The Ways We Live: Culture and the Inner World aims to provide students with an enhanced psychosocial understanding of different ways we live as represented, shaped and experienced in different social and cultural contexts in contemporary modernity.
The module combines psychoanalysis as the main mode of accessing the inner world with concepts from sociology and cultural studies in order to explore contemporary experiences made accessible through a range of practices, including observation of socio-cultural activities, site visits, case studies and examples taken from every day, high, and popular culture.
The central assumption of this module is the fluidity of modern identity in secular, consumer-oriented, (post)capitalist societies and the necessity to understand it as a multi-dimensional phenomenon.
Lectures cover a range of key theories with equal emphasis on representation and the underlying psychosocial phenomena.
Students are encouraged to develop a theoretical understanding of the topics of this module as well as an aesthetic criterion and a critical attitude towards popular culture, cinema, media, art, and spatio-temporal practices of everyday life.