Current semester
Winter semester 2023/2024
The following courses will be offered in the winter semester 2023/24:
- Social Theory in the Anthropocene (MA): in German
- Polycrisis and Deep Contestation of International Orders: Societal and Conceptual Responses (graduate seminar, together with Prof. Dr. Antje Wiener, Prof. Dr. Stefan Aykut)
This seminar is designed for PhD students with an interest in undertaking empirical research in the fields of Sociology, Political Science, International Relations (IR) and Global Governance, broadly conceived. This seminar addresses topical societal and political phenomena and discusses them with reference to concepts, approaches, and methods for the study of societal agency in global contexts, of forms of polycentric and multi-actor coordination, and interactions between bottom-up initiatives and top-down steering through states.
This semester’s focus is on the phenomenon of polycrisis i.e. the occurrence of multiple crises at the same time which implies a structural presence of crisis that requires societal transformation and political change.
Research on Global Governance is currently characterized by a series of conceptual and methodological challenges. Environmental and other global problems do not stop at borders. They often point to fundamental social science questions, while also bearing deeply normative tensions. Furthermore, they are shaped by a variety of actors and a blurring of governance levels, visible for instance in the tendency towards transnational networks, informal governance arrangements and polycentric governance architectures. All the more, research designs need to engage thoroughly with adequate methodologies and conceptual framings that reflect such complexities.
The seminar addresses concepts, methods, and approaches based on selected core readings and invites participants to engage with these readings with a view to select and develop their own research designs and discuss them with specific regard to methodology and conceptual framing.