Current Courses

Current Courses

Berta Martín-López

Ecological Restoration for Sustainability

COURSE DESCRIPTION

With the increasing human pressure on ecosystems and natural landscapes, one of the main challenges is to design and develop actions that supports the preservation of biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing. A central theme here is to integrate the ecological dimension with the socio-cultural dimension in order to create sustainable landscapes and equitable societies. Therefore, this module does not only focus on biodiversity, but also on human societies and their wellbeing.

During the seminar we will examine why we conserve biodiversity, how are biological and cultural diversities linked, and what are the key basic elements and processes to look at in order to think and design conservation policies and actions linked to wellbeing.

Ziel: Upon completion of this module, students should be able to:

1. Get knowledge about the state of the art in conservation biology from the perspective of ecological restoration;

2. Reflect about who conserves and restores, why we conserve and for whom,

3. Analyze current sustainability policies and actions related with conservation and restoration, and

4. Analyze and critically evaluate biological conservation practices;

5. Be able to be able to communicate the aforementioned aspects in writing and oral formats.

Colloquium Social-ecological system research

Das Kolloquium wird inhaltlich verschiedene Methoden, Ansätze und Ergebnisse sozial-ökologischer Forschung behandeln und unterschiedliche Formate anbieten: Studierende präsentieren ihre Forschungsvorhaben und/ oder Ergebnisse, die dann mit den Betreuuenden und anderen Forschern diskutiert werden können

Ziel: Ziel der Veranstaltung ist ein Austausch zwischen den Forschenden und Promovierenden, aber auch eine Präsentation des Promotionsvorhabens und eine Reflexion über die Fortschritte der Promotion

Basics of Sustainable Development

The course provide lectures on a wide variety of sustainability topics that connect with the focus of each of the seminars, including biodiversity conservation and food security, sustainable consumption and governance for sustainability. Thus the course covers theory, approaches and tools relating to sustainability, including the ecological, social and governance realms. By the end of the course you will understand the basics for sustainability and will get basic knowledge of the projects conducted in the three seminars of this minor.

Ziel: To introduce students to:

i) an overview of how sustainability has been and is being addressed in the fields of biodiversity conservation, sustainable consumption and governance;

ii) knowledge and ways of thinking with which to understand these three complementary approaches to move towards sustainability;

iii) to thereby provide a diverse background to the seminars of the Sustainability Minor.

Introduction to Ecosystem Restoration and Social-Ecological Systems

Ecological Restoration for Sustainability- Project Planning

IMPORTANT: our first introductory session is on the 7th April, Friday, at 11.00 am (not the normal 9,15). It will be either live or on zoom depending on how things develop over the next period.

Please make sure you attend this introductory meeting as all other tasks will depend on information you gain in this meeting and we will talk about the pecha kucha examination format.

Students are now in four different groups:

1) Abiotic butterflies

2) Understory pollinators

3) Outreach and connection to nature

4) Camera traps and wildlife

In this semester you will develop your plans you started for the posters in the winter and sample the orchard with your goals in mind. We plan to add a moth trap that we would sample 3 times in the summer, which could be a nice addition to the camera trap and wildlife group.

We are currently losing pollinators, the bees and the flies and the butterflies, in our intensively managed landscapes and we need theses organisms not least to feed ourselves. What can we do? Come and help us to restore, study and manage cultural landscapes that can provide us with both food and the diversity of life!

One of the most important challenges of our time is how to combine biodiversity and food security, as our human population and our influence on the biophysical basis of our existence on earth increases. Many people are no longer connected to nature, and feel alienated from natural processes and places. Our activities are causing major biodiversity decline that in turn affects how our ecosystems that we depend on function and the services they provide for us humans. Although our influence is often negative, there are many ways in which we can have positive effects on biodiversity as well as ensuring food security is possible.

What can we do?

This course combines key aspects of biodiversity conservation and

ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems with the extensive management of cultural landscapes,. The latter provide us with food and resources whilst at the same time fostering biodiversity. It is also highly relevant for the topic of sustainable consumption, as it instills in participants the value of extensively managed landscapes that cannot provide us with huge bumper harvests but are more resilient in face of climate change and provide much more habitat for many species to co-exist with us.

In this planning seminar, we will plan projects in detail. Our baseline project is a wonderful cultural landscape site near the village of Wendisch-Evern, where together with the a traditional orchard club (Streuobstwiesenverein) in November 2016 we restored an apple (and cherry and pear) orchard to a degraded horse paddock with low biodiversity and high nutrients in the soils (not good for biodiversity).

Since the restoration action we have been doing two main things with different student cohorts:

1) tracking how the plants and animals change at the site over time; we expect that the biodiversity of plants and insects and birds will increase over time, as we remove nutrients by mowing or grazing the site and this is good for promoting more plant and hence also animal species.

2) We are testing whether we can attract even more insects to the site but planting different grassland plants under each of the 15 apple trees; more tasty clover and co species (Klee) or forbs species that attract pollinators but are not quite as tasty as the clover and co species.

This is the first time that anybody has studied this option scientifically in a traditional orchard, and if it works, it may be a nice option for attracting more pollinators to many other orchard sites.

We are embedded in a cultural landscape including returning wolves and a shephard who does not want to have her sheep at our site - there are plenty of socio-ecological topics within the overall topic of the magic orchard and its transformation over time.

GENERAL INFO:

This course is one several different courses in the sustainability minor (sustainable consumption, sustainable governance, life cycles)- you need to choose one of the main courses and then you stick to this course over two years. This course in the summer semester, Module 3 and 4, takes place in the third semester of your minor.

Building on the preceding modules introducing you to transdisciplinary research and projects, and to the key concepts and methods in ecological restoration, this semester you take part in two seminars that move into the more active sphere.

Ziel: You learn: what costitutes ecological restoration and what goals restoration has and can have, as well as which specific restoration goals we have in our orchard restoration. We will include an analysis of historical land use legacy in this semester's course in relation to how Understand the key drivers of biodiversity and what role humans can play in this (both in terms of how much management is good for and how much is bad for biodiversity). We will also assess how the apple trees develop over time, including apple harvests (expected as of 2020). In this course you acqaint yourself closely with living organisms in a living ecosystems (grassland plants, apple trees, beetles, butterflies) and learn how to assess how the diversity of these organisms changes over time. You dive into field ecology and learn how to assess a site and present the outcome to a general audience. You learn how to

plan and run a biodiversity conservation/ restoration and food security project from the original idea through to complex ecological and social procedures. This will include learning about project planning and management, learning specific techniques to enable you to successfully plan a TD project of this kind. You will interact with actors within academia and outside academia. We will use theory and best practice knowledge to help us plan the project.

In addition, you have the luck of being accompanied by a professional personal coach, Eva Völler, who will help to deal with project management, group work and reaching your goals.

Current Courses

Dr. Aymara Victoria Llanque Zonta

Indigenous peoples and local perspectives towards sustainability

The seminar reflect on the perspectives of indigenous peoples, rural communities and other local actors in the sustainability debate. It will address the relationship between extractivism and commons appropriation processes, to discuss about development discourses into a geopolitical context that produce institutional change. Specifically, the seminar will expose institutional-building process bottom up resource management initiatives in extractive territories, connected with indigenous and local actor’s modern life style.

Ziel: Provide a background of indigenous and local perspectives, their interactions, power relations and structural asymmetries in territories with bio-cultural diversity, combining conceptual framework with practical experiences.

Psychology of Motivation, Emotion, Communication and Self-Regulation - Sem 1 for Major GESS

Global warming has brought the bio-physical limits of our planet into the international spotlight, highlighting the urgent need for structural changes in capitalist production models, sustained by a modern-colonial gender matrix. This system functions not only as a geopolitical apparatus but also deeply influences the minds and hearts of those inhabiting these territories.

This is not a matter of science fiction, but a crisis whose consequences we are already experiencing. It is predicted that without a significant reduction in carbon emissions, global temperatures could rise by more than 2 degrees. Media outlets have repeatedly depicted the devastating consequences of climate change: hurricanes, storms, fires, floods, droughts, pandemics, and people facing starvation and the need to migrate. This apocalyptic scenario does not signal the end of the world but rather the end of the modern-colonial matrix as we know it.

This perspective generates feelings of hopelessness, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and helplessness, triggering defense mechanisms and, in more privileged sectors, a growing disconnection from the impacts affecting distant bodies and territories. The antifuturist manifesto, "dear colonizer, your future is gone," signed by an ancestor, challenges us to reflect: Why do we imagine the end of the world and not the end of colonialism?

The worlds around us shape and inhabit us. This course will explore how our perception of the environment stems from an internal representation, an inner psychic landscape co-created through interactions and interdependent relationships between human and non-human communities. Extractive actions, through which we marinate our knowledge, generate representations of nature from an individualistic and anthropocentric perspective. Capitalism not only colonizes the space we inhabit, what we consume, how we dress, and how we use time, but also deeply configures desire and lack. Civilizational paradigms such as personal success, authorship, social ascent, racial supremacy, consumption, and accumulation, form part of social imaginaries and identity construction, fostering increasingly authoritarian, segregating, and excluding forms.

We will revisit Wilhelm Reich's perspective, who proposed a psychoanalysis of fascism a century ago, as its implications remain relevant today. Colonized worlds are supported by fascist political practices that reveal the links between authoritarian forms of power and capitalist accumulation. In this context, we will delve into obedience and submission, mechanisms intertwined with psychic structures, relationships with authority, and unconscious processes that shape individual subjectivity.

The urgency of dialogue between human and non-human actors grows, focusing on how to restore conditions to guarantee justice for all living entities on the planet. This process challenges the foundations of anthropocentrism, as it decentralizes the human as central to nature—one who uses and owns it.

We will examine contemporary feelings toward nature, in a world where we have become more disconnected from it than ever, ignoring the natural cycles and interconnections that sustain the "ethics of the land," a concept emerging from ecofeminism. This ethics represents an ecological consciousness in response to overexploitation issues. We will explore social movements such as Cimarrón Antifuturism, which uses metaphors of a future already passed to propose alternatives from deep ecology, the power of interactions, dark ecology, and community feminisms. These movements invite us to rethink body-territory and pluriverse perspectives, stimulating an openness toward an ecological mental becoming that builds new representations of happiness in alignment with the other, recognizing the other, and co-existing with the other.

For Amerindian ontologies, transformation involves constructing the "ancestral future," understood as the revitalization of everyday practices that connect us with nature, within nature and as nature. From Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism to Lacanian postulates on symbolic and social reality, we will learn about situated knowledge, where both Amazonian Amerindian worldviews and critical constructivism return subjecthood to all living entities. Viveiros de Castro's call to position perspective within a bio-cultural relationship with the world comes from the desire to understand knowledge through a plurality of visions that navigate contaminated worlds. We will also explore Anna Tsing’s (2015) perspective on contamination, which in a broader sense refers to the contact and mixing between species, cultures, and ecosystems in a world of tensions. Tsing argues that when global and local dynamics intersect, friction is created, a process of interaction that is not necessarily harmonious. This friction, especially at points of contact between capitalist globalization and local forms of life and knowledge, provides fertile ground for transformation. Thus, plurality can be seen as the social glue of being, resisting neoliberal recognition technologies that aim to absorb all cultures into a single model.

Furthermore, we will analyze the critique of consumerist idealization, masking enjoyment while questioning how to ensure long-term well-being in a sustainable world. We will shift the focus from the individual as the sole creator of desire to the interactions, relational effects, and language in the production of meanings for consumption.

We will also explore narcissism, anthropocentric views, and love for nature. Capitalism, especially global neoliberalism, promotes our narcissistic identity as consumers and erodes affectionate feelings toward nature, fostering the belief that we have the right to exploit it without considering the consequences. We will critique the separation of nature-culture, learning about the concept of multinaturalism in Amerindian ontologies.

Finally, we will explore how human communities can take responsibility for the friction generated by the capitalist model and what actions can be taken. We will consider both individual and communal psychological components. This course will study psychoanalysis, social movement perspectives, Indigenous thought, and decolonial critical philosophical frameworks, focusing on how we establish relationships between our bodies and territories we inhabit, with the intention of re-signifying our bond with nature, from nature, within nature, and as nature.

From the perspective of the Naza indigenous people in Colombia, "I am because we all are," this phrase invites us to imagine a continuous process of becoming as inhabitants of the planet in community, communalized, in interdependent and cooperative relationships between humans and more-than-humans. This principle, rooted in Amerindian ontologies, informs how we understand being, doing, and knowing, where agency is intertwined with territories.

In this course, we will address the work of Arturo Escobar (2015), who argues that plurality refers not only to distinct human cultures (a relativist view) but also to non-human life forms, ecosystems, and entities that coexist in the world. The diversity of forms of existence, arising from different worldviews, should not be hierarchized or reduced to singular categories as they respond to codes and large signifiers, reflecting heterogeneous existences beyond modern universalism.

Understanding plural worlds will also lead us to reflect on how we construct subjects within this context. The framework of Paladines (2024) contributes to this discussion by developing the idea of transmodern subjects—those who inhabit colonial modernity on their own terms. Binary logics such as tradition/modernity, woman/man, young/old, indigenous/white are insufficient to understand the multiple worlds guiding the present in human communities.

Finally, we will analyze psychoanalytic contributions regarding aesthetic value and the creative process in art as a form of expression of other possible worlds. "The deepest is the skin" (Octavio Paz, 1950) will be used as an exercise to dismantle the components intervening in the enjoyment of the dissatisfied subject, suffering from disconnection with their desire. We will also explore which aesthetic mechanisms can contribute to new meanings related to a living, sustainable world. This phenomenon will be analyzed through a photographic exercise, as part of Walter Benjamin's recent past archaeology, to understand the social imaginaries transmitted in a world on fire and explore possibilities for connecting art with emotional, aesthetic processes of systemic transformation.

Ziel: Main Learning Objective:

To critically examine the intersection of global warming, capitalism, and colonial gender matrices, exploring psychoanalytic, decolonial, and ecofeminist perspectives to understand the transformations needed in human-nature relationships and sustainability practices.

Secondary Learning Objectives:

- To analyze the role of psychoanalysis in understanding obedience, submission, and the dynamics of power and authority in shaping human-subjectivity and environmental behaviors.

- To explore the concept of plural worlds, examining Amerindian ontologies, the perspectives of deep ecology, and the implications of a multi-natural world in addressing global ecological challenges.

- To engage with alternative social movements and critiques of consumerism, developing new ways of thinking about well-being, sustainability, and ecological ethics in response to the dominant capitalist paradigm.

Sustainable Food Systems

Sustainable food system (SFS) is an approach that aims at delivering food security and nutrition for all people, i.e., a healthier, fairer, more productive and inclusive of marginalized or not-well informed populations, environmentally sustainable and resilient, and able to promote accessible and nutritious diets. These are complex and systemic challenges that require the combination of interconnected actions at the local, national, regional and global levels (FAO, 2018). As known, the crescent pressures from population growth, urbanization, changing consumption and diet patterns (including undernutrition, overweight and obesity), biodiversity loss and climate crises are all contributing factors to the strain on food systems, meaning that an overhaul in our current concepts and practices is needed for our food systems to become sustainable (UN, 2023).

Ziel: The main objective of this course is to understand the fundamentals, practices, and the relevance of the topic with both a local perspective in the Lüneburg region (or surrounding area in/ Lower-Saxony) and global perspective (South America). Students will work on different projects and, if possible, generate new data in order to discuss local (potential) actions towards more sustainable food systems. To this end, it is necessary to identify relevant initiatives (Lüneburg region /)(as the ones promoted by a company, farm, school, NGO, research centres, and any other pertinent institution), focusing on key criteria: e.g., food production (as agriculture, including the peri-urban and cities areas), processing (materials and techniques), consumption, food waste and loss prevention, policy, regulation, entrepreneurship, (bio)circular economy (regenerative processes, design and market of healthier products, making the most of food), as well as the interlinks with, for instance, educational programs and strategies.

Current Courses

M.Sc. Milena Groß

Ecological Restoration for Sustainability- Project Planning

IMPORTANT: our first introductory session is on the 7th April, Friday, at 11.00 am (not the normal 9,15). It will be either live or on zoom depending on how things develop over the next period.

Please make sure you attend this introductory meeting as all other tasks will depend on information you gain in this meeting and we will talk about the pecha kucha examination format.

Students are now in four different groups:

1) Abiotic butterflies

2) Understory pollinators

3) Outreach and connection to nature

4) Camera traps and wildlife

In this semester you will develop your plans you started for the posters in the winter and sample the orchard with your goals in mind. We plan to add a moth trap that we would sample 3 times in the summer, which could be a nice addition to the camera trap and wildlife group.

We are currently losing pollinators, the bees and the flies and the butterflies, in our intensively managed landscapes and we need theses organisms not least to feed ourselves. What can we do? Come and help us to restore, study and manage cultural landscapes that can provide us with both food and the diversity of life!

One of the most important challenges of our time is how to combine biodiversity and food security, as our human population and our influence on the biophysical basis of our existence on earth increases. Many people are no longer connected to nature, and feel alienated from natural processes and places. Our activities are causing major biodiversity decline that in turn affects how our ecosystems that we depend on function and the services they provide for us humans. Although our influence is often negative, there are many ways in which we can have positive effects on biodiversity as well as ensuring food security is possible.

What can we do?

This course combines key aspects of biodiversity conservation and

ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems with the extensive management of cultural landscapes,. The latter provide us with food and resources whilst at the same time fostering biodiversity. It is also highly relevant for the topic of sustainable consumption, as it instills in participants the value of extensively managed landscapes that cannot provide us with huge bumper harvests but are more resilient in face of climate change and provide much more habitat for many species to co-exist with us.

In this planning seminar, we will plan projects in detail. Our baseline project is a wonderful cultural landscape site near the village of Wendisch-Evern, where together with the a traditional orchard club (Streuobstwiesenverein) in November 2016 we restored an apple (and cherry and pear) orchard to a degraded horse paddock with low biodiversity and high nutrients in the soils (not good for biodiversity).

Since the restoration action we have been doing two main things with different student cohorts:

1) tracking how the plants and animals change at the site over time; we expect that the biodiversity of plants and insects and birds will increase over time, as we remove nutrients by mowing or grazing the site and this is good for promoting more plant and hence also animal species.

2) We are testing whether we can attract even more insects to the site but planting different grassland plants under each of the 15 apple trees; more tasty clover and co species (Klee) or forbs species that attract pollinators but are not quite as tasty as the clover and co species.

This is the first time that anybody has studied this option scientifically in a traditional orchard, and if it works, it may be a nice option for attracting more pollinators to many other orchard sites.

We are embedded in a cultural landscape including returning wolves and a shephard who does not want to have her sheep at our site - there are plenty of socio-ecological topics within the overall topic of the magic orchard and its transformation over time.

GENERAL INFO:

This course is one several different courses in the sustainability minor (sustainable consumption, sustainable governance, life cycles)- you need to choose one of the main courses and then you stick to this course over two years. This course in the summer semester, Module 3 and 4, takes place in the third semester of your minor.

Building on the preceding modules introducing you to transdisciplinary research and projects, and to the key concepts and methods in ecological restoration, this semester you take part in two seminars that move into the more active sphere.

Ziel: You learn: what costitutes ecological restoration and what goals restoration has and can have, as well as which specific restoration goals we have in our orchard restoration. We will include an analysis of historical land use legacy in this semester's course in relation to how Understand the key drivers of biodiversity and what role humans can play in this (both in terms of how much management is good for and how much is bad for biodiversity). We will also assess how the apple trees develop over time, including apple harvests (expected as of 2020). In this course you acqaint yourself closely with living organisms in a living ecosystems (grassland plants, apple trees, beetles, butterflies) and learn how to assess how the diversity of these organisms changes over time. You dive into field ecology and learn how to assess a site and present the outcome to a general audience. You learn how to

plan and run a biodiversity conservation/ restoration and food security project from the original idea through to complex ecological and social procedures. This will include learning about project planning and management, learning specific techniques to enable you to successfully plan a TD project of this kind. You will interact with actors within academia and outside academia. We will use theory and best practice knowledge to help us plan the project.

In addition, you have the luck of being accompanied by a professional personal coach, Eva Völler, who will help to deal with project management, group work and reaching your goals.

Current Courses

Pramila Thapa

Sustainable urban transformation of a cross-border city - a social-ecological systems approach

CONTENT:

Currently there are two apparently opposing trends regarding national borders: growing nationalism demanding for more border protection or even border closure, and simultaneously very high cross-border mobility. While sometimes treated as rather abstract concepts or pass-through/transition areas within the European Union, cross-border regions are home to almost 40% of Europe’s population. This means, living close to the border or even cross-border is part of their everyday life, and tangible as well as intangible values are attributed to various places along and across the border. A specific case is the double city of Słubice and Frankfurt(Oder) at the Polish-German border. Every day, thousands of people cross the border at the inner-city bridge over the Odra river. Here, abstract border and cross-border debates become very concrete and localized. The city governments aim for a sustainable cross-border city center that integrates the border bridge as the central points in an urban area of a ca. 1km radius, which is the focus of current planning activities.

Our course connects directly to these activities. In a participatory process citizen came up with four main topics of interest for future urban development: mobility, urban green, places of encounter, and social activities. Together with the research project Move’n’Sense, based at Leuphana and the University of Life Science in Wroclaw, these key topics have been further explored using a participatory mapping survey. Additionally, this course draws on the activities and results of a previous Master TD project (summer term 24 and winter term 24/25). These entail insights on (1) the relation between cross-border identity and perception of common challenges and conservation intention of the Odra river; (2) more-than human perspectives and diverse value frames; (3) different perspectives for a specific urban planning case; (4) visions for a pedestrian Odra border bridge to foster social cohesion and human-nature interaction. In this course, students will work together with different local practice partners contributing to solve local challenges associated to the above-mentioned topics.

PROCESS:

Part 1 Definition of research objective and design

The objectives of the first part are to gain an overview of all preceding work, form groups according to the students’ individual interests, to develop a basic understanding of project management, and to establish a first contact with local practice partners. At the end of this part, the students are set up in their team, know their (potential) practice partners, have developed fist research questions and/or hypothesis, and have designed their transdisciplinary study. Tentative 3 sessions until end of April.

Part 2 Co-creation of knowledge

The aim of the second part is to create some solution-oriented and transferable knowledge through cooperative research. The students will apply a method of choice that fits the research questions, their expertise and practice partners’ capacities and needs, and analyze and evaluate data. At the end of this part student groups have gathered data based on sound scientific research methods that responds their research questions and are valuable for practice partners. This part will include an excursion of 2 to 3 days. Tentative 7 sessions (including excursion) until mid June.

Part 3 Knowledge re-integration

The aim of this part is to interpret your results in cooperation with practice partners and peers to develop a knowledge re-integration strategy. At the end of this part the students have finalized their data analysis and received feedback. Tentative 2 sessions until beginning of July.

Part 4 knowledge communication and dissemination

The aim of the final part is to develop an artifact (end product or strategy for communication and dissemination) and present this to practice partners and/or local community, and peers. Tentative 2 sessions, until end of lecture time.

Ziel: COURSE OBJECTIVES:

1. Students are able to co-create visions with local stakeholders for the study area through the application of transdisciplinary knowledge and methods.

2. Students are able to understand and evaluate the process through critical self-reflection to learn from their experience and to improve the process in future projects.