Particularly in the global South, international organisations wield great influence upon political, social and economic arrangements. We will seek to understand how international organisations interpret and implement their mandates, and which results of their work may be observed. We will discuss their relationships with powerful and less powerful states and governments, shed light on their legitimacy and means of power, and see how they relate to societal actors. Thematically, the class will focus on development cooperation and welfare, as well as issue of security politics such as peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The class aims at providing a general overview on contemporary research on international organisations, an understanding of the internal dynamics of international bureaucracies, and seeks to inspire critical perspectives on power relationships in world society.
 

In this class, we will study the politics of human and fundamental rights in the global governance of digital tech – this year with a particular emphasis on governing artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key technology that affects how we live, work, understand the world, even conduct our public affairs (think of judges relying on algorithms to decide about keeping defendants in jail or facial recognition technology that can identify people with 'dangerous' feelings). This seminar will prepare you to analyze ongoing developments in AI and its governance from a political science perspective, while also touching on neighboring disciplines like law and communications.

This class will be conducted in close collaboration with partners at other European universities: Lecturers and students from Maastricht University (YUFE, YERUN), University of Padova, the University of Salerno and Dublin City University (YERUN) will join us in several of our meetings. Together with these partners, we examine how AI can be globally governed for the realization of human rights in the digital age. This class allows you to catch up on AI as a technology through an integrated digital learning module, making it suitable for any level of prior tech knowledge.

This class will be taught remotely through weekly meetings on Zoom. Options for examination include presentations, blog posts and term papers.

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. In contrast to earlier climate change protests they were able to mobilize large numbers of participatns.
Surveys of protesters in several countries have provided reliable information about the socio-demographic background and the motives of people participating in the Fridays for Future protests – at least for a handful of countries in the Global North. But climate change protests happened in many countries around the globe.
In the course we will try to tackle this research gap by developing a number of country studies about climate change protests, ideally in countries of the Global North and the Global South. A relevant part of the course will therefore involve independent research work on climate change protests based on media reports and activists’ documents from countries other than Germany.

This interactive seminar will introduce students to two concepts that are regularly heard across social science disciplines today: the ‘reproducibility crisis’ and the ‘open science movement’. We will start with a review of the events and discussions that cause many scholars, policymakers and the public to have negative views of science, or imagine it is in a crisis. We will start with science in general, and then focus on the social sciences including psychology, political science and sociology; and interdisciplinary related fields. Next, we will discuss empirical evidence supporting and opposing a crisis in the social sciences. Midway the course will shift focus to the various movements to change science. This review of the open science movement will eventually shift to how students can practice open science, or what we could simply call ‘better science’. The course requires a final project in which the students must develop a way to make a contribution to science now.

Learning objectives

Learn the history of the “reproducibility crisis” and “open science movement”
Understand “Questionable Research Practices” – such as p-hacking, HARKing, publication bias, status seeking and unintentional fraud
Learn the tools for investigating reproducibility – such as meta-analysis, p-curves and replication
Learn how to make transparent and reproducible workflows
Introduction to tools of open science – such as markdown, Zotero, interactive apps and collaboration platforms
Learn how to make a contribution to social science now, without the need for publishing an academic journal article
Course credit: Final project - written exam

Students will develop a final project in which they make a contribution to science. This can be constructing or editing online content (Wikipedia or blogging for example), engaging in a replication of a given study, starting a public outreach or media campaign, organizing a public debate or anything else creative that they develop with the supervision of the instructor. The result of their work must be submitted in a final written "exam" describing what they did and how it fulfills the criteria.

In the seminar „Who cares?! Comparative perspectives on care, gender and migration”, we examine the ever-more relevant topic of transnational care work and its consequences for global inequalities as well as for individual lives. We focus specifically on the connection of theory and practice. We aim to give voice to a variety of perspectives and make sense of those using theoretical insights from sociological, gender, social policy and migration studies. The literature and activities of this course will take us to realities of people across the world and draw linkages between multiple actors and spheres. We also ask what a “care revolution” could look like and how some of the inequalities involved in transnational care work could be addressed. This general studies seminar is recommended for advanced B.A. students and M.A. students. We will use a variety of online tools to create an open, inspiring, and communicative learning environment.

As part of the International Module Social Sciences, this spotlight lecture is held by visiting Professor Dr, Maya Hadar from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. The number of students will be limited according to the capacity of the classroom during the pademic.
In dieser Veranstaltung kann eine englischsprachige Prüfungsleistung erbracht werden. Bitte verlassen Sie sich nicht zu 100% darauf, dass dieser Kurs in diesem Semester stattfindet, da Reisebeschränkungen den Aufenthalt der Dozentin in Bremen erlauben müssen. Er wurde schon mehrfach Pandemie-bedingt verschoben.

It has been more than half a century since the last vestiges of formal empires were dismantled in the postwar context yet the notion of coloniality continues to frame our understanding of power across the world. “Racism, Coloniality and Space” opens up a platform for intellectual engagement to explore the stubborn relationship of racism as a spatial configuration of coloniality of power in different spatial settings. In this course, we tackle this relationship with a focus on three themes. First, we discuss how European colonialism still shapes our cartographic perspective of power relations in the world in the Global South and transnational diasporas. Second, we turn to the ghetto and el barrio as both colonial and futuristic spaces of African American and Latinx communities in the United States and discuss how racism and coloniality meet in urban spaces of the Global North. Third, we move to the Middle East as the ultimate Other of the West with a discussion on racism against Kurds in Turkey and Turkish cities. The goal of the course is to inform the participants about the interaction between structural racism and coloniality in contrasting spatial settings. Participants will explore this relationship to discuss alternative paths of politics that challenge contemporary forms and representations of coloniality.


Aim The course serves two objectives. The first one is to discuss the relationship between coloniality and racism as spatial categories. The second objective is to contextualize this relationship in historical cases.

Student Learning Outcomes 1. Gaining abilities on how to think critically and analytically on racism 2. Thinking the racism, coloniality and space from different disciplinary perspectives 3. Developing presentation skills 4. Gaining confidence in critical writing


Literatur:


Anibal Quijano & Immanuel Wallerstein (1992). Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the Modern World System, International Social Science Journal, 134, 549–552
Anibal Quijano (2010) Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies, 21: 2,168 — 178.
Neil MacMaster (2001) Racism in Europe, 1870-2000. Palgrave, pp. 1-26. (Introduction: The Roots of Modern Racism)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) Rethinking Racism Toward a Structural Interpretation, American Sociological Review, 62 (3), 465–469
Castles, S. & Kosack, G. (1972). The Function of Labour Immigration in Western European Capitalism. New Left Review, 1(73).
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton (1993) American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (Chapter 2-Construction of Ghetto, p. 17-59)
Max Felker-Kantor (2020) Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (Chapter 1-Introduction the Police Power, Chapter 2-Policing Raceriotland: A Journey into Racist Policing and Urban Uprising, p. 1-18, p. 19-42)