Summer Semester 2026

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: SDAC Guest Lectures (SDAC Seminar Room). The CAS Colloquium happens on Tuesday 18:00 – 20:00 c.t., weekly.

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Lecturer: Dr. Maria Bondes

Time and Place: Mon. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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The transnational linkages that are tying together countries and societies around the globe –via trade, capital, information and people flows – are frequently captured with the buzz word “globalization.” However, what this term really means often remains rather fuzzy. In this course, students will be introduced to the concept of “globalization” and the main debates surrounding the phenomenon from an academic global studies perspective. Part 1 of the course will discuss how we can capture and study “globalization,” including its manifestation at the local level and in different world regions (“glocalization”). We will also look at the main perspectives on and ideologies about globalization (“globalisms”) that guide public and academic debates – market globalism, justice globalism, religious globalism and antiglobalist nationalism. In Part 2 of the course, we will get an overview of the different dimensions of globalization – economic, political, ecological and cultural. While each of these dimensions merits a class of its own, this course will focus on understanding the major debates related to each dimension. To deepen our understanding of these debates, we will apply the different perspectives on globalization from Part 1 to specific topics. In debate sessions, students will represent different “globalisms” and debate specific issues from these standpoints.

By taking this class, students will learn to approach “globalization” in an academic and systematic manner from a global studies perspective, understand and identify the underlying ideologies that guide academic and public debates about globalization and related issues, and gain the tools to investigate the manifestations of globalization in different issue fields and world regions. Moreover, students will be able to train their communication and debating skills.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier & Wen “Alvin” Wang, M.A.

Time and Place: Wed. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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Lecturer: Jessica Wengel, M.A.

Time and Place: Thur. 16:00 – 18:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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Lecturer: Dr. Maria Bondes

Time and Place: Mon. 08:00 – 10:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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This course introduces students to the complexities, dynamics and processes of environmental governance. Drawing on the policy process model, students will learn to investigate and evaluate environmental policy making and implementation. Taking China as an example, we will have a closer look at China’s top-down system of environmental governance and discuss the pros and cons of such “environmental authoritarianism.” The course will approach these issues through the reading of relevant academic literature, in-class group exercises and discussion rounds. Moreover, students will be able to increase their methodological knowledge in the fields of policy analysis and case studies. Students will be organized in groups and conduct their own policy analysis of environmental governance in a specific issue field and region of choice. These case studies will be developed throughout the course and be presented at the end of the semester. The final examination is a term paper-format policy analysis based on the developed case studies.

Lecturer: Dr. Mingqing Yuan

Time and Place: Tue. 14:00 – 16:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier & Louison Delorme, M.A.

Time and Place: Thur. 10:00 – 12:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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Lecturer: Wen “Alvin” Wang, M.A.

Time and Place: Thur. 12:00 – 14:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: Block seminar, dates: Every last Friday of the months April, May and June, 10:00 – 18:00 c.t.,  SDAC Seminar Room

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This intensive course will have three components. First, the study of classic or lesser-known ethnographic texts that show how ethnographers enter their fields and begin their research. Second, the creation and testing of personal ethnographic projects and the conduct of concrete ethnographic exercises, with particular emphasis on participant observation, field exchange and/or interviews, and the role of description in ethnographic texts. Third, a reflexive analysis on the role of the ethnographer/researcher and on the ethical consequences of the choices we make in the production and analysis of research data. The course will include outside sessions meant as opportunities to experience and practice research.

Lecturer: Dr. Mingqing Yuan

Time and Place: Tue. 12:00 – 14:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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After the launch of the Reform and Open Door Policy in 1978, China has again become a major force in the world. How to understand China’s rise in the 21^st century? What are its impacts and results? What are the diverse forces and processes behind China’s global engagements? How to define and study global China? This course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understand China’s global presence at individual, state and global levels. It will show China’s perception of its place in the world and dynamics in its decision-making process. From the going-out policy (1999) to the Belt and Road Initiative (2013), the course aims to develop in-depth and up-to-date knowledge and cultivate critical skills about China. By focusing on different individual cases, it will cover topics from China’s global economic, geopolitical, technological presence to cultural, social and media expansion. At the same time, the course links this uneven nature of global China to its own domestic policy and development.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jie Yang

Time and Place: Tue. 16:00 – 18:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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The course engages an interdisciplinary approach to mental health as an example to illustrate and explore the new field of medical/health humanities. Health humanities is a multidisciplinary study of health and wellbeing as it explores interactions among literature, philosophy, religion, art history, ethics, and education with medicine.  It challenges purely biological or scientific understandings of health and illness, focusing instead on the social, cultural, political, historical and ethical contexts that influence health. In the past, scholars in medical humanities catered to the education and bodies of white, Euro-American medical practitioners. Virtually all canonical works written by Euro-American authors reflected those authors’ cultural values (about selfhood and unwellness, for example). Today, the new health humanities demand more inclusive insights into wellbeing. As such, this course aims to recast health humanities from East Asian cultural traditions, which emphasize the holistic, relational and emotional dimensions of healthcare, with complex ethical implications for care practices. It explores contexts (political, cross-cultural, gender, race, sexuality), experiences (local, communal, personal), and conceptual issues in care (i.e., de-psychologization).

Specifically, this course familiarizes students with the social, cultural, economic and political underpinnings of mental distress and its healing in East Asian societies. It examines keywords in the medical/health humanities including fundamental concepts and debated terms such as emotion/affect, empathy, gender, life/vitality, narrative/story, stigma and stress. It pays particular attention to the power of stories/narratives in shaping experiences of health and illness for both patients and practitioners. It investigates topics such as somatization, medicalization, psychologization, global inequities, local desires, and modern plagues in order to expose inequities and promote health justice and social change.

Lecturer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib

Time and Place: Wed. 08:00 – 10:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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This course discusses foundational assumptions, core themes, and potentials of Psychological Anthropology. It considers why Psychological Anthropology has thrived in US anthropology but seems marginalized elsewhere. Potential reasons explored include an anti-psychologizing disciplinary ethos, the role of early psychological anthropologists in nationalist and colonial agendas, and a lack of postcolonial theory. The course then takes the recent emergence of psychological anthropologies outside the US as an opportunity to reflect on current debates. It elaborates on approaches concerned with power asymmetries and universalizing “Western” psychologies. Contemporary psychological anthropology fosters insights into new forms of inequality, violence, and human subjectivity. Hence, imposing psychological or bio-psychiatric “insights” on human experience is open to question. This creates productive tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of humanity that can be addressed ethnographically. The course also highlights significant work rejecting universalizing tendencies in psychology. It prefers illuminating historically, politically, and socio-culturally situated concepts of self, personhood, affect, sociality, health and well-being.

Lecturer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib

Time and Place: Wed. 12:00 – 14:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jie Yang

Time and Place: Wed. 14:00 – 16:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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This course familiarizes students with the philosophical foundations of beauty and aesthetics and their integration in psychological well-being, art therapy, and environmental design. It engages the aesthetic turn in political thought and mental health and recasts this turn from East Asian perspectives. It explores the connection between aesthetic experience (art, nature, beauty, everyday artfulness/taste) and mental health, covering the psychological, philosophical, and clinical aspects of how beauty, art, nature and everyday artfulness/objects affect psychological well-being and therapeutic outcomes. It pays particular attention to ideas, concepts, and techniques of wellbeing and sanity imbricated in the integrated East Asian Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist philosophy and their implications for contemporary psychological practices.

While Euro-American psychology is grounded in assumptions of control, stability and internal coherence and healing starts with medical diagnosis and proceeds with correcting deviation or malfunction, such therapeutic paradigms cannot effectively address existential issues or life stress like the widespread experience of loneliness, uncertainty and malaise intrinsic to contemporary life, thus narrowing the scope and meaning of human suffering. East Asian aesthetic and philosophical traditions are grounded in change and impermanence and can offer healing resources for addressing such murkier existential issues.

This course includes three sections: first, the philosophical foundations of (East Asian) aesthetics and wellbeing including the Daoist root of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy on aesthetic attunement and Carl Jung’s integration of Euro-American psychology with Yijing, the Book of Changes, for example, by connecting his notion of synchronicity to the Yijing’s emphasis on chance events. The second component focuses on the psychological mechanisms behind creative expression, art, movement (dance, energy healing/reiki), music/guqin, and folk healing (incense seeing, the Japanese folk crafts/mingei, bonsai, or kintsugi artistic/psychological repair). The third section of the course encompasses the pragmatic turn in aesthetics and everyday artfulness in East Asia traditions including the so-called social aesthetics, environmental aesthetics or aesthetics of care: for example, the psychological effect of the beauty/artfulness/“appropriate measure” in interpersonal relationship and aesthetic deprivation in clinical practice/setting and the need for human-centered design in mental health care.

Lecturer: Wen “Alvin” Wang, M.A.

Time and Place: Thur. 14:00 – 16:00 c.t., SDAC Seminar Room

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In ancient China, intimacy between men was not always treated as taboo. One well-known story, often called the “passion of the cut sleeve,”（断袖之癖） tells of Emperor Ai of the Han dynasty, who cut off his own sleeve rather than wake his sleeping male companion, Dong Xian. For centuries, this story became a poetic way to refer to male same-sex love. So what changed? How did homosexuality in mainland China become a sensitive, often unspoken topic today?

At the same time, traditional Chinese women were long constrained by practices such as foot-binding, arranged marriage, and child brides, shaped by deeply rooted patriarchal values. Yet in Mao-era China, the slogan “women hold up half the sky”（妇女能顶半边天） became widely known, encouraging women to step into labor and public life. Did that period truly bring gender equality? And in contemporary China, do women still “hold up half the sky”?

Starting from these tensions and questions, this course focuses mainly on modern and contemporary China, especially after 1949. We will explore how ideas about gender and sexuality have changed through political campaigns, economic reforms, and rapid social transformation. Topics include feminist movements, queer lives, shifting gender roles, and changing sexual values in modern China. Through academic research, ethnography, film, literature, photography and art, the course encourages students to approach complex issues from different perspectives and invites them to rethink their own assumptions about culture, gender, and sexuality in the context of China.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier

Time and Place: Wed. 16:00 – 18:00 c.t., SDAC Conference Room

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Morality remains the great question of human life. How do we split the good from the bad, how do we associate with others, and how do we make these decisions? The study of moral phenomena is a core issue for the understanding of how society and culture work. What is the role of ethics in human life? How do people deal with their moral sentiments in complex situations, and how can we distinguish individual moral sentiments from collective and socially-induced moral representations? But moral phenomena goes beyond questions of distinguishing the good from the evil. It includes all dimensions of life concerned with beliefs, symbols, and how we tie ourselves together. This research colloquium will work on the study of moral phenomena from an anthropological perspective. After dedicating time to the classical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Émile Durkheim, and John Dewey in the previous semesters, this semester will focus on contemporary ethnographic works dedicated to the moral dilemmas to which anthropologists are confronted, and current ethical questionings in anthropology.

The colloquium is conceived as a space of exchange on ongoing research. It is reserved to second-year MA students working on their dissertation and opened to all researchers with an interest in the issue. In order to register, please write to jean-baptiste.pettier@fau.de