Teaching

Current Teaching:

Seminar P0385: Interpretive Research Design and Political Ethnography, Tuesdays 12:15–13:45h, weekly (25 Oct 2022 – 07 Feb 2023)

Interpretive research has increasingly gained attention in the discipline of International Relations research. The seminar situates interpretive research in the social sciences, especially political science, and discusses different aspects of ethnographic fieldwork. Focus is set on participant and non-participant observation in the “real” and in the virtual world. Students are offered the chance to gain first practical experiences in the design and implementation of an own interpretive research project.

The seminar illuminates the basis for interpretative research designs and the use of ethnographic research in political science. Based on central texts, the seminar will elaborate on the epistemological and ontological background of ethnographic research, ethical implications, data gathering as well as data analysis. Further, students will get an overview on the current state of the art of political ethnography and the application of ethnography in different thematic areas. Just to name a few examples, ethnography has been used to investigate the work of international organizations, diplomats, international legal standards on the ground or resistance and protest.

The course will critically reflect on the advantages and limitations of interpretive research designs and ethnographic methods, considering the epistemological, ontological and ethical premises to be considered by researchers.

***Please note that the class will include group work and three “lab-sessions”.

Link to the course on Alma https://alma.uni-tuebingen.de/alma/pages/startFlow.xhtml?_flowId=searchCourseNonStaff-flow&_flowExecutionKey=e2s7

Seminar P0386: Indigenous Struggles in International Relations: Conceptual Approaches and Claims from Latin America, Thursdays, 12:15-13:45h, weekly (20 Oct 2022 – 09 Feb 2023)

Indigenous representatives have become highly visible political actors in international relations. However, the threat that indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination poses to state sovereignty makes it “perhaps the most controversial and contested terms of the many controversial and contested terms in the vocabulary of international law” (Crawford 2001, 7).

This seminar sheds lights on the potentials and pitfalls international and transnational engagements holds for advancing indigenous peoples’ claims for recognition and self-determination. Focusing on Latin American indigenous actors, the role of international law, international organisations, and transnational activism for indigenous peoples’ struggles will be discussed. Critical issues centre around questions of self-determination, representation, territorial rights, stewardship, access to resources, and human-nature relationships.

The seminar is situated in political science, however, it is explicitly interdisciplinary and draws on decolonial literature, social movements studies, anthropological and critical legal perspectives as well as indigenous peoples’ ideas of political concepts and social science approaches.

Link to the course on Alma https://alma.uni-tuebingen.de/alma/pages/startFlow.xhtml?_flowId=searchCourseNonStaff-flow&_flowExecutionKey=e2s10

General Teaching:

Rights of indigenous peoples (consultation rights, FPIC)
Rights of Nature
Environmental justice
Resource conflicts and conflict transformation
Interpretive research designs, political ethnography
Research-based learning (RBL)
Theories of International Relations
Regional focus Latin America, especially Amazonia

Summer Semester 2022

Struggles over Natural Resources in Latin America

Resource extraction fuels conflict in Latin America, especially in the Andes and the Amazon. Conflicts range from symbolic protests to the formation of influential civil society movements and violent clashes between local populations, companies, state and other (armed) actors. Among the manifold reasons for these conflicts are struggles for land rights, competing claims to use resources, contestation about the distribution of benefits and protests against social, environmental and cultural impacts of extractive projects. Resource conflicts in Latin America are historically embedded into global, regional, and national dynamics. For Europe, Latin America has been a source of natural resources since colonial times. For the world market, main production sites for lithium, copper, soya, etc.. are situated in the Andes and the Amazon where they cause major damages to fragile ecosystems. However, for most Latin American countries the export of these resources is a central economic pillar, and a regional “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2015) exists, even though governments have different political orientations. At the same time, national, regional, and international institutions promote legal frameworks to make extractive industries more sustainable.

This seminar focuses on the multi-scalar entanglements of conflicts over resource extraction in Latin America. Central topics are the economic, social, and political dynamics of extracting different types of natural resources; legal frameworks to protect local populations and mechanisms of participatory environmental governance; underlying development models and questions of “environmental justice”.

Fighting for Mother Earth: Rights of Nature from the Global South to (Trans)national Climate Activism

Rights of Nature (RoN) is an innovative legal approach which promises an alternative to the destructive human-centred development model, which has led to a global climate crisis and an era diagnosed as the Anthropocene. RoN conceptualise nature to have an inherent right to exist and to flourish (Borràs 2016). Since the late 2000s, several countries have adopted legislations recognising rivers, mountains, or forests as living beings, especially Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador as well as New Zealand, India, and the USA (Kauffman and Martin 2021). At the same time, also in Germany, lawyers, academics, and activists are exploring possibilities to expand the idea of rights-bearing subjects for more effective environmental protection, e.g., in struggles over the Hambacher Forst. Indigenous concepts of human-nature relationships have inspired RoN and resulted in a fast-growing political movement, which is also pushing the United Nations to complement the Universal Declaration on Human Rights with a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (United Nations General Assembly 2020). However, in academic literature ‘the environment’ is usually considered to be a passive site or object of struggle. The definition, value, and agency of non-human entities, such as rivers or forests, are not taken into consideration, and only anthropological literature recognizes that these conflicts are also ‘ontological conflicts’, i.e., ‘conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”’ (Blaser 2013, 547).