European Master's in Global Studies

This international research-based Master's programme combines perspectives, methods, and theories developed in history, the social sciences, cultural and area studies, and economics to investigate phenomena of global connectedness. We do not believe that globalisation exists as an objectively given material reality that can be measured, but rather that we have to understand the phenomena described as globalisation as a bundle of political, economic, social and cultural projects to manage increasing transnational and transcontinental connectedness (the so-called global condition). Therefore, the multi-national classroom of the programme and the cross-over of contributions from various disciplines and universities dealing either with some of these projects and/or with their conflicts and resulting entanglements offer substantial added value to the study of processes of globalisation. The learning targets of the programme are: to become familiar with different academic ways of looking at processes of globalisation to learn about how concepts of globalisation worked in the past and work today in various world regions to work with concepts from different analytical and theoretical perspectives to systematically compare socio-political concepts and configurations as well as to investigate their mutual interaction (cultural transfers) to gain insight into the production of social science knowledge and to relate knowledge production to concepts of globalisation to become aware of one's own rootedness in a specific discipline and academic culture Since we start out with the assumption that there is no single discipline that is able to cover the whole set of phenomena summarised under the term globalisation, the programme favours a post-disciplinary organisation of knowledge production by giving precedence to comparative approaches (both diachronic and geographic), encompassing constructivist approaches, and questioning essentialist notions. Taking the postcolonial challenge seriously, we would argue that the current disciplinary organisation of universities (which we nevertheless have to deal with) is often inadequate for the production of knowledge about the current world and that we have to reflect upon this inadequacy to overcome it at least partly.