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Start > Masterprogramm Kulturwissenschaften: Kritik der Gegenwart - Künste, Theorie, Geschichte (M.A.) -> Wahlbereich -> Urbanität und Raum

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.