Courses

Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus the NOISE Summerschool, as referred to below, will not take place this year.

This course starts with the yearly NOISE Summerschool (a small contribution to the NOISE programme will have to be paid). The NOISE Summerschool always takes place in the last week of August (i.e. the week before the academic year starts). After the thematically focused introduction to the course via the summerschool the course continues to train students in the basic building blocks of doing interdisciplinary feminist research: critical reading, collecting data/ building a corpus of texts, objects or phenomena, analyzing and writing. The course offers students the opportunity to map their fields of interest and makes them acquainted with empirical research/fieldwork. The course focusses on ‘doing gender’, which means that students learn to encounter gender studies in practice. In this context, the students will write an academic paper related to the summerschool topics, and get acquainted with the requirements for academic papers in this master programme. Furthermore, the students will be given instructions about academic English and the library.

Only open to students of the MA Gender Studies.

Underlying the approach to this course is the idea that in order to become producers of knowledge, not just consumers, we must be fully aware of the skills and orientations that go into conceiving, implementing, and composing a text or a study. The course aims to further verse students in the basic building blocks of doing interdisciplinary feminist research by: (1) reading canonical feminist texts/studies that present different ways of doing feminist research (ethnographic, archival, literary, theoretical, etc.) and (2) having the opportunity to practice how to use various research methods (e.g., interviewing, observation, critical discourse analysis, textual analysis, archival analysis, etc.). Throughout this course, students will be honing their critical-thinking skills; building a corpus of texts, objects or phenomena; and engaging in substantial research and writing. The aim of the course is not to become an instant expert but rather to gain familiarity and experience with a rang.

This course is for students in the MA Gender Studies and GEMMA; students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.

This course provides students with an analytical 'toolbox' for their studies in the MA Gender Studies. Each week deals with a different branch of feminist theories and methodologies that inspire contemporary Gender Studies. The course presents different schools of feminist thinking concerning subjectivity, agency and difference, and it also explores the most influential strands of feminist epistemologies, such as e.g. standpoint epistemologies, situated knowledges and intersectional approaches. The course starts from postfoundational thinking, which is defined as a historical and epistemological moment of questioning and challenging established notions of subjectivity and knowledge production. It concentrates especially on an affirmative understanding and manoeuvering of differences and diversity in today's global context, and it elaborates them from multiple feminist traditions of thought and activism. The course enables the student to learn that any societal relevant phenomenon can be analysed with concepts and approaches derived from the large body of Gender Studies scholarship.

This course is for students in the MA Gender Studies; students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.

The Research Lab II prepares the students to build a foundation for two main tasks they will have to complete in the following semester - internship report and MA thesis - while continuing to polish their academic skills in writing course papers. Consecutive sessions will be devoted to issues like developing one's bibliography; methodology; research question; research plan; and setting working agenda, while gradually designing and elaborating on the proper content of the research.

Only open to students of the MA Gender Studies.

This course examines, through gender and postcolonial theories, the politics and the practices of (self)representations, with a focus on the erotics, passion and empowerment, but also on separation, violence, and pain. In the process, it presents different feminist approaches to the complex interplay of affect, emotion, and feeling, focusing on the emergence of new subjectivities and communities.

This course is for students in the MA Gender Studies and GEMMA; students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.

This course explores in both creative and critical ways the ‘hype’ that still surrounds the new technological and digital cultures we are living in today. Somatechnics - combining in one word the constitutive interaction of bodies (soma) and technologies (techne) - explores how ever changing technologies affect our daily experience and understanding of questions of subjectivity and identity, of bodies and power. The course investigates how technologies continuously change our relationship to our bodies.
This course approaches the processes of identification and subjectivization across a number of social and cultural practices, such as bodily appearances and sexualities, medical practices and popular scientific knowledge productions, the distinction between the virtual and the real, and visual cultures. The course explores how contemporary techno-theoretical frameworks can help us understand our manifold experiences in a globalized world. The course will provide interdisciplinary approaches (Gender Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, STS, Science Fiction) and it will raise issues of representation and agency in the new digital era.

This course is for students in the MA Gender Studies; students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.

This course addresses the main theoretical, historical, cultural, and political transitions that shape our postcolonial world as well as postcolonial studies as a field. Postcolonial transitions take place through both material and discursive practices and emerge at the intersection of cultural formations, geopolitical reconfigurations, and socio-economic changes. The course will illustrate and analyze the “postcolonial condition” we live in through the close reading of theoretical texts and the discussion of global and local political debates. In so doing, the course offers an overview of the canon of postcolonial theory - the theory of Orientalism, the project of Subaltern Studies, the conceptualizations of hybridity and colonial mimesis, and the relation between postcolonial and decolonial approaches, among others - while at the same time locating and applying these theories and concepts to particular postcolonial locations and histories. The course places particular emphasis on the intersections between Postcolonial Studies and Gender/Queer Studies, foregrounding the role played by sexual politics in colonial domination and postcolonial transitions.

This course is for students in the MA Gender Studies; students from other MA programmes should check with the course coordinator before enrolling. The entrance requirements for Exchange Students will be checked by International Office and the Programme coordinator. You do not have to contact the Programme coordinator by yourself.

The internship consists of 10 full weeks of a work placement. It allows the student to experience a professional engagement within the MA study period. The internship is a central colomn within the study curriculum of the MA Gender Studies. Under supervision of a staff member (internal supervisor), the student is required to find his/her own internship by approaching organisations and companies of his/her interest. Before the internship starts, a workplan is developed together with the internship supervisor (internal and at the organization/institution) that specifies in detail the activities, projects, and the Gender Studies relevant research component of the internship. At the end of the internship the student will compile a report of both the achievements and experiences at the internship placement and present the undertaken research of the internship.

The final project consists of a written assignment (thesis) that is related to the internship and, therefore, aimed at the professional practice of Gender Studies. The thesis needs to suffice in all academic standards (scientific originality and significance, theoretical-methodological framework, thorough analysis of a case study). Students formulate a clear research question based on the knowledge gained throughout their studies and the questions raised during the internship. For the process of writing the thesis, students will be supervised by a staff member (mentor/supervisor).