Course Schedule

Start > Masterprogramm Sustainability: Sustainability Science: Ecosystems, Biodiversity and Society (M.Sc.) -> Komplementärstudium -> Engaging with Knowledge and Sciences

Lehrveranstaltungen

Philosophy of Social Science (PhD Course open for Complementary Studies) (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Cristina Neesham, Markus Reihlen

Inhalt: *** IMPORTANT INFORMATION: COURSE REGISTRATION VIA EMAIL (SEE BELOW) *** This course provides you with insights into how to do more engaging and useful research. So what can philosophy contribute to social science? The answer is straightforward: it helps to construct more interesting research problems by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions. The philosophy of social science raises fundamental questions relevant to the practicing researcher, such as what is the nature of social phenomena? Should we see organizations as accumulations of autonomous individuals, collective actors with goals of their own, or systems embedded into society? What is the appropriate form of investigation? Should we rely on empirical facts, on our reason, on action, or on intuition? Can we investigate society by studying individuals or via their social structures? What values and norms of social actions are appropriate? Should we see the individual's freedom (maximization of individual benefit) or his/her responsibility to the community at large (maximization of collective benefit) as the primary goal of social action? This course blends specific perspectives from the philosophy of social science with controversies in social studies. Our use of the term social studies is broad; it includes all disciplines that study social systems of different kinds and of different levels such as economics, sociology, political science, culturology, social psychology, and the respective socio-technologies such as management. This course will enable students to explain how philosophy could contribute to the improvement and interestingness of social research. More specifically, students will be made familiar with general philosophical controversies in social science such as individualism versus holism, idealism versus materialism, the positivism versus postmodernism debates. Finally, we address the relation between science and praxis and reflect upon the different statuses of science and technology.

Race and Colonialism in International Political Economy (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Nadja Spatzl

Inhalt: Despite demands in- and outside of academia to pay (more) attention to the importance of race and colonialism in shaping past and contemporary societies, they remain at the margins of most disciplines and research fields. International Political Economy (IPE) is no exception to this, despite enduring colonial legacies e.g. in international trade and persistent racial economic inequalities. This seminar seeks to center race and colonialism in our understanding and analysis of historical and contemporary economic phenomena. In a first step, we therefore clarify why this neglect is an analytical problem. In a next step, we study different approaches that think together “the economy” and race as well as/ or colonialism and compare their analytical advantages and disadvantages. In this part of the seminar, we will familiarize ourselves with some of the debates around the significance of slavery, colonialism and racialization for the development of capitalism. In the last part of the seminar, we will apply our acquired theoretical knowledge to historical and contemporary empirical cases and processes, such as racialized markets or the emergence of tax havens in the Global South. A special emphasis will lie on a critical reflection of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the provided literature, as well as the historical, political and theoretical context in which the authors have developed their arguments.