As part of the “Teaching and Learning with Society: Transdisciplinary Course Program,” faculty and students explore how learning can be shaped within and in collaboration with society.

In collaboration with artists, cultural institutions, and civil society initiatives, the selected courses in the summer term 2026 incorporate societal experiences and community knowledge, including artistic archival and collection work, site-specific knowledge and anti-discrimination discourses. They explore artistic approaches to topics such as culture, health and pollution in Berlin, and utilize movement-based methods of knowledge processing in political theory and social movements.

1. “The Fifth Wall – Navina Sundaram. Working with a digital and physical archive”

Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider (Institute for Asian and African Studies)

The seminar combines work with the online archive “Die Fünfte Wand – Navina Sundaram” (The Fifth Wall – Navina Sundaram), that compiles journalistic, cinematic and personal materials on migration, feminism, decolonization and media criticism and practical engagement with original materials in the object lab at ZfK. The students will reflect archives as places of societal knowledge production.  Cooperating with experts from the fields of education, artistic film and archival practices, the course incorporates non-academic perspectives and offers six public events.

2. Theater in Practice: Living Archives

Dr. Constanze Baum (Institute fpr German Literature)

As “Living Archives,” objects, texts and their histories from HU archives and literature-related collections will be brought to life in this course at the Theaterhaus Mitte and in the Object Lab at the ZfK. Using exercises and methods from performing arts and impro theater, students will explore ways to express themselves through voice, body, gestures, and facial expressions, and develop short individual and group scenes. Research, development and documentation of such “object staging,” as well as a pop-up performance of selected scenes during the Long Night of Science are part of the course.

3. Taking a stand as a teacher? Dealing with anti-democratic tendencies and extremism in schools and classrooms

Dr. Julia Frohn (Professional School of Education, PSE)

In collaboration with the association “Aufstehen gegen Rassismus” (Stand Up Against Racism), the seminar addresses the role of teachers in dealing with anti-democratic tendencies and extremism. It reflects on what it means for teachers to “take a stand” and what scope for action teachers have in schools and classrooms. The accompanying exercise examines political mobilisation on TikTok with a focus on memes as carriers of extremist content. Students analyse their potential impact and develop own democracy-promoting memes for democracy and media education.

4. Critical Film Education – between School, Cinema, and Society

Charlotte Wiesner (Institute for Education Sciences)

In this film education seminar for prospective elementary school teachers, students engage in an open exchange with practitioners from society to consider how film education that is critical of discrimination can be designed for the classroom. The seminar takes a research-based and participatory approach and involves practitioners from the BIPOC community and from the film and cinema landscape (e.g., film libraries, Vision Kino – Network for Film and Media Competence, cinemas, filmmakers).

5. Berlin.Culture.City.

Prof. Dr. Friederike Landau-Donnelly ( Geography Department, Cultural and Social Geography)

The aim of the seminar “Berlin.Kultur.Stadt.” is to convey interdisciplinary perspectives on the ‘creative’ city of Berlin. Via student-generated mappings of various cultural spaces, districts, and infrastructures in Berlin and in cooperation with civil society partner Kulturraum gGmbH, that launched the “Kulturkataster” (cultural register), students explore Berlin’s cultural and urban development-related policies that shape it as city of culture. As part of a final exhibition and transdisciplinary knowledge transfer, students provide insights into the spatial geographic exploration of cultural sites.

6. Health and Art Narratives in Berlin. Institutions, collective practices and artistic approaches

Maria Morata (Berlin Perspectives)

How do contemporary artistic practices approach and challenge the binary of health and illness? Framed within Disability Studies and Crip Theory, the course explores artistic experiences of illness and vulnerability as platforms for social transformation and as emancipatory tools for navigating a normative and ableist world. Featuring Berlin-based artists and collectives, curators and scholars, the course also includes visits to the Berlin Museum of Medical History and the Tieranatomisches Theater at Humboldt-Universität.

„Embodied Futures. Knowledge and Movement“

As part of the new Public Engagement Hub at ZfK “Embodied Futures: Knowledge and Movement,” support is provided for courses that explore creative movement approaches as research method, teaching tool and format for outreach, and understand academic, artistic and practice-based research as a participatory form of knowledge production.

7. Hazardous Hope. Explorations through contaminated Berlin

Dr. Léa Perraudin (Department of Cultural and Media Studies,  Exzellenzcluster Matters of Activity)

“Hazardous hope” – as Ayushi Dhawan and Simone M. Müller (2024) term a practice that, amid permanently contaminated environments, experiments with new forms of cohabitation rather than hoping for purity or redemption. We undertake explorations through contaminated Berlin to engage its material politics via embodied and speculative methods, in dialogue with civil society actors, community initiatives, and artists.

8. Social Media and Social Movements

Prof. Dr. Shintaro Miyazaki (Department of Cultural and Media Studies)

Social media not only inform about global political and social developments but also significantly shape the everyday lives of many citizens and contribute to polarization. From a media studies perspective, the course examines how these dynamics emerge and what role social media might play in fostering sustainable social movements. Together with choreographer Irina Demina, an experimental approach will be explored that extends role-playing activities (Resnick & Wilensky) through choreographic and embodied methods in order to investigate social dynamics and processes of polarization through experience.

9. Body, Gender, Public Sphere: An Introduction to Iris Marion Young’s Feminist Political Theory

Dr. Jeanette Ehrmann (Department of Social Sciences)

In this seminar, we explore Iris Marion Young’s feminist political theory through her essays on female body experience. We examine how inequality and oppression shape embodied experience and connect these insights with intersectional perspectives on ableism, classism, and racism as well as on trans* and non-binary gender identities. The seminar is organized in collaboration with an artist within the hub “Embodied Futures: Knowledge and Movement” and integrates embodied knowledge, movement, and theoretical reflection.