Course content and focus areas
The four-semester master's degree program, "Moving Cultures: Transcultural Encounters," is a four-language program that builds on the cultural and literary core competencies acquired in an English, Romance language, or comparable bachelor's degree program. It connects these competencies with an interdisciplinary perspective on cultural contact phenomena within the Anglophone, Francophone, Italophone, and Spanish-speaking worlds.
Moving Cultures assumes that languages, literatures, media, and cultures are constituted through cross-border interconnections arising from migration and contact, rather than in ethnically self-contained, language-wise homogeneous, and territorially delimited regions. The program focuses on transcultural processes in history and the present, as well as the associated negotiation strategies in the respective regional and historical contexts. These strategies manifest in writing, images, sound, and other media.
In the Moving Cultures master's program, these processes and strategies are at the center of learning through research. For example, they are studied based on concrete transcultural contact zones. Several contact zones are studied as part of the course, for example, from the following list: Canada, with its anglophone and francophone cultures in a multicultural, migratory society; the Caribbean, with its history and present status deeply affected by hybridity, creolization, and cultural syncretism; Latin America, with its multifaceted relationships with Spain, other Latin American countries, and other regions, including North America and Africa, and the current Latino culture in the U.S.; Africa, with its linguistic diversity, interaction between "old" and "new" diasporas, and the Maghreb as a European-African contact zone; the South Asian diaspora, connecting Asia with North America, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific region; and Great Britain, Italy, and France, where migrants from non-European regions have contributed greatly to cultural transformation processes for decades.
The Moving Cultures master's degree program provides comprehensive foreign language competence in two languages (English, French, Italian, and/or Spanish). The program prepares students for a scientific career and for demanding, qualified occupational activities. Examples include positions as a PR manager, consultant, or advisor in NGOs, public administration, politics, and foundations, as well as roles in company communication as a press officer or editor.