Current Courses

Current Courses

Berta Martín-López

Introduction to Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functions

Environmental Sciences - an Introduction

First part: key scientific background necessary to work in environmental sciences; second part: social-science components of environmental sciences, including value systems and governance.

Ziel: Despite disciplinary boundaries: introduction to environmental sciences including two different perspectives, the natural and the social sciences. In this introductory course we combine basic knowledge in environmental sciences with knowledge of relevance to application to major challenges of our time. This will prepare the way for making cross-cutting connections between the different modules of the environmental science major in later semesters of the bachelor degree.

Environmental Sciences - an Introduction. Humanities seminar A (for GESS)

The main content includes:

• Conceptualization of paradigms of value-systems with practical exercises

• Identification of relevant stakeholders and institutions for environmental decision-making

• The importance of social relationships in environmental governance

• Social conflicts and the role of deliberation

The knowledge in seminars is constructed through role-play teaching method that allows students to understand social-ecological dynamics and to assimilate the contents learned in lectures by facing realistic situations and environmental problems

Ziel: The seminar aims to get knowledge about social aspects that determine sustainability decisions, particularly value-systems, conflicts between social actors, and power relations.

Environmental Sciences - an Introduction. Humanities seminar. Group B (for UWI)

The main content includes:

• Conceptualization of paradigms of value-systems with practical exercises

• Identification of relevant stakeholders and institutions for environmental decision-making

• The importance of social relationships in environmental governance

• Social conflicts and the role of deliberation

The knowledge in seminars is constructed through role-play teaching method that allows students to understand social-ecological dynamics and to assimilate the contents learned in lectures by facing realistic situations and environmental problems

Ziel: The seminar aims to get knowledge about social aspects that determine sustainability decisions, particularly value-systems, conflicts between social actors, and power relations.

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

Current Courses

Dr. Aymara Victoria Llanque Zonta

Environmental Sciences - an Introduction. Humanities seminar C (for UWI and GESS)

The main content includes:

• Conceptualization of paradigms of value-systems with practical exercises

• Identification of relevant stakeholders and institutions for environmental decision-making

• The importance of social relationships in environmental governance

• Social conflicts and the role of deliberation

The knowledge in seminars is constructed through role-play teaching method that allows students to understand social-ecological dynamics and to assimilate the contents learned in lectures by facing realistic situations and environmental problems

Ziel: The seminar aims to get knowledge about social aspects that determine sustainability decisions, particularly value-systems, conflicts between social actors, and power relations.

"When we stand up, they have to negotiate with us" - South-North North-South proposals from local to global sustainable changes

The course proposes to reflect on participation and contributions for sustainability transformation from the perspective of knowledge generation. We will focus on sustainability from the point through lectures and workshop style methodology; for an understanding of political participation of social movements. We will emphasize in social learning and the adoption of a transdisciplinary approach to the interface between science, policy and practice. The inspiration will be local proposals to global changes, mainly examples of South-North North, and their pragmatic responsible towards sustainability.

There are 2 threads under which sessions will be organized in the seminar:

1. Interface of Science, Policy and Practice, resonance with social movements from North and South.

2. Understanding meta topics- transformative, transgressive and transdisciplinary learning.

Ziel: It is expected that at the end of the seminar, we have:

1) Develop broader understanding of the concept of sustainable development

Gastropolitics: From Plate to Planet (FSL)

This course offers a sensitive immersion into the ways we feed ourselves, and into the historical, material, spiritual, and political relations that are metabolized each time we eat. Inspired by the empirical philosophy of Annemarie Mol, we start from a simple yet powerful premise: eating is a way of thinking, not from an abstract mind, but from a metabolic mind, one that digests, transforms, remembers, and dreams through the body. Eating is not an individual act, but a relational pact, with the earth, with other species, with the divine, and with time. The point of departure will not be a theory about food, but rather food practices themselves as a window into understanding the world.

We build upon the notion of body-territory developed by Guatemalan Maya Indigenous thinker Lorena Cabnal: our bodies are the first territory in dispute, battlegrounds where monocultures, advertisements, ultra-processed products, imposed diets, displaced knowledges, and silenced memories intersect. We will ask: What nourishes us, and what empties or deterritorializes us? How do we heal hunger, of the body and of the spirit? What life networks organize what we eat, how do we relate to them, name them, share them?

We will begin by reflecting on the radical interdependence between body and territory, through the lenses of community-based antipatriarchal feminisms and ecofeminisms, to situate one of the structural axes of contemporary food systems: the agroextractive model and the necropolitics of hunger. We will examine how agribusiness not only produces monocultures, but also monocorporealities, monodiets, and monocultures of thought.

We will trace a historical journey through strategic foods in the consolidation of the modern colonial gender system, through narratives surrounding salt, sugar, coffee, chocolate, spices, cotton, among others. These foods helped to establish the foundations of capitalist machinery in the 16th and 17th centuries and continue today as examples of the international division of labor and the perpetuation of territorial expropriation policies in the form of global commodity chains.

We will talk about a good cup of coffee, but we will not stop at its taste, variety, or brewing method, all elements of our experience as consumers. We are interested in where our mind goes as we enjoy a cup of coffee, what connections we make with the roasted seeds that nourish us, how the living territory circulates within us as we drink, who are the beings involved in the process, how the value chain is formed, and most of all, how we can think beyond and through market narratives to strengthen territorial perspectives.

We will explore the relationship between pre-modern diets and the resistances of European rural communities to colonial food impositions, as well as the dietary changes that followed European invasion in the Global South. We will analyze how cannibalism narratives in the “Americas” were used to dehumanize territories and justify their exploitation, even as Indigenous medicinal knowledges were absorbed into European pharmaceuticals. Today, the cannibals of the Global South “eat monocultures”: repetitive, contaminated, and nutritionally impoverished.

In this context, we will approach sustainable food systems not as a mere technical improvement, but as a political, cultural, and spiritual transformation. In response to dietary homogenization, we will explore agro-food revitalization processes, from ritualized recipes to ancestral fermentation practices. We will study cases such as raw milk cheese from southern Brazil, persecuted by public health authorities but essential to peasant microbiomes, and fermented beverages made with saliva, such as chicha and masato, revalorized as part of an ecology of care and vital plurality.

We will learn about multinaturalism and object-subject relationalities from Viveiros de Castro, to understand how certain Amazonian communities conceive food as an animated entity that heals Wisire: a spiritual anemia caused by uprootedness and the presence of agribusiness. We will delve into food practices in which insects, leaves, prayers, non-psychoactive mushrooms, fermented roots, fats, and unrefined sugars are part of an integral health system. In this frame, cooking and eating become acts of healing, communion, and resistance.

We will reflect on how food builds our bodies and territories from within, to imagine how food can return to us language, time, spirit, and social organization, a sense of communality. The course is conceived as a confluence between culinary history, philosophy of the body, Indigenous cosmopolitics, decolonial critique, and urban food experiences, in search of a language that is not only academic but also experiential—one that allows us to recover recipes, rituals, encounters, affections, and networks.

Because encountering food is a radical act: it implies pacts of commensality, interdependent relationships, and an ethics of care. Eating also means choosing who we align with, what world we want to digest, and which one we are willing to cook.

Ziel: Objective:

Main Learning Objective: To understand food as a relational, historical, and political practice that connects body and territory, and to critically analyze how food systems shape and contest ways of life, knowledge systems, and social relations.

Secondary Learning Objectives:

1. To identify and analyze the effects of the agro-extractive model and food coloniality on bodies, territories, and cultures, through concepts such as body-territory, the necropolitics of hunger, and monocultures of being.

2. To explore ancestral and contemporary food practices (such as fermentation, ritual, and cosmologies) as forms of resistance, healing, and reterritorialization, from ecofeminist, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives.

Current Courses

M.Sc. Milena Groß

Ecological restoration for sustainability - second module

With the increasing human pressure on ecosystems and cultural landscapes, one of the main challenges is to design and develop ecological restoration that supports the preservation of biodiversity, ecosystem services and livelihoods security. 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, restoration does not only focus on ecological functions and biodiversity, but also on human communities, their knowledge and values. Indeed, restoration requires of society as agents of sustainable transformations.

During the seminar in the second module we will examine how we can restore nature, how we can engage different social actors and how we can measure the impacts of restoration strategies on human wellbeing and biodiversity.

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

1. Get knowledge about basic ecological and social methods for implementing restoration practices;

2. Be familiar with the restoration project in a traditional orchard

3. Identify relevant research questions and design a methodological approach to answer them

Students will also get competencies on:

1. Ability to systematically research information

2. Ability to work in interdisciplinary teams

3. Ability to communicate in writing and oral formats.

Current Courses

Pramila Thapa

Sustainability Science - Discussion session 4

Conservation case studies. The present and the future

The first half of this course explores global change ecology and its connection to nature conservation, examining conservation and restoration approaches through research projects and case studies. Students will learn methods to maintain ecosystem integrity and restore degraded ecosystems.

The second half focuses on designing management strategies using scenario thinking and planning. Students will analyze case studies where scenario planning guides conservation and restoration and apply these methods to real or hypothetical cases.

By the end, students will understand ecosystem-specific threats, develop conservation strategies from ecological and social-ecological perspectives, and gain skills in participatory methods for designing conservation and restoration strategies.

Ziel: This course helps students understand global change impacts on ecosystems and develop conservation and restoration strategies. Through case studies and scenario planning, they will learn to assess challenges, apply participatory methods, and design effective management solutions.