The academic study of Africa is dominated by scholars from non-African backgrounds. This has various historical and institutional reasons. The aim of this class is to become more familiar with political thought that is situated within African contexts, with a focus on the 20th and 21st centuries.
The class will be organised around several thematic parts. We will firstly set the scene by reading introductory literature on African social scientists, their theoretical output and political connections. Secondly, some of the classic nationalist manifestos will be read and connected to literature on the decolonisation project. On these follow political economy and feminist texts, as well as discussions about democracy, freedom and pan-Africanism.
The class will be taught online, making use of a seminar blog and stud.ip, but without holding live class sessions. This is meant to make the course as accessible as possible independent from everyone’s current work situation. However, small group exercises are included, which, ideally, involve a preparatory video conference with the instructor. All necessary information for getting started will be made available on stud.ip before April 21st.

In the Spring of 2020, the Internet epitomizes a life-line for people scrambling to find reliable health information, searching for new sources of income during an emerging global recession and keeping in touch with loved ones amid a global state of physical social distancing associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, private companies and state institutions are also using the Internet to slow the spread of disease, aiming to limit its social and economic impact at any cost. As they do so, they realize that they require new tools and new policies to effectively limit the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19 or to trace those who have been in contact with people infected by the virus. It is exactly this global situation of crisis that forces all involved to act as swiftly as possible and that provides a legitimation for actions that would otherwise at least be controversial from an Internet rights perspective.

In this seminar, we will study the politics of human and fundamental rights as part of the global governance of digital technologies, with a particular emphasis on the early impacts of the pandemic in this critical policy field. Our theoretical approach to this will be the concept of digital constitutionalism, developed by scholars from political science, communications and law. Together with colleagues at the University of Padova, the University of Salerno and Dublin City University we will discuss how digital constitutionalism has emerged and how it relates to the realization of human rights in the digital age. This cooperation is now enhanced by the fact that we will conduct our weekly meetings remotely (live rather than asynchronously). We will thus effortlessly engage with students and instructors of the partner institutions and with additional guest speakers enriching our discussions.

The academic study of Africa is dominated by scholars from non-African backgrounds. This has various historical and institutional reasons. The aim of this class is to become more familiar with political thought that is situated within African contexts, with a focus on the 20th and 21st centuries.
The class will be organised around several thematic parts. We will firstly set the scene by reading introductory literature on African social scientists, their theoretical output and political connections. Secondly, some of the classic nationalist manifestos will be read and connected to literature on the decolonisation project. On these follow political economy and feminist texts, as well as discussions about democracy, freedom and pan-Africanism.
The class will be taught online, making use of a seminar blog and stud.ip, but without holding live class sessions. This is meant to make the course as accessible as possible independent from everyone’s current work situation. However, small group exercises are included, which, ideally, involve a preparatory video conference with the instructor. All necessary information for getting started will be made available on stud.ip before April 21st.

Policies that are aimed at improving living conditions and ensuring social protection in the Global South have attracted increasing scholarly attention since the turn of the new millennium. A body of works has resulted under the name of “global social policy”, that studies collective social interventions beyond the much better studied world of the OECD. Understanding social problems, as well as which solutions might work, is an important part of designing social policies. Researchers have hence assumed a huge role in informing policymaking, and research occupies a large part in international cooperation and policy learning. What is often called “evidence-based” policymaking is particularly important for gaining legitimacy in contexts where non-democratically elected actors (such as donors or the UN) co-operate with national governments in setting up social programmes. This seminar aims at better understanding the processes of knowledge production in the realm of global social policy.
The class will begin by zooming in on the core two concepts: “knowledge” and “global social policy”. We will discuss how the former can be conceptualised and with what implications for understanding the world. We will also unpack what is meant by the latter and read some introductory texts on that emerging field. The main part of the class will then revolve around discussions on the emergence, functioning, and effects of knowledge within global social policy, covering questions like, who produces knowledge and on whose behalf? What kind of knowledge counts? How does our perception of social problems depend on the type of data that is generated about them?
The class will be taught online, making use of a seminar blog and stud.ip, but without holding live class sessions. This is meant to make the course as accessible as possible independent from everyone’s current work situation. However, small group exercises are included, which, ideally, involve a preparatory video conference with the instructor. All necessary information for getting started will be made available on stud.ip before April 21st.

With Fridays for Future the climate protests have reached a new dimension. The protests, which began with the exemplary action of Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, have since developed into a global protest movement. They have successfully established climate change as an urgent problem on the national and international political agenda.
How did this remarkable development come about? How did the pupils and students, who are the core activists, succeed in bringing millions of people to the streets against the climate policies of their governments? Who participates in the protests? What are the motives of the protesters and the organizers of the protests? How do pupils and young students manage to organize such a protest? How do the protests differ between countries?
These are the questions the seminar will address. We will do this not only from a theoretical perspective, but by developing student research projects on the current climate protests. The course will thus on the one hand introduce core research perspectives of movement research. These will then serve as background knowledge for students’ own research on Fridays for Future. A relevant part of the seminar time will therefore involve independent research work on protest forms, media reporting, and public perception of Fridays for Future protests, worldwide.

ntroduces students to social policies and how they impact social, political, economic and health conditions of modern nation states. The focus of the course is comparative. It introduces students to differences and similarities in social policies among the rich countries after the Industrial Revolution – countries mostly located in Western and Northern Europe and North America. It then briefly covers some Eastern European and Asian contexts, and finishes with a focus on income and wealth inequality across the globe. Students will present readings, participate in online discussion forums and write an essay for their final grade. The course will take place virtually using the platform BigBlueButton (students can learn more after enrollment). There are two basic texts we will use:
Dodds, Anneliese. 2013. Comparative Public Policy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kennett, Patricia. 2001. Comparative Social Policy: Theory and Research. 1st ed. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press