Vorlesungsverzeichnis

Journal writing and publishing (Seminar)

Inhalt: The course is designed for PhD students interested in, or embarking on, writing journal articles. 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.

Spatial power: Theorizing and exploring the making of space (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: The seminar aims to provide students with an understanding of ‘space’ as central analytical category of cultural and social theory. Working with selected, relevant approaches to spatial analysis, the students will learn to critically examine the everyday production of space, its effects, power dynamics and possibilities. Interviewed by geographers in 1976, Michel Foucault expressed his irritation: How could space, he asked, be treated as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile”, while time would be seen as “richness, fecundity, life, dialectic”? Since then, things have changed. The question of space – space as ‘alive’, as fecund, multiple, diverse, contested, ever in movement – has become a primary matter of concern in social and cultural thought. The seminar zooms in on important conceptual strands of such spatial thinking, and it endeavours to try out and ‘test’ their empirical applicability and potency by way of explorative fieldwork. The first half of the course is dedicated to conceptual work. The philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s serves as main point of reference – indeed, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space is widely regarded as key text of the turn (back) to the spatial. From here, the seminar covers different understandings of ‘spatial power’, such as Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ (and its uses), Doreen Massey’s notion of spatial multiplicity, Nigel Thrift et al.’s turn to the affective and atmospheric constitution of space, and recent thought on feminist and queer spaces. In the second half of the seminar (and after some corresponding methodological exercises), the students will be asked to conduct fieldwork on the everyday production, appropriation and atmospherics of space, and to reflect upon their findings through spatial theories and concepts. The students’ findings will be presented in a concluding ‘research exhibition’.

Secrecy, Opacity and Intransparency (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: This course is dedicated to investigating the imaginaries, practices and infrastructures of secrecy. It aims to provide students with modalities of secrecy and the secret as central categories for understanding (not only) contemporary life. The course’s basic premise is that historical and contemporary societies are shaped by forms and episodes of secrecy, opacity and not-knowing. Today’s rise and ubiquity of computational media – its infrastructure, platforms and algorithms – updates and intensifies conditions of invisibility and illegibility, of what can be betrayed, what remains hidden and what is inaccessible and cannot be accounted for. Therefore, the course’s guiding question is: How can (resistance to) organized life be investigated and understood through different registers of secrecy? The course is based on a rethinking of secrecy itself. Secrecy is not merely an unfortunate necessity for exceptional circumstances or a strategy of last resort. It is not merely a state of exception mischievously upheld by state agencies and the tech giants of surveillance capitalism, to be countered by the panacea of making things public and transparent, and holding humans or algorithms responsible. Rather, secrecy is a constitutive and multi-faceted force of social organization. In this sense, we will go beyond the tradition of a hermeneutics of the secret, which demands endless answers to what, why and how. Rather than revealing secrets, the seminar explores, maps and discusses different notions of secrecy as key concepts with which to investigate organized life. The first half of the course will be given over to historical and contemporary approaches to secrecy as key concept of cultural inquiry and social theory. These writings and performances range from Georg Simmel’s sociology of the secret to Reinhard Koselleck’s history of secret societies, from the study of cybernetic »black-box epistemologies« (Peter Galison) to the diagnosis of today’s »Black Box Society« (Frank Pasquale), from present ideas of »postsecrecy« as collective resistance (Clare Birchall) and a »cloud ethics« based on the demand for opacity (Louise Amoore) to the postcolonial »right to opacity« (Edouard Glissant); from modes of secrecy staged in literary texts to contemporary art works that engage with registers of the arcane. In the second half of the course (working towards the concluding research conference), the students will be asked to conduct their own investigations into specific cases, sites, practices or technologies of secrecy.

Forschungskolloquium Soziologie und Kulturorganisation (Kolloquium)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Serhat Karakayali, Volker Kirchberg, Andrea Kretschmann

Termin:
Einzeltermin | Mi, 22.11.2023, 14:30 - Mi, 22.11.2023, 20:00 | C 7.320 Seminarraum

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.

Master-Auftakt C&O (Arbeitsgemeinschaft)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Petra Nietzky, Christina Wessely

Termin:
Einzeltermin | Mi, 18.10.2023, 17:30 - Mi, 18.10.2023, 18:30 | C 5.325 Seminarraum

Organizing Culture (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes, Maximilian Schellmann

Inhalt: The seminar is dedicated to contemporary transformations of the forms and processes of cultural organization. The seminar is broadly structured into three parts: In Part I, we will draw upon recent sociological and organization-theoretical work to reflect on the transformation of the sphere of art and cultural production, and its implications for understanding organization and organizing. In Part II, we will zoom in on specific fields and sites in order to discuss how cultural organizing has been reconfigured (or not). This entails, for instance, a) the (contested) transformation of urban space in and towards ‘creative cities’ and its emphasis on the fields of art and culture; b) the (related) rise of ‘culturepreneurship’ as a kind of entrepreneurial turn in cultural production, and its implications; c) the technological and socio-cultural transformation of (art) museums as key cultural institutions and the demands to reorganize how they operate; d) contemporary art’s keen interest in the nature of sociality and social transformation, where artistic production has turned to organization as a cultural form itself, as artistic material to be worked on and with. In Part III, the students will conduct their own empirical investigations of contemporary forms and processes of organizing culture. The participants will be asked to identify and form groups around specific cases, sites, initiatives or platforms (not limited to the fields and sites listed above), on which to conduct fieldwork in the form of on-site visits, interviews, participant observation, and other fieldwork techniques. The groups will present their findings in a research conference (in the form of a mini-exhibition) in a local art space (location tbd).