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Prof. Dr. Armin Beverungen

21335 Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, C5.237
Fon +49.4131.677-2020, armin.beverungen@leuphana.de
Professor, Professorship of the Sociology of Organisation and Economy
Associated member, Centre for Digital Cultures
Associated member, Leuphana Center for Organization & Social Transformation

Table of contents for this page

Vita

Armin Beverungen is professor for the sociology of organization and economy. Previously, he has held research and teaching positions at the University of the West of England, Leuphana University and the University of Siegen. From September 2022 to August 2023, he was on leave at Leuphana and a visiting professor at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. He regularly teaches in the technologies section of the contextual studies program at the University of St. Gallen. He is an organization scholar and sociologist by training, and received his PhD for a history of critical management studies from the University of Leicester. His research interests have included the financialization of the university, corporate governance and business ethics, the politics of labour, and open access publishing. At Leuphana, he has been involved over most of the last nearly ten years in establishing the Centre for Digital Cultures. In this context, his research has increasingly engaged with media studies and science and technology studies.

Armin’s current research revolves around digital (media) technologies and organization; algorithmic management, automation and artificial intelligence; and smart, logistical cities. He is currently occupied with three projects in particular: as co-speaker of the key subject area „Climate Futures in Digital Cultures“ he is setting up a new strategic research area as part of the Centre for Digital Cultures. In a consortial research project funded by the VolkswagenFoundation on “Smartness as Wealth” Armin explores with Randi Heinrichs, Orit Halpern (TU Dresden), Marc Steinberg (Concordia University, Montreal), Liza Cirolia (African Center for Cities, Kapstadt) and Anindita Nag (Jindal Global, Delhi) the promises of wealth associated with smart technologies in cities. In a research project funded by the VolkswagenFoundation and the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Education (as part of zukunft.niedersachsen) entitled Automating the Logistical City: Space, Algorithms, Speculation (2021-2025) Armin explored with his collaborators how Amazon’s logistical urbanism speculates on urban, automated futures.

Armin is the director of the international BA program in „Cultural Studies: Organization, Society, and the Arts“, deputy director of the MA program in Cultural Studies: Culture and Organization, and a member of the study commission for the MA programs in the School of Culture and Society. He teaches regularly in the school’s programs and regularly supervises BA and MA theses. Armin is available for PhD supervision in his field of research.

Courses

Feedback Meeting Cultural Studies: Organization, Society, and the Arts
Armin Beverungen, Jan Teichmüller
Agenda:
1. Welcome, introduction, study/programme situation
2. Progress Report on the Implementation of the Measures Documented in the Last Teaching Report
3. Current student topics (This is where your feedback is needed!)
4. Agreements/measures

What are quality circles?
Quality circles are an important tool for advancement of your study programs, as well as the teaching that is being offered within them. The quality circle is an opportunity for students and lecturers to come together and discuss both the strengths and the weaknesses of the program with the program Director as well as other lecturers. The fact that these quality circles are conducted regularly is a defining feature of the quality development at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

When do quality circles take place?
Quality circles are conducted annually for major programs and every two years for minor programs.

Why is it important for you to attend?
The quality circle is designed as a feedback tool and is supposed to bring together students and lecturers to work together to improve a program and/or talk about current problems. A report documenting the results of the quality circle will be composed after that. Based on this report, measures will be taken to improve the study program. At the next quality circle, there will be a status update in how far the measures have been implemented. Therefore, the quality circle is a space for students to exert direct influence on their study programs.

A short summary of everything you need to know about quality circles at Leuphana University Lüneburg can be found at:
https://bit.ly/2Iz0FrD (German language)

In case you want to prepare for the quality circle, the program-screening-data for the program has been made available on myStudy (material).
Next appointment:
Lectures for this semester ended.
History of Cultural Studies and its Methods II
Armin Beverungen, Luca Scheunpflug
Organized as a lecture series, this course focuses on central themes and thinkers in the globalized sphere of cultural theorizing within the humanities and social sciences. The concerns, debates and methodologies of international cultural theorizing in part also draw upon different traditions and geographies of thought, or take the form of ›mobile theories‹ and ›travelling concepts‹ translated into different contexts, and change as they travel. The lecture series is, as suggested by the cultural theorizing explored, based on an understanding of culture as plural, as cultures that are continouously produced through, and made manifest in, embodied practices, discourses, spaces, emotional registers, technologies and organizational forms. In a globalized world, these cultural constellations are also geographically and linguistically plural, shaped by both global proceses and local conditions. They are thus contested and to some degree contingent. The terms and methods of cultural theorizing, its history and present, are invariably part of this ›cultural production and contestation‹. We hope that the lectures and discussions will therefore allow us to defamiliarize and enrich our ways of seeing and understanding, to make sense (differently) about how invariably globalized cultures take place.
Next appointment:
Lectures for this semester ended.
Media Technologies of Organization
Armin Beverungen, Lisa Conrad
The class brings together students from the MA "Media and Digital Cultures" and the MA "Culture and Organization" and is focused on the organizational powers of media technologies. ‘Media organize’, as the architectural theorist Reinhold Martin put it, and this is particularly true for digital media, according to the media theorist John Durham Peters. The class thus focuses on the way media organize, i.e. on their organizational capacities, on the kinds of organizational forms and processes associated with particular media technologies, as well as on the way these media technologies themselves are organized.

The course is broadly split into three parts: in a first part the class explores histories of media technologies of organization; in a second part students embark on a group exercise in which they research particular media technologies and their associated organizational forms and processes; and in a third part the class explores current instantiations of media technologies of organization in writing about them.
Next appointment:
Lectures for this semester ended.
Research colloquium sociology and cultural organisation
Armin Beverungen, Timon Beyes, Serhat Karakayali, Andrea Kretschmann, Anna Lisa Ramella, Stephan Scheel
Das Promotionskolloquium dient der Präsentation und vertieften Diskussion der Forschungsvorhaben im Kreise der Mitglieder des Promotionskollegs. Pro Kandidat*in steht üblicherweise 1 Stunde für Vortrag und Diskussion zur Verfügung. Die Präsentationen und Diskussion finden in deutscher oder englischer Sprache statt.
Next appointment:
Lectures for this semester ended.