- Course Title: Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies: Trauma Through Contemporary and Historical Perspectives
- Course date: July 11-16.2022
- Application Deadline: Feb 28, 2022
- ECTS Credit: 1.0
Individual and collective traumas are increasingly at the heart of social and political decision-making in different parts of the world. Different forms of trauma shape our perception of the social reality, ranging from #MeToo and BlackLivesMatter to the Stolen Generations and the Holocaust, the pandemic, and climate-catastrophes. They impact the ways we recognize and remember but also forget and silence past and present injustices. The divergent attitudes towards these traumatic experiences determine both how our societies currently look like and how they will look like in the future. The comprehensive assessment of different facets of trauma is thus urgent.
The field of Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies represents the new tendencies in the intersecting areas studying trauma in the 21st century. The necessity to incorporate diverse perspectives on trauma coming from different cultures as well as different academic disciplines prompts the need for re-conceptualizing the field of trauma studies.
The proposed course is part of a longer curricular/training initiative; the initiative of a new program in Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies. The course thus is mapping the results of a new research field in teaching, providing information on the newest developments of trauma research, bringing together approaches from across disciplines such as cultural studies, psychology, history, computer science, gender studies, human rights, and beyond.
- Course Title: Dismantling Democracy from Within
- Course date: June 27–July 2, 2022
- Application Deadline: Feb 28, 2022
- ECTS Credit: 1.0
The “Dismantling Democracy from Within" course advances the twin mission of understanding the critical challenges democracy is facing and developing the democratic agendas that will meet these challenges under variable cultural and socio-economic conditions. Such a mission can only be secured by facilitating a robust dialogue among students, activists, and scholars assembled from all over the world. Students will leave the Summer School with a deeper knowledge of the specific challenges facing democracy in different contexts as well as a global understanding of how they are connected.
- Course Title: Civic Engagement: Student as Citizen
- Course date: July 4-15, 2022
- Application Deadline: Feb 28, 2022
- ECTS Credit: 2.0
This course is taught in the backdrop of the pandemic and threats to civil society becoming even more apparent. The Civicus 2021 report identifies some strategies governments utilized to “assert top-down, command-and-control approaches that seemed to show little trust in the wisdom of people and communities. The first instinct of many presidents and prime ministers was to act as though the pandemic was a threat to their power, rolling out well-rehearsed routines of repression. States took on broad emergency powers, and at least some clearly used the pandemic as a pretext to introduce rights restrictions that will last long after the crisis has passed. At a time when scrutiny was more difficult, the suspicion was that some political leaders were opportunistically consolidating their power, rushing through repressive measures they had long wanted to unleash.”