Summer Term:

Master Course "Equality and Diversity in Practice: EU Employment Policies. A Map Exercise Game"

This course will prepare for and apply a map exercise game to foster students’ ability to apply gender and diversity knowledge in practise. In the first part, students will review and discuss texts considering key actors, institutions and policy makers in the gender and diversity policy field of employment across EU member states. Past and present European employment strategies within the Europe 2020 Strategy will be analysed on the member state and supranational level of policy making. In the second part, students will experiment with acquired gender and diversity knowledge to relate this to a map exercise game. Here, students will develop and evaluate policies, regarding their assigned position either as policy makers, NGO, political representative, business, employee or labour organisation. The goal is to create a lively course setting introducing different options or barriers for agency concerning gender and diversity policies and practice.

BA Seminar Migration, Social Cohesion and Citizenship in Central & Eastern Europe

This seminar explores political participation, patterns of work and non-work migration and representation of women, men and minority groups in Eastern and Central Europe. It discusses citizenship for women, men and different minority groups as well as political and social exclusion mechanisms in representative democracies today. It especially focuses on the transition processes in Eastern Europe, EU enlargement and discusses the role of Eastern member states and their equality agendas within the European Union today.

Winter Term

BA Seminar: Anti-discrimination Policies in the EU and Global Politics

The EU has been a driving force to implement anti-discrimination law and gender mainstreaming (GM) as strategy to foster equality between women and men and has implemented GM in primary law of the Amsterdam Treaty 1997 and its European Employment Strategy. The successive anti-discrimination directives from 2000 onward support this strategy and can be seen in line with laws in international politics such as the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 to support the rights of women in conflict, war and peacebuilding. Ever since the World’s Women Conference in Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing 1995 these issues have been discussed in international women’s fora and have influenced law and policy-making on an international level. The lecture will retrace the history and development of European and international diversity, gender equality and anti-discrimination policies and discuss gender mainstreaming and diversity policies as means to an end to foster equality in different policy fields of the EU.

Master Course "Gender & Diversity Policies in the European Union after the Economic and Financial Crisis"

This intensive course will analyze the effects of the financial and economic crisis for gender and diversity policies in different EU member states. New forms of economic governance have applied notions of best practice for all Eurozone countries in form of austerity policies. The effects of such an austerity regime are strongly variegated, with several countries having experienced profound crises. Moreover, such variegation reflects the asymmetrical politico-economic relationships between core and periphery Eurozone countries. However, less has been said on the need to consider ‘public’ and ‘private’ households together as well as ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ countries to grasp the effects of these policies for gender, diversity policies and social cohesion. Additionally, the crisis of social reproduction has come in many forms, including widespread evictions, emigration, and the increase in the provision of unpaid work for women in private households. This is a highly diverse ethnical, social and gendered process disproportionately affecting women of low-income status. We will, after a critical reading of the effects of austerity on social reproduction and the new ‘Economic Governance’ institutional architecture in the first part, analyze the gender and diversity effects of generic policy and institutional measures, considering the household in country case studies - Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, and Greece - in the second part of the course.