Course Schedule

Veranstaltungen von Dr. Anke Gruendel

Lehrveranstaltungen

Politics at the Interface: Thresholds of power and the making of subjects (Seminar)

Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 10:15 - 11:45 | 06.04.2026 - 10.07.2026 | C 12.013 Seminarraum

Inhalt: This seminar examines politics at the interface: the sites where social, technical, and institutional systems meet, where subjects are formed, and where sometimes contestation can erupt. While the concept of the interface originates in the discourse of human–computer interaction as a point of contact between the computer and its human operator, media theory has long generalized it into a broader analytic. Here interfaces are more than screens or GUIs, but effects of technical mediation which can be found in all forms of media. The course extends this insight beyond digital technologies and new media to argue that interfaces permeate all aspects of contemporary life. From bureaucratic procedures and classroom syllabi to checkout counters and public transportation systems, interfacial interactions structure how we move, know, and act in the world. And yet, their very ubiquity allows them to recede from view, obfuscating their existence and masking their influence. Drawing on scholarship from science and technology studies, media theory, anthropology, and new materialist thought, the course investigates what happens at the interface. More than passive touchpoints, interfaces actively shape subjectivity and power by organizing relations between humans, technologies, institutions, and materials. Together, we develop an analytical approach to social and political interfaces which allows us to identify critical sites of mediation: where knowledge is translated, information formatted, cultural scripts are rehearsed, norms are enforced, and behaviors are elicited or constrained. In short, the course explores how power comes to matter at the political interface and how interfacial effects make (and unmake) subjects. At the same time, the course asks to what extent interfaces may become sites of contestation rather than compliance. Thus, we interrogate interfacial materiality and how it conditions political effects and causes friction, allowing for refusal of subjectivation and even opening up pathways for alternative modes of engagement.

Ethics in Transformation Research (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Anke Gruendel, Anna Heudorfer, Henrike Kohpeiß