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Students are required to attend classes amounting to 30 ECTS per semester. Please refer to your FPO (Prüfungsordnung) for more information.
9th cohort:
Module – Praxis (10 ECTS)
Students have to write a 20-25 page report about their thesis fieldwork (or an internship, if it’s part of the thesis preparation). It has to be handed in to their first supervisor until March 31st 2027 (or an individually scheduled deadline determined by the supervisor!).
Module – Theory (5 ECTS)
Students have to write a 15 page literature review for their thesis topic. It has to be handed in to their first supervisor until March 31st 2027 (or an individually scheduled deadline).
Module – Exchange Semester (15 ECTS)
Student who are doing an exchange semester need to take a workload that equals 15 ECTS (usually 3 courses) at their University abroad. One of them can be a language course. Questions regarding credit transfer and suitability of courses should be directed to our exchange coordinator Maria Bondes.
Modules – Semester in Germany I + II (15 ECTS)
Students who stay in Germany during this semester have to take 3 of the following courses:
Lecturer: Dr. Mingqing Yuan
Time and Place: TBA (Mon. 13:00-16:00 or Tues. 12:00-15:00), bi-weekly, SDAC Lecture Room
Description:
This is not a course about how to use ChatGPT or Claude. It is neither a workshop on application nor a staunch refusal of the artificial intelligence. It is a course about what happens to qualitative research when a fluent, confident, non-understanding text generator is inserted into it. It is about learning to tell the differences between the parts of your work that the machine can genuinely accelerate and the parts that using the AI destroys the thing you were trying to produce. Every session in this course will integrate practices and specific case studies to critically engage with the AI. The course treats the tool as an object of methodological scrutiny and reflects on the relationship between machine and humanities. It is designed for students in the phase of working on their master thesis.
By attending the course, students will be able to:
• Explain, in non-technical but accurate terms, what a large language model does when it produces text, and derive from that explanation a set of principled predictions about where it will and will not be reliable in their own research.
• Use AI tools competently for a defined set of research tasks with documented verification at each step.
• Diagnose and evidence a specific failure of an AI tool on their own data and explain the failure methodologically rather than anecdotally.
• Locate their AI use within the ethical and legal frame of their fieldwork: consent, data protection, third-party processing, and disciplinary disclosure norms.
• Write a defensible AI-use disclosure statement for their Master’s thesis.
Examination form: Oral exam
Lecturer: Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib
Time and Place: The seminar follows a blended format. The first session will be held online on 16.10.2026, 09:00–11:00. The second to fourth sessions will take place in person as block seminars on 04.12.2026, 14.01.2027, and 29.01.2027, from 10:00–18:00. The closing session will be held online on 05.02.2027, 10:00–12:00.
Description:
What does it mean to do ethnography queerly at a moment when queer and trans lives, research, and the conditions in which they are pursued are under ever-intensifying pressure? This block seminar begins with the premise that queer ethnography is not simply the application of queer theory to ethnographic data, nor is it reducible to studying LGBTQ+ communities. To queer ethnography is to unsettle some of its most foundational assumptions: about who counts as a knowledge producer, what forms of evidence are legible and valid, how intimacy and positionality shape the research encounter, and whose worlds are considered worth studying and worth writing about. In difficult times, when anti-queer and trans politics are reshaping legal and institutional landscapes across the world, when researchers face surveillance and institutional sanctions for standing in solidarity with marginalized communities, and when the stakes of representation are material rather than merely symbolic, they become questions of urgency and responsibility.
The course is organized around four interrelated concerns: theory, fieldwork, writing, and research practice. We examine queer theory’s genealogies and the assumptions that travel with Euro-American canons, bringing them into dialogue with decolonial, Black feminist, queer-of-color, Indigenous, Global South, and more-than-human scholarship. We ask how queer ethnographic fieldwork can navigate surveillance, criminalization, precarity, and political hostility, attending to positionality, intimacy, safety and collaboration in knowledge production. Ethnographic writing is approached as both an ethical and methodological practice, exploring how experimental, collaborative, and poetic forms of representation can reshape ethnographic knowledge while opening new possibilities for care and accountability. Finally, students are expected to develop and present their own research proposals, critically reflecting on theoretical, methodological, and ethical choices. Throughout, the seminar treats “difficult times” not as a backdrop, but as the conditions that shape what queer ethnography can do, how it is practiced, and what it demands of those who pursue it.
Key readings:
Weiss, M. (Ed.) (2024). Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures. Duke University Press.
MacCallum, C. A., Posocco, S., & Fotta, M. (Eds.) (2023). The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge University Press.
Boyce, P., Engebretsen, E. L., & Posocco, S. (Eds.) (2018). Special Issue: “Anthropology’s Queer Sensibilities.” Sexualities, 21(5–6).
Lecturer: Dr. Maria Bondes
Time and Place: Mon. 12:15 – 15:45, weekly from October 12th until October 26th, then according to the semester plan, SDAC Lecture Room (first session online)
Description:
This course will guide students through the MA thesis writing process. It does not substitute, but complement thesis supervision and takes students through the entire process step by step. Tasks for this class will be entirely along the lines of the writing process with the aim of finishing the thesis in two semesters. The class is designed for two semesters to accompany students along the entire process, however the second half of class is only mandatory for students under my supervision.
Additional offers (without ECTS):
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Jean-Baptiste Pettier
Time and Place: TBA, online
Description:
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 go beyond questions of distinguishing the good from the evil. They include all dimensions of life concerned with beliefs, symbols, and how we tie ourselves together.
By contrast with the seminar Introduction to the Anthropology of Morality and Ethics, which covers a large number of classical and contemporary readings concerning the anthropological study of morals, this research colloquium is conceived as a space of exchange on ongoing research. It is reserved for MA students and PhD candidates working on their dissertations, but also open to all researchers with an interest in the issue.
In parallel to the discussion of ongoing research, the seminar follows, semester after semester, the study of classical thinkers on the issue of ethics and morality. After dedicating time to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Émile Durkheim in the previous semesters, this winter semester will focus on the reading of work on ethics of the American philosopher John Dewey. As John Dewey lived in China from 1919 to 1921, his pragmatist philosophy was engaged in a dialog with Chinese classical thoughts and the contemporary revolutionary historical context of his times. The first sessions of the semester will be dedicated to studies on the influence of this experience on his thought, before turning to the reading of his later works on ethics.
In order to register, please write to jean-baptiste.pettier@fau.de
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Dominik Müller
Time and Place: Thurs. 14:30 – 15:45, first session: October 22nd 2026, Glückstr. 10
Description:
This advanced seminar is open to advanced BA students, MA students, and PhD candidates whose research focus is related to the Chair of Cultural and Social Anthropology, or who are interested in pursuing related research. During the sessions, we will discuss ongoing and planned research projects, primarily – but not exclusively – within the research group “Law Tech Ethnographies”. Students are invited to present and discuss their own research and thesis projects at BA and MA level. In addition, current literature related to the Chair’s research areas will be discussed. Participants are encouraged to actively contribute to the design of individual sessions, for example by suggesting their own topics, readings, or research projects. Students interested in writing an undergraduate or graduate thesis, or a PhD dissertation, in cultural and social anthropology, for example legal, political, and/or religious anthropology, are encouraged to join the seminar to discuss and present their ideas.
Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Tijo Salverda
Time and Place: TBA, first session: Tue. October 20th 2026, SDAC Lecture Room
Description:
Why do people protest to change the world around them? What exactly are social movements and protests that mobilise people? How do methods and expressions of protest, ideas of change, means of action differ and/or conform from place to place? How can we study and analyse these aspects? This course will explore (different) logics and manifestations of social movements and protest across the globe. It aims at addressing questions that are central to anthropological and sociological investigations of counterpower and social change; individual and collective agency; political opportunity; modes of action and organisational structures; the impact of art and music in mobilising change; as well as the extent to which the success or failure of social movements can be determined. Together, this allows for a more comprehensive understanding of people mobilising for (preventing) change.
Examination form: Oral exam