|
Lehrende: Associate Professor Constance DeVereaux; Nico Stockmann; Prof. Dr. Martin Tröndle
Veranstaltungsart:
Seminar
Orga-Einheit: Communication & Cultural Management
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
Issues in Cult & Com
Semesterwochenstunden:
3
Credits:
6,0
Hinweis: In Ihrer Prüfungsordnung können abweichende Credits festgelegt sein.
Standort:
Campus der Zeppelin Universität
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
10 | 35
Prioritätsschema: Standard-Priorisierung
Inhalte:
Travel to Berlin and explore cultural hybridity as a cultural policy imperative. This course examines how aesthetics and policy connect in contemporary hybrid cities. A hybrid city is characterized by diversity, with a wide range of social and cultural influences contributing to mixed and fluid identities as the norm. “Survival” in hybrid culture requires fluency, or a metaphorical ambidexterity in the cultural mix.
In this course, you will conceptualize and realize projects based on the framework of cultural hybridity and new aesthetics that emerge in the context of the mix and flow. Special foci on cultural policy response, limitations, and transformation are also explored.
This course recognizes that preservation of culture and of cultural diversity are central policy aims at the international and national level. These dual aims have been connected to both economics (tourism, creative industries) and politics (local cultural development, empowerment of marginalized groups) as means to achieve positive governmental aims. The international organization UNESCO, for example, has articulated cultural diversity and preservation of culture as central to their global mission. Critics of these policies maintain that cultural preservation impedes the development of culture, retarding the natural dynamics of aesthetic processes present in society. Similarly, critique of “diversity” as a policy aim argues that it constrains and impedes beneficial social and artistic exchange by limiting creative innovation.
With these realities as a backdrop, this course looks at cultural hybridity through policy, philosophies of art, and the aesthetics of everyday, practical life. A central argument is that in contemporary society we are all more prone to live hybrid lives in culturally hybrid spaces. Evidence may be seen in the fact that many global cities have come to be described as “hybrid” societies where cultures mix, almost seamlessly in the aesthetic realm. Identity, art, culture, and social engagement should operate differently, it seems, in culturally hybrid spaces.Cultural hybridity is also the focus of challenge. Many people see its manifestation as a remnant of colonialism—the physical signs of cultural dominance and repression written in the art and architecture of a city.
For all of the above reasons, cultural hybridity is worthy of academic inquiry and analysis. This course proposes to explore cultural hybridity from the perspective of policy and aesthetics through the lens of several so-called hybrid cities. Some examples include Shanghai, São Paulo, London, Amsterdam, Almaty, Los Angeles, Berlin.
Lernziele:
The course will combine online and face-to-face instruction, the latter to take place in Berlin as a quintessential hybrid city. You will very literally explore cultural sites and institutions that show evidence of cultural hybridity—that challenge, critique, and celebrate its existence through various means. Some questions to be answered in the context of the course is whether cultural hybridity requires policy support, and if so, what kind, precisely? Is it to be preserved and supported, or discouraged and eradicated? Is cultural hybridity an inevitable part of contemporary, globalized living that needs no policy intervention? Given cultural economic development in the 21st century, one could also ask if hybrid cities are necessarily and inevitably neo-liberal no matter where they exist? Finally, how do we understand artistic production in the context of cultural hybridity? How is it both supported and contested in political, social, and economic contexts.
The course is research-based. You will form research groups and select a research topic relevant to course material and objectives to investigate through the lens of a selected hybrid city. The Berlin portion of the course will allow you to connect course theories to a real-world case while developing perspectives they can apply to the cities they research.
Course program in short:
In the center of the course is the excursion to Berlin. The excision is prepared by reading material in online units and online discussions with the course members and the course instructor.
1. Preparation Phase (February & March)
Reading and online discussions of preparatory literature with constant feedback of the course instructor.
2. Intensive Phase (Excursion Week)
Excursion week with events and lectures in Berlin.
3. Project Phase (April & May)
Group/individual project/paper work with online feedback by the course instructor, if requested.
Weitere Informationen zu den Prüfungsleistungen:
The assessment details will be discussed as a Teaching Contract in the first session of the course (online) in February.
For further information on the course contact nico.stockmann@zu.de
|
