2021 Spring - Winners

Mary Cox

BA in Cultures, Politics and Society programme

Vienna: City of Dreams and Innovation. (Or a practical guide to questions, and how to use them to approach problems)

Vienna: City of Dreams and Innovation. (Or a practical guide to questions, and how to use them to approach problems) is a course designed to inspire critical and reflective thinking by encouraging students to consider questions posed by a handful of individuals that led them to address the problems of their day and create new ways of thinking and addressing the world.

Planned excursions for the course include:

1. Karl von Frisch and the dancing bees: understanding language

2. Harriette Chick & the causes of rickets: Rigorously observing the known to explain seeming contradictions

3. Franz Schubert and the invention of “Lieder”: Combining poetry with music

4. Gustav Klimt: using symbolism to explore the unknown.

5. Kurt Gödel and the incompleteness theorem: challenging questions to show they don’t matter

6. Sigmund Freud & Dreams

Rather than considering these different approaches and discoveries chronologically, they will be arranged methodologically starting with the close observation of a single entity (bees in the University of Vienna Botanical Gardens) to understand how they share information. Next, we show how Harriette Chick questioned competing arguments for the cause of rickets in the aftermath of WW1 in Vienna by using controls to closely analyse the supposed contradictions of medical science. Through rigorous observation, she showed that the competing theories of the disease were both correct, solving a medical mystery that saved millions of children’s lives. Next students will explore how Schubert created a new musical genre through his “Lieder”. Students will be asked to produce their own “Lieder” following his parameters and attend a concert. Students will then be asked to consider symbols, and how they can and were used by Gustav Klimt to express the inexpressible. Finally, the course will end with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and a discussion of dreams and Freud.

Class would be held twice a week: once a week on campus, and once a week "onsite" where we will take a fieldtrip together. Given the wealth of ideas that have had their origins in Vienna, as well as the fantastic museums, frequent fieldtrips make sense for this kind of course. I plan to spend times with students at the Sigmund Freud Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Botanical Gardens, the Opera house, the Belvedere Museum, and Wien Museum.

In each of these places we will have discussions on how different individuals thought about and approached the world. Throughout the course, students will be asked to question themselves on how they know what they know (or think they know), and how they can approach questions in different ways to understand the world. Where appropriate, homework assignments will include exercises to give them practice in approaching the world in one of the ways discussed in class.

Field trips will not only make exciting use of being based in Vienna, it will also increase experiential learning for students, and provide opportunities and experiences for cohort and relationship building.

Luca Váradi

BA in Cultures, Politics and Society programme

Group Identity and Prejudice: taking the perspective of minority group members

The proposed project would be implemented within the course to be offered for second-year BA students in the Culture, Politics and Society Program, titled Group Identity and Prejudice. The aim of the project will be to give students the opportunity to gain first-hand experiences about how ethnic prejudice affects the lives of minority group members. This field is often overlooked in theory and studies about intergroup relations, while it is utterly important for students to understand the perspectives of minority group members in order to see the complexity of this problem. This can be best learnt through the voices of minority group members. As Roma are the largest ethnic minority group of the European Union, and CEU has a special mission regarding Roma-related issues, the effect of prejudice on the lives of Roma people in Hungary will be the topic of the in-depth case study for the course. To learn about this social problem, students will participate in a one-day study trip to Budapest. In Budapest, students will take a thematic walk introducing everyday life of Roma people (organised by the Uccu Foundation) and will then meet young Roma volunteers and activists from Uccu and Bagázs Association for Roma People, to learn about their experiences and strategies for overcoming the negative outcomes of prejudice. By the time of the fieldtrip (in October), students will have covered the basic theories of intergroup relations, so they will be familiar with the scholarly debates surrounding this question. As preparation for the study tour, students will have a class introducing them the problem of anti-Roma prejudice in Europe and Hungary. They will also receive information about the participating organisations and about the Roma volunteers they will be meeting in Budapest.

During the study tour, students will complete small-scale group projects (short videos or podcasts), applying theories covered in class to the case of Roma in Hungary. They will have a chance to ask their questions from the volunteers during the discussion and each group will have a designated time to interview the volunteers for their data collection. Upon return to Vienna, students will present their preliminary findings and we will discuss how the material gathered during the study tour informs theories of intergroup relations and prejudice. Students will then finalise their projects based on feedback from the group and the professor. The final videos / podcasts will be shared with the two participating organisations and might be made public on the homepage of the Nationalism Studies Program (if all participants agree).

Topics covered throughout the study trip are directly related to the learning goals of the course. At the same time, learning about such issues from those mostly affected, and in the spaces where they can authentically share their experiences, will give students a deeper and more intense learning experience.

For students’ critical engagement with scholarly theories about prejudice, I find it very important that they get a chance to see whether and how these are applicable in a real-life setting. It should be underlined that learning about minorities from minority group members themselves is the most effective and also reflexive way to understand the complexities of the effects of ethnic prejudice. The reason why I decided to cooperate with members of the aforementioned two organisations is not only because we have had positive experience with UCCU’s tour presenting Roma life in Budapest to CEU students before, but because Roma volunteers in these two organisations are able to show a new narrative about how minorities can tackle injustices. Through their activities they aim at transforming the discourses about Roma people and offer new, more empowered narratives that are missing from the existing academic literature about Roma.