Archives: Courses

This course is all about you and your ideas, purposeful doings, sustainability and teamwork.

In Entrepreneurship with Purpose, students learn about the characteristics of entrepreneurial ventures that are driven by a dual mission: a strong social, societal and/or ecological purpose alongside economic goals. They learn about, discuss, and reflect upon social and economic purpose during ideation, team building and business modelling. They get acquainted with ideas, tools, processes and methods from various “practices” in business and organisations, like Theory U, New Work and Design.

You students are invited to reflect upon and critically explore if and how social/ecological and economic purpose can be potentially aligned in entrepreneurial ventures. Individually and in teamwork, you reflect upon how personal values can drive the various blocks of a venture creation process. You experiment in teams to deal with potentially conflicting values and interests to jointly find out how to align them in a collectively created idea.

In the course, the concept of regeneration, the process Theory U and contemplation and expression through arts are used to explore how an entrepreneurial mindset can foster action towards sustainable activities.

The idea of regeneration is to nurture and restore natural ecosystem. In the course, we ask how you can apply entrepreneurship to integrate nature, its value and its limited capacities into you team’s venture and, generally, into business activities.

Theory U is a process and method developed and applied by the Presencing Institute (Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaeufer & team). Its methods and tools are used in the course to explore individual values and mindsets. It frames the teamwork. It is used as an approach for reflection, co-creation and as one potential perspective on necessary societal transformations.

In contemplations on arts and as form of expression, you deal with arts both in theory and in practice. You wilil look at art for inspiration and to engage with its critical power. You will make art to express, reflect and, yet again, look. Through arts, we engage with different aspects of entrepreneurship, like the consideration of stakeholders, prototyping, and the integration of nature in business activities.

The Digital Entrepreneurship bachelor lecture at the University of Duisburg-Essen introduces students to key concepts and methods for developing digital business ideas. Through a combination of theory and practice, students learn how to design business models, understand startup dynamics, and apply design-oriented research methods. The course includes a group case study project with a written report and presentation (60% of the grade) and an individual written exam (40%).

Are you eager to apply your knowledge in a hands-on setting that mirrors the fast-paced startup world? Do you want to explore how digital ideas evolve into real ventures? If so, Digital Ideation and Entrepreneurial Design is the course for you!

The course Digital Ideation and Entrepreneurial Design introduces students to the basics of digital entrepreneurship and sustainable innovation with a focus on digital ideation and entrepreneurial design. Conducted in a practice-oriented approach, students work in teams to tackle real-world challenges provided by an external collaborator in order to develop solutions themselves.

In the course, you develop adequate strategies to find and assess problems of individual and societal significance. Building on methods of design thinking, you are introduced to design-oriented research methodology, where you learn to systematically define relevant solution spaces to solve these problems. Through this approach, you learn to analyze complex requirements under time pressure, systematically develop alternative decisions and reflect on possible options in different contexts. You systematically analyze possible causes of deviations from plans and develop suitable response measures.

Individually or in teams, you prepare written analyses and illustrate their decision-making processes to later on present them appropriately to various target groups. To mirror this methodological approach, you engage in the scenario of an entrepreneurial context that requires you to search (or design) an opportunity through means of effectuation.

From folk ballads to punk anthems and hip-hop tracks, protest songs have long helped people express feelings of anger, hope, and resistance. They offer a way to make unheard voices heard and help build a sense of community, especially among groups who have historically been excluded or marginalised. In this way, political songs can challenge dominant ideas – not just through their lyrics, but through sound, performance, and the construction of collective identities. These dimensions work together to strengthen the songs’ emotional and symbolic power, making them key cultural texts in times of conflict and transformation.

In this seminar, we will examine the role of selected protest songs in British and American cultural history. Through selected case studies such as the Vietnam War, the Miners’ Strike, Occupy Wall Street, the climate movement, and the Trump presidency, we will analyse how music can reflect and shape political consciousness.

Die Veranstaltung führt in zentrale Perspektiven, Theorien und Begriffe aus der Rassismus- und Antidiskriminierungsforschung, Intersektionalität, Gender Studies sowie migrationsgesellschaftlichen und machtkritischen Debatten ein. Im Fokus steht eine reflexive Auseinandersetzung mit gesellschaftlich produzierter Differenz, struktureller Ungleichheit und den politischen Ursprüngen diversitätsbezogener Kämpfe. Methodisch werden kritische, reflexive, künstlerische und partizipative Zugänge kombiniert.

No need to travel all the way across the Atlantic: in this seminar we will use a combination of literary, archival, and field research to explore traces of America, American culture, and American history right here in the city of Essen! In the process, we will hopefully get to see Essen, America, and the relationship(s) between the two in an entirely new light.

This class will allow students to improve their Information Literacy, Analysis, Oral and Written Communication, Teamwork, and Intercultural Knowledge competences.

The seminar will feature close readings and a critical analysis of key texts of popular culture theory from the beginnings of the 20^th century to today. The seminar aims at facilitating a thorough examination of the philosophical, semiotic, political and cultural diagnostic implications of the approaches presented in the selected texts by thinkers such as Adorno, Hall, Storey, Fiske, Jenkins and others. Texts are not discussed in isolation, but will be embedded in their synchronic and diachronic interdependencies. In this way, the differences and similarities in the various approaches will be identified and the historical development of the discourse of popular culture criticism will become apparent.

There will be a moodle room for this seminar containing additional information and the texts. After the registration period, you will be informed by the lecturer regarding further course modalities and the log-in information for moodle!

A young woman who fails to escape the poverty and violence of her childhood surroundings and becomes a prostitute, another young woman who spectacularly rises to stardom on the New York theatre stage, a greedy dentist who ends up being handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of Death Valley, and a Californian pet dog who joins a pack of wolves in Alaska: the plots and themes of some of the most famous works of (North) American literary naturalism (Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Frank Norris’s McTeague, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, respectively) are nothing short of epic, sensationalist, and melodramatic – and thus do not fit the conventional critical characterization of literary naturalism as a subset of realism at all. In this lecture, we will review traditional and revisionist critical approaches to literary naturalism and examine both canonical and less frequently read works of naturalism from the U.S. and Canada (including French Canada). In addition, we will also take a look at early adaptations and translations of literary naturalism, including D.W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909) and some of the various German translations of Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1904/1954).