Teaching
The goal of the teaching is to enable students to critically evaluate current technology trends and the expectations, fears, interests, standards and consequences that go along with them.
Our lives are shaped by technology. How we travel, what we eat, where we work, with whom and about what we communicate - devices and machines are involved everywhere. Some of them, such as computers and cell phones, we usually have within reach, others, such as glasses or pacemakers, we wear directly on or in our bodies, and yet others, such as power grids or sewage systems, we only notice when they fail. As different as technologies are, many of them have one thing in common: we take them for granted.
The Department of Technology Studies aims to analyze, interpret and contextualize the wide world of human artifacts. We understand technology to be more than just devices and infrastructures. Their social impact, cultural significance and political relevance only becomes apparent to us when we consider them to be dynamic forces with their own power and even their own morality. Technologies save and destroy lives, give and take control, include certain people and exclude others, solve and create ethical problems. Their functions vary according to time and place, class and culture, gender and generation. In order to grasp the many dimensions of technology, we examine the processes and contexts in which technologies are conceived, produced and researched, and the expectations and values with which they are introduced, used, promoted or opposed.
Together with Prof. Paula Bialski, Prof. Tanja Schneider coordinates the area Technologies in Context Studies, which makes up a large part of the teaching in the Department of Technology Studies.
In the course directories you will find relevant information on the individual courses for the respective semester.