course-schedule

European Summer Academy: Exploring Urban Atmospheres (Seminar)

Inhalt: +++ If you would like to participate please send an email to haniel_esa@leuphana.de until March 28th, 2025 (max. 1 page covering your motivation why you would like to attend the Summer Academy). You will be notified until March 31st . The maximum number of Lüneburg participants is 10. +++ The European Summer Academy is part of the European Haniel Program on Entrepreneurship and the Humanities. The 2025 version is supported by the Curtius Foundation. The Academy brings together MA students from the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), the Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), Ca’Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and Leuphana University. See https://eursummeracademy.com/ The Academy will have its base in Berlin. Thanks to the generous support of Haniel and Curtius Foundations, we can offer free accommodation. Course content 2025’s European Summer Academy will investigate the organizational, entrepreneurial and political conditions, consequences and potentials of urban atmospheres. To do so, current forms of political polarisation as well as practices of solidarity – witness the current ascent of the far right and the struggles around ecological and social well-being – are understood as atmospheric phenomena: as propelled by, and themselves shaping, collective affects and moods. The seminar aims to provide students with theories, concepts and methods to critically examine the emergence, modulation and management of urban atmospheres. The students are asked to conduct fieldwork-based analyses of atmospheric spaces, their constitution and consequences. Cities have always been perceived as atmospheric. Time and again, urban atmospheres are imagined and perceived as liberating, emancipating and entrepreneurial. Also, cities have been endlessly depicted and imagined as spaces of sensory overload, of excess, of violence, of anxieties and estrangement. While these tropes have a long history, we can observe – for one – a rise in atmospheric struggles and conflicts fuelled by the current polarisation of collective moods as they manifest in political extremism, racist and antisemitic sentiments and heterogeneous processes and practices of protest, but also in affective atmospheres of solidarity and togetherness. Moreover, recent decades have seen a political and economic shift towards emphasizing and engineering urban cultural vitality through atmospheric means. Consider, for instance, the staging of sensual experiences and spectacles, the turn to urban cultural heritage and consumption and the images and branding of so-called creative cities. Urban spaces and urban cultures are increasingly subject to atmospheric engineering. This seminar is dedicated to understanding and exploring these developments. Its aim is to conceptually and methodologically equip the students with a basic understanding of the ‘urban sensible’: of the city as first and foremost an embodied and atmospheric phenomenon. Moreover, students are challenged to venture out into the city and encounter the urban everyday themselves, conducting sensory fieldwork and enacting their own stories of the ‘atmospheric city’. Studying the atmospheric can be done through, for instance, interviews, observations, pictures, sound recordings and video-takes, drawings and maps, reports and articles. Joined by researchers of all participating universities, the teams will then transform their empirical work into presentations of how a city can be sensed, how its atmospheres organize urban life, and how such atmospherics become a technology of power as well as resistance. Course structure After an (online) introduction/preparation session, the course is organized in five parts and runs over 5 full days, which consist of thematic discussions, guest lectures, preparatory methodological exercises, on‑site visits and fieldwork, project analysis and putting together an exhibit of findings. Through mixed groups made up from participants from the participating universities, the learning process centres on the fieldwork on and in the atmospheric constitution of sites in the urban context of Berlin, which are reflected conceptually and personally by respectively drawing upon the preparatory readings and group reflections. Part 1 consists of exploring concepts of and methodologies of urban atmospheres. Part 2 consists of fieldwork and empirical research based on specific locations in the city of Berlin. In Part 3, we develop empirical findings through interweaving observations with findings from literature research. Part 4 is for preparing and executing the exhibition. Part 5 is setting up the exhibition and presenting the findings.

Forschungskolloquium Soziologie und Kulturorganisation (Kolloquium)

Dozent/in: Armin Beverungen, Timon Beyes, Serhat Karakayali, Andrea Kretschmann, Stephan Scheel

Inhalt: 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.

Journal writing and publishing (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Robin Holt

Inhalt: The course is designed for PhD students interested in, or embarking on, writing journal articles in the social sciences and the humanities. The course’s default language is English; written projects and group discussions can also be in German. The aim of this course is to take participants through the process of (international) journal publication. There are two aspects to this. First, considering the nature of academic knowledge production (using (and being used by) concepts, categories, methods etc.), and secondly the craft of writing and participating in the peer review process. As such this is not just a practical ‘how to’ course, but also requires participants to consider actively and reflexively the uses to which academic knowledge is being put, and the relational conditions of ‘its’ generation. There will be input presentation, but the emphasis will be a discursive, dialogical one, involving participants in conversations, presentations and group work. Participants should come prepared to discuss not only others but their own work, and to comment in constructive and substantive debate. The intent therefore is not just to take participants through the demands of producing written work suitable for academic publishing, but to do so having experienced critical engagement with the nature of theory, concepts, methods and claims. The lecturer has extensive editorial experience in journals of social theory, cultural theory and organization theory. I’m a Senior Editor of Organization Studies and have also published in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society (Sociology/Cultural Studies), Grey Room (cultural theory), the German-speaking Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft and Leviathan, and quite extensively in assorted journals of organization theory. The discussion on the nature of knowledge production will take in ideas from cultural and social theory, and studies of media and technology. Methodologically, the lecturer has largely been involved in qualitative work. The emphasis will not be on the technicalities of methodological approaches or methods, but on the kind of knowledge they create. The plan is to involve colleagues or guest faculty to enrich the course with further experiences.

Organization, organizations and organizing in art and culture (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Robin Kuchar

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 10:15 - 11:45 | 07.04.2025 - 11.07.2025 | C 16.222 Seminarraum

Inhalt: How can we understand culture, cultural productions and the arts through notions and theories of organization? Following up on the winter term’s introductory course to Organization, Society and the Arts, the course more systematically investigates the organizational nature of forms and processes of artistic production and cultural labour. To do so, the course is loosely structured through different understandings of organization and what they help us see, think and understand. These understandings range from classic theorizations of organization as formal organizations structured through hierarchy, membership and organizational purpose via notions of processual, ‘partial’ and networked organization to understandings of organizing as spatially, affectively or atmospherically constituted. Each approach will be discussed theoretically and empirically by bringing together conceptual texts with empirical studies or examples. The students are expected to prepare the sessions by engaging with the preparatory literature uploaded on mystudy. They will also be asked to prepare specific sessionsn (in groups) by way of case-based presentations and reflections. The course will take place weekly. Sessions entail input by the lecturers, class discussion, project work and group work phases, presentations and break-out sessions.

Leuphana Bachelor - Major Cultural Studies: Organization, Society, and the Arts - Understanding Cultural Organization

Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Prof. Dr. Timon Beyes

Lehrveranstaltungen

European Summer Academy: Exploring Urban Atmospheres (Seminar)

Forschungskolloquium Soziologie und Kulturorganisation (Kolloquium)

Journal writing and publishing (Seminar)

Organization, organizations and organizing in art and culture (Seminar)