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Programme at a glance
Mode of instruction: On-campus (3 weeks) Academic dates: Sunday 16 June - Thursday 4 July 2024 (tentative) Housing dates: Friday 14 June - Monday 8 July 2024 (tentative) Academic fees: Student fee:
€1750 (tentative) read more about what is included in the fees.
Professional fee:
€2000 (tentative) read more about what is included in the fees.
Housing fees: €685 (tentative). Housing is optional. Read more about university-organised accomodation. Credits: 6 European Credits. Read more about credits and credit transfer. Early admission deadline: Thursday 1 February 2024. Applications will be processed throughout the year on a rolling basis. Regular admission deadline: 15 March 2024 Who is this programme for? For current university students (Bachelor and Master) in the arts and social sciences with an interest in political science, urban studies, sociology, anthropology, and social movements over time. Working professionals seeking continuing education in the field are also welcome to apply. -
Programme description
This course offers (1) a critical examination of the concepts of ‘people’, ‘power’, ‘social movements and ‘activism, (2) a historical review of key movements in the last century, and through this, (3) also addresses a broad variety of contentious issues ranging from labour to gender and from globalization to migration. In this three week programme, participants will examine bottom-up initiatives ranging from protest movements to self-organised communities as they to disrupt established top-down institutional control, or propose alternatives to it.
Where possible, the course will pay specific attention to the local dynamics of these social movements in the city of Amsterdam. Potential topics include squatters’ movement, LGBTQ activism, a self-organised community of undocumented people, a project on alternative (Black) history, an advocacy organisation for sex workers’ rights, and more. The thread throughout the course are the dynamics between people and institutions, viewed from the former’s perspective to recenter narrative attention on people themselves.
The course starts with a thorough overview of social movement theory and work on collective action. Subsequently, we will offer methodological tools to study bottom-up initiatives, after which we will combine the theories and methods to zoom-in on a the range of case studies.
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Academic directors
Dr. Christian Scholl is Assistant Professor at Maastricht University. His research focuses on urban sustainability, participatory and collaborative forms of urban planning and governance, social learning and social movements. He has published widely on these topcis, including “Two Sides of a Barricade. (Dis)order and Summit Protest in Europe” (Suny Press 2012) and ‘Out of Order. The Political Violence of Social Control in the Global Era’ (New York University Press, 2011). Over the past years, he has coordinated several transdisciplinary research projects on Urban Living Labs delivering interactive and reflexive support tools for practitioners and their experimental learning processes. These tools have been widely disseminated and well-received by a wide range of governance actors.
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