course-schedule

Theories, sites and practices of organizing culture (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Maximilian Schellmann

Inhalt: The seminar is dedicated to forms and processes of cultural organization. The seminar is structured into three parts, echoed in the course schedule. In Part I (Sociological Background, organized into weekly sessions), we draw upon sociological and organization-theoretical writings to relate core questions of organization and organizing to changes in the sphere of art and cultural production. In Part II (Sites, organized into thematically blocked sessions), we engage with key fields and sites of cultural organizing. These entail, for instance, a) so-called ‘creative cities’ as sites of cultural organizing; b) the (related) rise of ‘culturepreneurship’ as a kind of entrepreneurial turn in cultural production; c) platform-based organization and its technologies of cultural production and circulation; d) (art) museums as paradigmatic cultural institutions and the demands to reorganize how they operate; e) contemporary art’s 'organizational turn' or 'organizational aesthetics' and its collective experiments in alternative organizing. In Part III (Fieldwork, organized into group-led empirical research and concluding research conference), the students conduct their own empirical investigations of contemporary forms and processes of organizing culture. The participants are asked to identify and form groups around specific cases, sites, initiatives or platforms (not limited to the fields and sites listed above). Feldwork can take the form of, for instance, on-site visits, interviews, participant observation, and other fieldwork techniques. The groups present their findings in a concluding research conference (in the form of a mini-exhibition) in a local art space.

Masterprogramm Cultural Studies: Culture and Organization - Kernbereich - Organization in Arts and Culture

Organizing culture: The art museum as site of organizational change (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: +++ If you would like to participate please send an email to haniel_esa@leuphana.de until September 29th, 2025 (max. 1 page covering your motivation why you would like to attend the course). You will be notified on October 2nd. The maximum number of Lüneburg participants is 10. +++ This course brings together students and lecturers from the University of St.Gallen’s program in Management, Organization Studies and Cultural Theory (MOK) and Leuphana University Lüneburg’s program in Culture & Organization (C&O). Designed as an intensive 4-day-experience, the course will take place in cooperation with - and will be hosted by - the Lenbachhaus in Munich (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München). It is carried out in conjunction with the European Haniel Program on Entrepreneurship and the Humanities (supported by the Haniel Foundation, https://eursummeracademy.com/) and the 'Community Arts and Culture' (part of the TriCo project funded by the the Federal Ministry of Education and Research; https://www.leuphana.de/en/partners/innovation-communities/arts-and-culture.html ). We can offer free accommodation in Munich for the nights from Monday (3.11.) to Saturday (8.11.). Students are expected to arrange (train) travel to Luxembourg (on Nov 3) and back (on Nov 8) themselves. Course content Besides the university, the museum of art is one of the oldest forms to think about and effectuate the organization and representation of knowledge, its history of ideas and its repertoire of artifacts and objects. Art museums are currently undergoing an enormous shift in how they perform their own functions. These organizational changes are propelled by different developments such as broader societal shift towards an experience economy and the culturalization of urban life, new practices of audience participation and exhibition formats, debates and demands around more inclusive and decolonial ways of collecting, exhibiting and reflecting art, positioning the art museum in the spotlight of political protest and activism, and – cutting across all of these developments – the ubiquity, everydayness and agencies of digital infrastructures, information technologies and media platforms. In short, the contemporary art museum is an exemplary site of organizational change. Yet how does this change take place? How is the museum organized (differently)? On invitation by Lenbachhaus Munich, this course will investigate the organizational challenges that museums face, and reflect upon responses and new practices of organizing. Students will have the unique opportunity to empirically engage with a leading art museum and the wider institutional landscape of organizing art and culture. As a site-specific course dedicated to fieldwork-based teaching and learning, the participants will be able to take a closer look behind the scenes, explore the museum’s processes, technologies and atmospheres of organizing, and engage with its curators, technicians, administrators, educators and managers. Joined by further guests and experts, we will jointly work towards an exhibition of the studentsʹ findings on the museum as site of organizational and cultural change. Course structure and indications of the learning and teaching design After an online kick-off session, the course is organized across 4,5 (full) days in Munich, which consist of thematic discussions, site-specific research, guest speakers, preparatory exercises and project work. Part 1 consists of exploring themes as part of the transformation of contemporary museums and forming groups around a specific theme. Part 2 consists of field work and empirical research based on the themes. In Part 3, we develop empirical findings (also through further literature research) and prepare the exhibition of findings, while Part 4 is setting up the exhibition and presenting the findings.

Masters Forum Culture & Organization (english) (Kolloquium)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: This Master Forum provides first and foremost an opportunity for students embarking on their MA theses to present an outline of their projects, with the goal of receiving productive critical feedback – both from instructors and from student peers. Please consider taking the MA Forum in the semester prior to the one in which you intend to write your MA thesis. The MA Forum is meant to help you develop your exposé, with which you can approach a supervisor and which you need to register your thesis. It is also a space for collective learning and peer feedback; seeing how others approach their thesis will help you with yours. You are also welcome to join the MA Forum again informally in the semester in which you write your thesis to present and receive feedback on a bit of writing. In addition, the Masters Forum also aims to facilitate critical reflection on a set of what may initially appear to be quite practical or even technical issues – around how scholarly research is carried out and presented – and yet often ultimately prove to be caught up with questions of content, argument and approach. We will discuss some of the common issues confronted by those carrying out scholarly research or writing in Cultural Studies, the Humanities and the Social Sciences. This will include general questions, including: how to arrive at and formulate a research question and a suitable framework for your project; how to begin thinking about method and methodology, and starting to conducting research; and ways of referencing and of acknowledging the use of sources. Students are invited to sign up to present an outline or an excerpt of their MA thesis. While this will ultimately depend on the number of students participating, students should expect to have around 30 minutes in total for the presentation and discussion of their projects, and presentations themselves should last between 10 and 15 minutes, allowing plenty of time for discussion. Students are required upload a two-page summary of their project or an excerpt of their thesis to myStudy one week before they are due to present. Exposés should include: • a working title for your thesis as well as your preliminary research question; • the approach, method or methodology that you plan on using, and the theoretical framework or points of reference for your project; • what you anticipate discovering or arguing in your thesis; • and a list of up to five key works that you will use, along with any additional information about sources you plan on using – such as archives, exhibitions or interview partners. Students are asked to attend all sessions of the Master Forum, and to have read the two-page summaries ahead of time. Please be ready to provide your fellow students with productive critical feedback on their projects! The Master Forum is examined (pass/fail) as a combined scholarly work [Kombinierte wissenschaftliche Arbeit] made up of (a) your two-page summary and (b) your presentation.

Space, affect and atmosphere in organized life (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: The course takes place as a workshop organized within the framework of the European Haniel Program on Entrepreneurship and the Humanities, organized in conjunction with Haniel Foundation and Curtius Foundation, and will take place in St.Gallen, Switzerland, from April 7th to April 10th 2026, hosted by the University of St.Gallen. The course is coordinated and taught by Chris Steyaert (University of St.Gallen) and Timon Beyes (Leuphana University Lüneburg), together with Monica Calcagno (Ca' Foscari University Venicer) and Martin Parker and Robin Holt (University of Bristol ). The course is open for doctoral students from each of the participating universities (Venice, Bristol, Lüneburg and St.Gallen). There is a maximum number of 20 participants. Thanks to the Haniel Foundation, there is no course fee, and we can offer free accommodation and an evening meal in St.Gallen. Participants are asked to organize their own transport. Application deadline in Lüneburg is October 31st 2025. Applicants will be chosen on the basis of a CV and a motivation letter also including a short reflection on ‘Space, atmosphere and affect in organized life’ (max. 2 pages). Please send your application to haniel_esa@leuphana.de. Content Social theory and the study of social organization (and its subsets of management and entrepreneurship theories) have been swept along by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the last decades. Loosely connected to adjacent movements of thought (e.g., affect theory, neo-materialism), there now is a robust body of research inquiring into the sites of organization, their spatial power relations, their spatial multiplicity, their affective charge and atmospheric performativity. Addressing these concerns entails reconsidering the methods and performativity of organizational inquiry, from mappings to atmospheric walks, from drawing to videography, from topological analysis to a spatial poetics. This course invites PhD students working with, or interested in, the spatiality of organized life. Participants are asked to engage with current strands of spatial theorizing, to discuss spatial organization at work in different social spheres, and to reflect on how these ‘spatial attunements’ affect our understanding of organization, management and entrepreneurship – not least as concerns the participants’ own dissertation projects and empirical materials. In particular (but not exclusively so), this PhD workshop is dedicated to exploring and thinking the interplay of space, affect and atmosphere. ‘Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’, Teresa Brennan has asked at the very beginning of her study of The Transmission of Affect. Organizational spatialities are invariably ‘spaces with a mood’ (Gernot Böhme). Affect, we might claim, is organizational in being spatial and spatialized; and everyday spaces of organizing and being-organized are loaded with affect, hence atmospheric. How do such affective and atmospheric ‘spacings’ enable, and play out in, organized life? How do they become organizational forces, how do they shape everyday life? How are they managed, controlled and modulated, how are they resisted, subverted and transformed? As Lauren Berlant has argued, moreover, it is atmospheric disturbances that enable a critical attunement, a feeling-and-becoming-critical, not least as scholars. In times of the highly engineered spatialiaties and atmospheres of organized life (in business and economics just as much as in politics, culture, entertainment and everyday urban life) and their affective and spatialized (and partly violent) in- and exclusions, and in times of the atmospheric breakdowns wrought by climate change, the PhD workshop seeks to map and reconsider the ambivalence (and the struggles around) space, affect and atmosphere as forces of organization. Structure The workshop begins with an opening meal on Tuesday, April 7th, and ends on Friday, April 10th, at 2pm. Accommodation will be offered from Tuesday to Friday. The basis of the course will be the participants’ essays. Convenors and invited speakers will add input on their experience in spatial studies of social organization. The course will also be situated in St.Gallen and will have various elements that allow us to explore everyday spatialities, affects and atmospheres. Therefore, it will take the form of a combination of mini lectures, break-out sessions and exercises, fieldwork excursions and student presentations and commentary. Indicative readings Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77-81. Beyes, T., & Holt, R. (2020). The Topographical Imagination: Space and organization theory. Organization Theory, 1(2). Beyes, T., & Steyaert, C. (2011). Spacing organization: non-representational theory and performing organizational space. Organization, 19(1), 45-61. Beyes, T., & Steyaert, C. (2013). Strangely Familiar: The Uncanny and Unsiting Organizational Analysis. Organization Studies, 34(10), 1445-1465. Beyes, T., & Steyaert, C. (2020). Unsettling bodies of knowledge: Walking as a pedagogy of affect. Management Learning, 52(2), 224-242. Böhme, G. (2017). Atmospheric architectures: The aesthetics of felt spaces. London: Bloomsbury. Brennan, T. (2004). The transmission of affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Furuhata, Y. (2022). Climatic media: Transpacific experiments in atmospheric control. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jørgensen, L. and Beyes, T. (2023). Organizing Half-Things: Knowing, Theorizing and Studying Atmospheres. Organization Theory, 4(4). Leclair, M. (2022). The Atmospherics of Creativity: Affective and spatial materiality in a designer’s studio. Organization Studies, 44(5), 807-829. Leff, J. R. (2021.) Expanding feminist affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 41. Michels, C. & Steyaert, C. (2017). By accident and by design: Composing affective atmospheres in an urban art intervention. Organization, 19(1), 43-59. Stephenson, K. A., Kuismin, A., Putnam, L. L., & Sivunen, A. (2020). Process studies of organizational space. Academy of Management Annals, 14(2), 797-827. Stewart, K. (2011.) Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(3), 445-453. Steyaert, C. (2010). Queering Space: Heterotopic Life in Derek Jarman's Garden. Gender, Work & Organization, 17: 45-68. Wall, I. rua. (2019). Policing Atmospheres: Crowds, Protest and ‘Atmotechnics’. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(4), 143-162.

Master-Abend C&O (Arbeitsgemeinschaft)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Petra Nietzky

Termin:
Einzeltermin | Di, 14.10.2025, 17:45 - Di, 14.10.2025, 19:00 | C 5.311 Seminarraum

Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Prof. Dr. Timon Beyes

Lehrveranstaltungen

Theories, sites and practices of organizing culture (Seminar)

Organizing culture: The art museum as site of organizational change (Seminar)

Masters Forum Culture & Organization (english) (Kolloquium)

Space, affect and atmosphere in organized life (Seminar)

Master-Abend C&O (Arbeitsgemeinschaft)