Understanding
Europe

In this course, we seek to understand the processes that make religious heritage a growing political and cultural presence in Europe.

Across the continent, processes of de-churching and secularisation go hand in glove with the growing importance attributed to religious heritage. Redundant religious buildings, sites or objects deserve a second life as ‘heritage.’ Similarly, religious festivals or rituals may be preserved as part of people’s cultural identity, worthy of being transferred to future generations. Interestingly, also societies where religion is still part and parcel of everyday life, religious communities or political elites may strive for a heritage status of their site of religious worship or religious ceremony.

Processes of heritagization of religion are multi-layered and never without contestations. Some may morally object against what they consider profanation through festivalization and commercialisation and see a decline of authenticity. For others, heritagization of religion entails emancipation, enabling religious minorities to claim recognition and protection by being acknowledged as heritage.

By way of notions of place attachment and cultural heritage, this class explores people-place relations and the challenges dislocating processes pose to people’s sense of home and belonging. People’s social and emotional ties to places are often perceived as an effect of prolonged interaction in and with a particular place, often characterized as roots, referring to emplaced personal memories, family history and communal cultural heritage. In this context migration is perceived as upheaval of rootedness, disrupting people’s identities and sense of belonging.

While Europe has witnessed recurring periods of excessive migration through its history, the current massive voluntary and involuntary mobility of people has formed new challenges to place-based identities and heritage. The class asks how globalization, inequality, and violence frame processes of dislocation; how people retain and renew ties to communities and neighborhoods they have chosen to leave or been forced to abandon; and how people form meaningful attachment to new places and develop new place-based identities.

Following a general introduction to tourism, this class will use the unlikely example of theme parks to introduce key areas and practices of sustainable tourism, from resource and climate efficiency through digitization and innovation to the safety, health, and general wellbeing of employees through safety and diversity initiatives and relationships with (local) communities through special programs e.g. for children. Moreover, sustainability will be discussed as an economic strategy whose relevance for both theme park-investor relationships (the attraction of financial investments) and theme park-customer relationships (the “public image” of the company) has been steadily on the rise. Finally, students will develop their own research project on sustainability in an area of tourism of their choice.

This course questions dominant discourses and practices on language education and explores alternative discourses, bodies of knowledge, conceptualisations, and practical approaches. It starts by posing some pertinent questions: 

• Whose knowledge matters most in my education system/curriculum/training/research?
  
• Whose culture is over/under-represented? 
• Whose language is valued more/less?
  

This course explores how language learning and teaching can be conducted in a decolonising manner and how to promote pluriversal knowledge in schooling and education.