070273 UE Reading Course Contemporary History and Media (2022W)

In this reading course we will discuss theoretical approaches to study “epistemologies” as systematic contexts of explaining the world. These contexts can (but do not have to) link very different areas from politics to ideology, cultural knowledge, nature, science, technology, the body and others to form specific modes of making sense of what surrounds us.
The course is based on critical readings of theoretical texts from cultural studies and adjacent fields. We will discuss how these approaches may (or may not) help to study “epistemologies” and the especially political or ideological factors they bear. Can they help to describe intrinsic qualities and specific, often hardly questioned demarcations or boundaries of these attempts to explain the world? We will reflect on the genuine heterogeneity of knowledge constellations and their historical indices rather than discredit politics and ideology from the outset as external, after-the-fact elements of knowledge.