Ibero-American Studies: Master's Program 'Communication and Society in Ibero-America' Course Catalog Summer Semester 2025

Seminar: Anthropologies of Care

This course provides an introductory overview of the anthropology of care, examining key topics and approaches through a variety of ethnographic, theoretical, and cross-disciplinary materials. By drawing on these materials, we will explore care in its many forms—its presence and absence, its bureaucratic management, and its connections to kinship, labor, relatedness, and governance. The first part of the course will focus on theories of care as a moral practice, with a feminist perspective. In the second part, we will apply this perspective to ethnographic studies of care in diverse settings, shedding light on its political, economic, and lived realities. These studies will include discussions on the circulation of care in moral economies, its monetization as paid labor, the politics of healthcare in institutional contexts, and the role of care in kinship, household formations, and life course trajectories across cultures.

The course counts as seminar for module 1.

Seminar: The meaning of home (Heimat) in times of climate change and urban transformations

Climate change, urban transformations and growing socio-ecological inequalities are the mounting societal challenges of our times. In Human Geography these challenges have been studied from different approaches, either focusing on different urban development trends, ecological aspects or political entanglements. In this seminar we want to combine these different approaches by directing our focus on one socio-spatial dimension that is affected by these changes in a specific way: the home. What happens to home when climate change urges people to leave their house? How are people emotionally affected by wind parks installed close to their homes? How do energy transformations impact feelings of belonging to certain spaces or neighborhoods? By using an interdisciplinary concept of Heimat and the socio-spatial category of home, this seminar tries to better understand the effects of climate change and urban transformation in different regions of the world.

The course counts as seminar for module 2.

Seminar: Justice, Fairness and (In-)equality

This seminar introduces students to the study of inequality, justice, fairness and their connection. It provides students with a general understanding of these key theoretical concepts and with a broad and well-structured overview of various methodological approaches to study them empirically. Based on modern classics and recent application-oriented contributions in the literature students examine 1) fundamental questions of justice and fairness in modern societies and 2) procedural fairness and outcome fairness in representative democracies. Students also learn 3) about political, social and economic inequality around the world and explore the causes and consequences of inequality for citizens’ attitudes and behaviour. 

Thematically, we discuss issues of justice, and fairness in relation to adaptation to and mitigation of environmental pollution and climate change, global poverty reduction, and intersectional inequalities. Throughout the course, students are introduced to different data sources for empirical research on fairness, justice, and inequality, providing them with plenty of opportunities to do some initial thinking and develop first ideas for their term paper. By the end of the course, students will have improved their knowledge and skills in the areas of structured theoretical arguments, research design and causal inference. They will also apply their newly acquired insights through small exercises and hands-on research.

The course counts as seminar for module 2.

Seminar: Blackness and Whiteness in Brazilian Cinema and Scholarship

This course proposes to discuss racism and anti-racism in Brazilian society through Brazilian cinema and theoretical texts by Brazilian researcher. We use the seventh art as a didactic resource to reflect on how whiteness and Blackness shape Brazilian society. Based on this concrete reality, the course seeks to explore how Brazilian social and theoretical debates can also illuminate processes of racialization and otherness in other cultures and societies. The course methodology is based on an active and interactive approach, utilizing translanguaging as a strategy to integrate various forms of communication, allowing students to share their ideas, perceptions, and reflections through critical analysis of films and academic texts theorizing racism and anti-racism. Each session will focus on studying a film, followed by critical discussions and presentations, encouraging analysis of the works’ contexts and their relation to social issues and ongoing research. Course assessment will be divided between an oral presentation based on a critical analysis of one of the films covered, connecting cinema and theory and demonstrating understanding of concepts and their application to real social situations, along with active participation in discussions and critical reflection on films and texts. The course aims to expand students' academic repertoire by integrating theories, practices, and an interdisciplinary perspective on contemporary social challenges, demonstrating how Brazilian cinema serves as a field for social, political, and cultural reflection.

This counts as seminar for module 2. 

Practical: Communication and Public Spheres in Ibero-America

This practice studies the public sphere, comprised of the media, civil society, and politics, and looks at their relationships from a communication science perspective. The practice, therefore, introduces a selective conceptual vocabulary that is regarded as instrumental to understanding the communicators of political information, such as journalists or today’s ‘users’. Further, the practical focuses on characteristics that typically guide the content of the media and political information and serve to uncover structures of the communication itself.

This course counts as practical for module 3. 

Seminar: Introduction to quantitative data analysis using R

This course provides students with knowledge in quantitative methods for the investigation of central questions in political science, sociology and economics. The aim of the course is to enable the participants to conduct independent empirical analyses using the statistical software R. The central topics of the seminar are univariate, bivariate and first multivariate analysis methods, as well as the graphical and tabular presentation of empirical results. To take full advantage of this course, students should have had some prior exposure to quantitative data analysis. They should also have a solid understanding of basic statistical methods and a strong interest both in the subject matter and empirical-analytical research. Finally, they should be comfortable with reading academic publications in English. Students are able to comprehend the logic of common statistical methods and procedures in empirical research in the social sciences and understand their application in the context of empirical research. They are able to critically receive statistical statements and independently conduct simple data analyses.

The course counts as seminar for module 4.

Seminar: Media effects and Ibero-America

Because of individual limitations, most information about the world outside is assumed to be acquired through the media (Luhmann, 1996). Thus, many of our daily decisions and behaviors may be shaped by what we receive from the media. This seminar introduces selected (political) media effects approaches and, thus, into central aspects of communication science. In order to take into account the importance of contexts in research and the changing media system, the seminar selectively deals with media effects in Ibero-America on the one hand and with the impact of digital and social media content on the other. The seminar helps students understand how the individual use of media content affects our attitudes and behaviors, particularly concerning societal and political issues. 

The practice mainly builds on quantitative research literature, but previous knowledge of quantitative research is not required. A short introduction to reading quantitative papers is provided.

This course counts as seminar for module 5.

Seminar: The role of urban-rural dichotomies for food movements / Emancipatory Ruralities

This course explores the concept of rurality, examining its meaning, as well as challenges and potentials ascribed to it. The focus will moreover be on the analysis of social movements related to food and agriculture, as well as the phenomenon of rural populism.

This course counts as seminar for module 5b.