The elective modules include Module 2: Concepts of Europe in a Global Context, Elective Module 4, and Module 5: Semester Abroad.
While the required modules must be completed by all students, each student has the choice of an elective module. The elective module consists of two courses in Module 2: Concepts of Europe in a Global Context (to be completed with examination for 6 credit points), two courses in the chosen Module 4 (to be completed with examination for 6 credit points), and 18-24 credit points abroad.
In additional to Modules 2 and 5, students choose one of three modules for Module 4. The three fields are thematically organized and interdisciplinary; that means that relevant courses can be chosen from various departments. The choice of the module creates a thematic focus of each student’s studies. It enables a targeted differentiation of learned material and at the same time ensures an individual orientation in the course of studies.
Module 4
Narratives, Media, and Imaginations
This area of study opens up the worlds of text and image in which Europe constructs itself as a cultural giant on the global stage. Specifically, it deals with the key role of myths and collective imagination in the cultural memory of Europe, or with visions of the future in utopias or apocalyptic scenarios. Students will examine traditions, identity models, and patterns of conflict that are grounded in “grand” narratives, images, and ideas and are imaginatively as well as affectively organized. Next to narratives, media, and imaginings of European identity, the deconstruction, questioning, and critique of these entities will also be illuminated. Internal and external dislocations between center and periphery, the dynamics between the European South and North, East and West, urban and rural images of Europe shed light on historical and social transformations of the European. Historically, the span ranges from antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages and the differentiation of national language spaces, colonial and postcolonial narrative spaces into the global border-dissolving effects of modern mass media.
Social and Political Dynamics
This area of study places an emphasis on social and political dynamics and models that were and continue to be decisive for the development of Europe and its place in the world. Central complex issues of relevance to Europe—the role of religion, colonialism, migration, globalization—will be looked at critically, as are hegemonial concepts such as the “Christian West” or the “Cradle of Enlightenment,” which continue to influence internal and external perceptions of Europe today. A second main focus, in close relation to these topics, is Europe itself as a political construct, its institutional forms of integration, processes for solving internal and external conflicts, and the determination of its political borders.
Theory, Critique, and Reflection
The goal of this module is the engaged critique and reflection of students’ own thinking and knowledge stimulated by the contrasting of European and non-European forms and resources of knowledge. The module thus encourages the distancing from and the (self-)observation of one’s own and foreign historical, conceptual, and scientific processes. This area of study reflects developments that have shaped modern Europe and have, at times, established its central position in the world. Of central importance is the critical and reflective reappraisal of these processes of cultural transfer and exchange, which can be described as an entangled history and with which sometimes uniform standards were disseminated, but also new stimuli, new cultural entities, hierarchies, and inequalities emerged.