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Start > Masterprogramm Cultural Studies: Culture and Organization (M.A.) -> Wahlbereich -> Organization, Aesthetics, Materiality

Lehrveranstaltungen

European Summer Academy: Cultural and artistic ecologies of organizing (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Timon Beyes

Inhalt: +++ The European Summer Academy, enabled by the German Haniel Foundation, brings together MA students and teachers from four different European universities: the University of St. Gallen, the Copenhagen Business School, Leuphana University Lüneburg and CaʹFoscari University of Venice. The Academy will have its base in Berlin, Germany. Thanks to the generous support of the Haniel Foundation, we can offer free accommodation as well as supporting train travel to Berlin and back. If you would like to participate please send an email to haniel_esa@leuphana.de until April 1st, 2026 (max. 1 page covering your motivation why you would like to attend the Summer Academy; please also indicate your study program in the letter). You will be notified until April 3rd . The maximum number of Lüneburg participants is 10. +++ 2026’s European Summer Academy will investigate the organizational conditions and capacities of urban cultural production in times of budget cuts and political antagonism. How can cultural and artistic milieus, scenes, organizations and sites respond to current economic and political struggles? How do urban cultural ecologies change under such conditions, and how are the spaces, atmospheres and infrastructures altered in which any form of cultural organization is embedded and to which it contributes? The Summer Academy will take the predicament of Berlin’s cultural sector as empirical ground. For 2025, Berlin’s cultural budget has been slashed by 12%, with further cuts announced for the year of 2026. Impacting both established cultural institutions and independent art spaces, the cuts constitute a major blow for a city whose reputation is largely based on a thriving and globally renowned cultural scene. They affect livelihoods and modes of organizing culture. At the same time and like elsewhere, Berlin’s cultural and artistic milieus are marked by increasing political antagonisms and struggle. The rise of right-wing populism and its call to defund everything that is critical of a nationalist understanding of culture threatens the comparably diverse sphere of art and culture and its capacity for irreverent, subversive and creative thought and action. Moreover, the violent disputes unfolding in the Middle East have provoked deep disagreement within the cultural field and have led to increasingly interventionist attempts to govern artistic expression. The Summer Academy will be dedicated to these developments. It will ask students to become participant observers and ethnographers of the everyday, so as to study – on their feet, with compassion, care and a critical sensibility – how cultural and artistic sites might find responses to the current travails, and how urban cultural milieus and atmosphere are re-shaped by them. To do so, the Summer Academy will be fieldwork-based and work together with a number of cultural sites, organizations and collectives. Students will venture out into the city, conducting fieldwork and translating their empirical findings into exhibits of cultural and artistic ecologies in turbulent times. Course structure After an (online) introduction/preparation session, the course is organized in four 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. Please note that this is an intense week of fieldwork and discussion, in which you're expected to fully participate. Through mixed groups made up from participants from the various participating universities, the learning process centres on the fieldwork on and on cultural 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 cultural production and milieus. Part 2 consists of fieldwork and empirical research based on specific locations in the city of Berlin. In Part 3, we develop and analyze empirical findings through interweaving observations with findings from literature research. Part 4 is for preparing, setting up the exhibition and presenting the findings.

Work space, spacing work (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Lydia Jørgensen

Inhalt: Space has never merely served as a backdrop for work—it has structured, enabled, and constrained the very possibility. By taking a socio-cultural approach to work and its spatial dimension, the seminar seeks to address the spatial organization of work, its recent changes and implications for how we understand work and its organization. The Industrial Revolution extracted work from the home and relocated it to the factory and (bureaucratic) office, which inaugurated new spatial regimes and spatial technologies that displined bodies, regulated time, maximized efficiency and organized hierarchies. With the rise of the knowledge economy, digital technologies, and networked communication, work and its spatial infrastructure is again transforming. Mobile devices, laptops, and cloud-based platforms work have become somewhat ubiquitous by transgressing previous spatial boundaries—into homes, cafés, airports, and public spaces. New work paradigms like hybrid work, mobile work, and work from anywhere exemplify this spatial decentering of work The seminar seeks to investigate how work is intertwined with space and how the contemporary spacing of work produces, incites and informs complex new organizational forms, alters (traditional) work relations, and forsters socio-cultural questions on how to understand and (spatially) organize it in contemporary society. For one, the emergence of remote and home-based work challenges previous boundaries between professional and personal space and make these work spaces become contested affective, organizational, and political terrains. Simultaneously, the spacing of work raises questions about who actually gets to be spatially flexible. While some workers benefit from spatial autonomy and may be able to work from anywhere, others still have to remain spatially fixated. Thus, new work spaces and the spacing of work may also mask new forms of inequality, surveillance, and exclusion. Inquiring contemporary work spaces, means studying how they are performed and practiced in everyday interactions, whereby articulating the configuration of social realities, power relations and lived (affective) experiences. How does the spacing of work e.g. impact and alter our understanding of ‘professionalism’, our affective involvement, work-life balance etc.? What does differences across sectors and organizations alter our conceptions of work and working culture? How does the spacing of work become political? How does the legal infrastructure of work resonate with the spacing of work (working hours, worker rights, safety, ‘anywhereness’ etc.)? Overall the seminar is dedicated to both understanding and exploring the current developments of work and its spatial organization. Its aim is to, conceptually and methodologically, equip students with a basic understanding of work and its relation to space as first and foremost an organizational aspect that is manifested through everyday practices and spatial arrangements, yet raises cultural and political questions on, and to, contemporary society.