Short description:
If the pandemic situation allows, we will meet us in presence, but it should be possible to take part by Zoom anyway.
Module 3 is a basic as well as a transfer module. Concerning the „getting in“ into the master’s
programme we will focus the following issues:
1. to explicate the forms of previous knowledges and the experiences which each person brings
along
2. to be acquainted with the basic issues of the master’s programme
3. to transform these issues into different practical or theoretical fields
Following the principle of student-oriented, processual forms of learning by doing research, while being aware of our heterogeneity and inequality, this module considers the main theoretical concepts of transculturality and its related concepts. It gives an introduction into the discipline and its subjects within the context of its neighbouring concepts as by example „interculturality“, „diversity“ and „hybridity“.
These and further concepts related to transculturality and their impact will be discussed within an
intersectional framework.
In the course of the semester we will transfer and prove these concepts by applying or questioning them related to different fields of social life and science system. For instance applications are forms of „transcultural communication“, „third space“, „spaces of transition“, „managing diversity“ and „social justice“.
Other kinds of applications are exercised and deliberated in the practical part of the module, which is carried out in form of workshops according to a prior agreement.
Seminar and workshops are based on a high level of participation and communication, which will be
practiced in different kinds of moderation, presentation, teamwork and course of instruction and its
reflection.
The module’s learning target is a kind of transfer and awareness, practical or theoretical, by single or
teamwork, focusing on „transcultural competence“.
This module results in 9 CP. For more information please register on Stud.IP.
The module will take part in German and English.

Extractivism – traditionally understood as the over-exploitation of natural resources – has led to irreversible environmental damage and the destruction of livelihoods across the globe. While these forms of primitive accumulation have historically been key to colonial exploitation of the Global South, we are currently witnessing an expansion of multiple forms of extractivism. Reimagined as a developmental and even emancipatory strategy, extractivism has increasingly been implemented by states, private firms, local and traditional authorities, and networks of experts in order to capture and distribute high rents, while in fact deepening legacies of colonial dependencies. However, extractivism has also extended beyond the plundering of raw materials to cultural or non-material resources, e.g. in the form of extensive tourism, or “data-mining”. Hence, today, extractivism has come to signify a global logic of current capitalist accumulation and valorisation which differs decisively from industrial capitalism. To secure the appropriation of rent, these different forms of extractivism are flanked by various violent and authoritarian state practices, often reinstating racist and (settler) colonial orders, erasing indigenous claims to land, large-scale dispossession and displacement, severe human rights violations, unsafe labour conditions, surveillance, and forced migration.
The participants of this seminar will be able to participate in a six-day interdisciplinary Autumn Research School to be held on 9-10, 15-16 & 29-30 October 2021. The programme is composed of six content modules, plus a hands-on research design workshop module. It includes lectures by Sandro Mezzadra, Shalini Randeria, Ranabir Samaddar, Deval Desai, Michi Knecht, Klaus Schlichte and Martin Reisigl, Q&A-sessions, interactive roundtable sessions and micro-group sessions with presentations by MA, PhD and postdoc participants from around the globe. The Autumn School with be held online and in English language.
As participants of the seminar you are invited to actively participate in the discussions. To prepare for the Autumn School required literature will be circulated prior to the event. We will have one meeting before and one after the Autumn School to discuss all questions related to requirements and assignments. You will be able to acquire up to 6 CPs for this seminar. Unfortunately, the number of participants for this seminar is limited to five.

Literature:

Canterbury, Dennis C. 2018. Neoextractivism and Capitalist Development. New York: Routledge.
Engels, Bettina & Dietz, Kristina (eds.) 2017. Contested Extractivism, Society and the State. Struggles over Mining and Land, London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Escobar, Arturo. 2015, “Degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation”, Sustainability Science 10 (3): 451–462
Gudynas, Eduardo. 2018. “Extractivisms. Tendencies and Consequences”, in: Munck, Ronaldo & Delgado Wise, Raúl (eds.) 2018. Reframing Latin American Development. London: Routledge.
Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett. 2017. “On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism”. Cultural Studies 31 (2–3): 185–204.
Preston, Jen 2017. “Racial extractivism and white settler colonialism: An examination of the Canadian Tar Sands mega-projects”, Cultural Studies (31) 2–3: 353–375
Sassen, Saskia. 2010. A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation, Globalizations, 7 (1-2): 23-50
Szeman, Imre. 2017. “On the politics of extraction”, Cultural Studies 31 (2-3): 440-447
Vélez-Torres, Irene. 2014. “Governmental extractivism in Colombia: Legislation, securitization and the local settings of mining control”, Political Geography 38: 68-78

What if we thought of the world’s oceans not as the vast expanses that begin where inhabited territories end, but as mediators and archives of these territories and their inhabitants? What if we viewed world histories and societies – slavery and colonialism, the Haitian Revolution, imperial law-making, contemporary labor struggles, infrastructures and logistics, borders and boundary-making, migration and urban coastal life not from the vantage point of land, but from the vantage point of the seas? This course gathers readings from history, anthropology, and environmental and legal studies to ask how the seas are not only watery worlds onto themselves but have helped mediate and make our terrestrial worlds as we know them today.
We begin with stories about sailors, slaves, and the making of the “New World,” about how the Haitian Revolution hinged on common currents of information-sharing across slave routes, about British imperialism and maritime jurisprudence, and about histories of whaling and the Industrial Revolution (Scott, Rediker, Mawani, Goldberg-Hiller, Bakke). We then move to anthropological accounts of piracy, Mediterranean region-building, migrancy across the “Black Mediterranean,” Mumbai’s “inhabited seas” and the making of global borders and logistical pathways (Dua, Ben-Yehoyada, Anand, Proglio et. al, Levinson. Kosmatopoulos). Finally, we will focus on the more-than-human (grains of sand or waves, for example) as well as the multi-modal to discuss how the study of the seas – visual, textual, sonic - leads us right back to the study of ourselves (Leviathan; Cosmopolitics at Sea, Helmreich, Winderen).
Class exercises will consist of (1) prepared author interviews (recorded, on zoom) which students conduct with a select group of class authors; (2) a 2-hour conversation with Floats (the “Floating Laboratory of Action and Theory at Sea) at the American University in Beirut and (3) final student papers that will explore German maritime history and its present from the vantage point of class themes.