much as confronted with a debate on quotas or human rights, German academia expects everybody to ‘integrate’ into what is essentially a structure normatively built around the ‘white male’ and organised according to steep hierarchies around disciplinary chairs. The consequences are direct dependencies of various kinds and precarious, fixed-term employment structures unparalleled by international comparison.

Many who came here with hopes and expectations have meanwhile withdrawn, tending to pressing political issues in other ways. While very much understandable, this inadvertently strengthens the fragmentation and division among the large class of underprivileged and precarious scholars that the system relies upon. The Network for Decent Labour in Academia (Netzwerk für Gute Arbeit in der Wissenschaft, NGAWiss) has been working for the past three years to publicise and scandalise the miserable employment conditions in German academia and to advocate for structural reforms. Its working group ‘Precarious Internationale’ aims to make intersectional discrimination a central issue of the network’s activism.

As a part of this effort, we invite scholars, unionists and activists with different histories of mobility and migration to discuss and reflect on the intersection between precarious labour conditions and different forms of discrimination in the German academic system. We want to come together and learn from each other in order to come to a better analysis of the different problems and challenges faced by differently positioned scholars and activists, but also to exchange experiences and knowledges over struggles for academic freedoms and labour conditions in different contexts. The aim is both to position the question of labour in academia within broader societal struggles in Germany and to link it up to related struggles in other countries.

We propose to frame the discussion along two lines of debate and exchange. However, we are very much open to alter and adapt this proposal according to what participants consider urgent and relevant to be discussed!

Critical diversity: As against a neoliberal depoliticised celebration of diversity that follows a calculative logic of added value while blanking out structural inequalities, we want to engage in a critical discussion on the realities of diversity in German academia. 

Possible questions to be discussed include: what are the effects, limitations and problems of current discourse and practices of diversity? Is it possible – and acceptable – to speak of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ in the European and especially German context? When does it make sense to speak of ‘migration backgrounds’ to address the issue of underrepresentation of scholars in high academic positions? What are the concrete problems and challenges faced by people with a variety of different migration/mobility histories? What about forms of discrimination affecting people who do not master the German language? And how do these issues intersect with other vectors of discrimination, such as class, age, gender or disability?

Network of solidarity: We want to learn from each other’s struggles and experiences, think through concrete possibilities for solidarity and envision common political actions. 

How can we connect the activities of scholars, unionists, and activists struggling against precarious labour and different forms of inequality and discrimination in different academic settings? What are the larger political struggles in which these activities are involved? How and what can we learn from each other? What kinds of concrete steps towards mutual assistance could be developed and what common political actions could be envisioned?

This is a writing intensive course designed to help students learn different genres for the public communication of ideas. We will spend the first three weeks of the course helping each student develop an argument related to the Anthropocene (climate change, mining, waste, fossil fuels, finance, government in/activity etc.). Once each student has a topic they care deeply about and has developed an argument about this topic the rest of the course will involve learning to write or express that argument in very different ways (genres) from the policy brief to the short essay, from a video abstract to work of fiction. Students should be willing to experiment with how scientifically strong arguments can be made and the relationship between genre, audience, and impact. Collective work will be encouraged. Following students interest course work can be refined into a publication. Options include a screenplay, or special issue of Æther -- an example of which can be found here: https://aether.ethz.ch/ausgabe/montan-welten/

Teaching will be in English, writing can be done in German, English, or French. 

In der Europäischen Ethnologie erfreuen sich Fragestellungen zur Wirtschaft als „komplexes Feld des gesellschaftlichen Lebens“ (Seifert) in den vergangenen Jahren zunehmender Beliebtheit. Wie aber können wir Phänomene des Wirtschaftens mit unseren Methoden und Perspektiven erfassen und verstehen? Im Seminar entwerfen wir eine „Europäische Ethnologie der Wirtschaft“. Aufbauend auf der Entwicklung eines europäisch ethnologischen Verständnisses von Wirtschaft(en), soll aufgezeigt werden, wie das Ökonomische aus der Perspektive unseres Faches, in Bezug und Abgrenzung zu klassischen wirtschaftsanthropologischen Perspektiven, erforscht werden kann. Nach derAuseinandersetzung mit theoretischer und ethnografischer Literatur steht die Forschungspraxis im Mittelpunkt: Bei der Erarbeitung eines kleinen Forschungsprojekts wird die Einbettung ökonomischen Handelns in soziale und kulturelle Umfelder exemplifiziert.

The SARS-CoV2 virus or, more colloquially, ‘Corona’ is way more than just a pandemic or a public health issue. As we are currently witnessing, it also entails very specific modes of putting at risk, problematizing and re-assembling life and, most particularly, urban life. This does not only involve biopolitical modes of segmenting and governing populations, sealing zones, blocking transit or intervening the proxemics of social distances in shops and parks, or the emergent dynamics of panic and hoarding. The vastly complex infrastructural and multi-species assemblage of urban life that we tend to call ‘the city’ is also at stake. From the urbanization of domestic spaces due to generalized lockdowns over various concerns about digital broadband connectivity, food provision, informal economies, networks of mutual support, etc. to heightened awareness for surfaces, materials and vectors of the disease, especially animals, life in cities seems to be held in suspension. The challenge, it seems, is to explore this ‘Corona’ moment as a ‘cosmopolitical event.’ That is, a moment shaped by situations of shared perplexity with the sudden intrusion of the unknown and leading to open inquiries and radical problematizations of conventional understandings of who we are, what we do, and the entities with whom we share the urban worlds we inhabit. 

How could an anthropology interested in the more-than-human nuances of contemporary urbanism be up for this task? This reading-based course seeks to explore, tentatively and with the care and precaution that the situation requires how to engage conceptually and ethnographically with Corona urbanism. Indeed, the current cosmopolitical event entails a deep challenge for our all-too-human ethnographic methods: How can a microscopic phenomenon with huge effects, causing speedy reactions leading to urban paralysis be apprehended? Corona urbanism, hence, invites us to readdress our ethnographic methods so as to become multi-sensory-aware explorers and documenters of these complex multi-species engagements, be it in the newly crowded interior spaces of our homes, or in the cautious social contacts in the outer world. And we plan to do so with an online teaching methodology appropriate for these times: mixing synchronous debates with asynchronous exercises using our digital infrastructures. More specifically, the course will have two main types of sessions: a) those focusing on readings from relevant social/urban theory and current investigative journalism; and b) those used to prepare, execute and discuss two experimental auto-ethnographic exercises.

Dieses Seminar begleitet das Projektseminar  "COVID-19: Biopolitik in Zeiten von Neoliberalismus und Ausnahmezustand" (von Bieberstein/Nadim). Wir diskutieren Fragen von Datenmanagement und Forschungsethik, diskutieren verschiedene Datenformen und Analysearten, führen in die Auswertung von Daten mit Software-Programmen ein und begleiten die sich entwickelnden Forschungsprojekte.

Der Besuch des Seminars ist in der Studienordnung 2017 verpflichtend für den Abschluss des Moduls 8.