This research studio invites participants to explore the haunting legacy of abandoned mines and extractive landscapes in the regions of Ore Mountains and Lusatia, questioning how these sites can inform our understanding of resource-driven histories and speculative futures. We will delve into the concept of “ghost mines”—both as literal sites of abandonment and metaphorical markers of environmental trauma and contested futures.

Biopolitics describes modern states’ investments in the health and vitality of the population by means of population metrics, statistics, death and birth rates, quarantine, or public health policies.

In this seminar we ask if history just repeats itself or if in fact we never arrived in the future. Full speed ahead we’ll travel back to 1973. At the height of the environmental movement and counterculture, amidst cold war politics, the vietnam war and oil crisis; at the dawn of the information age and the end of the industrial age, this year is emblematic of the politics that profit from the condition that Alvin Toffler called future shock: “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

March 11 - 18, 2024: The Chair for Digital Cultures, the Chair of Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction, and the Department for Speculative Transformation organize an interdisciplinary research studio on energy transition in Dresden and Lusatia for early-career researchers and practitioners interested in post-mining landscapes and the development of renewable energy infrastructures. The program is aimed at fostering exchange between social sciences, humanities, architecture, engineering, art, and design.

Following the concept of "critical pedagogy" formulated by bell hooks (1994, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York: Routledge), in this seminar we offer to dedicate ourselves to the university as a place where people critically and collectively think, research and produce knowledge.

Today we live in a world that is fully visual and sensory: inundated by images, sounds, and interactive experiences and saturated by digital media that shapes minds, bodies and our daily habits. From geo-politics to the Coronavirus Pandemic, to Artificial Intelligence, digital media is transforming society. This course is an introductory survey into how digital technologies and cultures are impacted and shaped by society and history.