Vorlesungsverzeichnis

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Start > Masterprogramm Cultural Studies: Culture and Organization (M.A.) -> Wahlbereich -> Organization: Structure, Power, Economies

Lehrveranstaltungen

European Summer Academy: Exploring Urban Atmospheres (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

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.

The Bureaucratic Imperative (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Lydia Jørgensen

Inhalt: The seminar aims to provide students with theories and concepts to critically examine the modulation and management of bureaucracy and its imperative of power as organizational form. The students are asked to conduct fieldwork-based analysis in/of bureaucracies, the constitution of power relations and its consequences. Bureaucracies in many ways form the backbone of democratic rights and obligations in contemporary western societies, but are also constitutive of how companies organize their work and decision making. Overall bureaucracies can be said to hold the power to guide the actions of others, as through public or company policies, application procedures etc. Following Weber’s seminal text on bureaucracies as rule based, hierarchical and impersonal, bureaucracies have often been portrayed as the imperative of a rational way of organizing, that is affectively neutral. Yet, Webers ideal type of bureaucracy was a sociological investigation of an organizational form emerging in a specific historic context, that altered previous power relations. Together with more recent societal developments, also the organizational form of bureaucracy and its constitution of power seems to have changed, when Foucault addresses 'governmentality' as intertwined with power relations and (self)disciplining humans. By taking a socio-cultural approach to bureaucracy, the seminar seeks to address the organizational form of bureaucracy and its power imperative(s) following the societal context. How can we understand the shift from the impersonal and hierarchical imperative towards e.g. the modulation of affective relations and human disciplining, which has come with nudging? How do and why these changes in bureaucracies emerge? What role does neo-liberal thinking and behavioural economics play in the organization of bureaucracies and their power relations?. How does bureaucratic power relations show in contemporary organizations, like the workplace, urban planning, government communication etc.? Accordingly, this seminar seeks to investigate how bureaucracy is part of producing, inciting and organizing a complex set of (affective) power relations, and asks how we can understand bureaucracies as an organizational imperative, that demands a certain kind of action and exercies power. Just consider your interactions with the bureaucratic apparatus, when you get a letter from the tax authorities, see the deterent pictures on a cigarette package or companies nudge employees creativity though innovative work spaces. At the level of these everyday practices and behaviour, (affective) power relations happen that modulate our lives, but also seek to organize and shape lives in a certain way. Willed or not bureaucracies take part in organizing power relation, that may range from clear control and command to very subtle affective (self)discipling and organizing. Further, addressing the bureaucratic imperative as part of organizing power relations also raises questions of critique and (political) resistance. Inquiring bureaucratic imperatives means studying how power relations happen and play out in everyday interactions, documents, and work spaces. Investigating bureaucracy thereby articulates the configuration of social realities and power relations through lived (affective) experiences as a major force, how they are central in the socio-cultural development of society and how they may reflect political considerations. The seminar is dedicated to both understanding and exploring these developments. Its aim is to, conceptually and methodologically, equip students with a basic understanding of ‘the imperative of bureaucracy’ as first and foremost an organizational phenomenon of power that can be manifested through everyday practices, spatial organization and embodied traces.