Ibero-American Studies: Master's Program 'Communication and Society in Ibero-America' Course Catalog Semester October 2026 - February 2027

Seminar: Voting Behavior and Party Competition in Europe and Latin America

This course introduces students to empirical research questions in the field of individual voting behaviour and party competition. It explores important concepts in comparative politics from the perspective of Latin America and Europe and confronts students with prevalent challenges in empirical-analytical research.

Based on selected recent contributions students examine 1) important electoral institutions in Latin America and Europe (e.g., political parties and electoral systems). Students also learn 2) about influential models of voting behaviour and the role of class, gender, and corruption in Latin America and Europe. Other key aspects that are discussed in the seminar include 3) the characteristic features of Latin American and European party systems and the dynamics of party competition.

Throughout the course, students are introduced to the relevant data sources of voting behaviour and party competition in Latin America and Europe, providing them with plenty of opportunities to conduct their own preliminary analyses and develop first ideas for their term paper. These include the AmericasBarometer, the Latinobarómetro, the PREPPS, the PELA, the European Social Survey, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and the MARPOR data.

By the end of the course, students will have improved their knowledge and skills in the areas of research design, causal inference, and statistical analysis. They will also apply their newly acquired insights through small exercises and hands-on research.

This course counts as seminar for module 1.

Lecture: Latin American Social Movements

This seminar examines the diverse landscape of social mobilization across Latin America, exploring how citizens organise, mobilise, and contest power across historical and contemporary contexts. The seminar emphasises comparative analysis, asking how different movements emerge under varying political conditions, what grievances and aspirations they express, how they sustain themselves, and what outcomes they achieve or contest. Through close engagement with case studies from various countries in the region and theoretical literature from Latin American scholarship, students will develop analytical tools for understanding collective action and social change in the region, with attention to the specificities of Latin American contexts and the limitations of universal frameworks.

This counts as seminar for module 2. 

Seminar: Comunicación y Sociedad en Iberoamérica

El seminario presenta los fundamentos de los procesos comunicativos a partir de la realidad social iberoamericana. La comunicación se descompone en sus diferentes factores, que se interpretan desde una perspectiva sociocognitiva. Los contextos iberoamericanos sirven de marco para comprender cómo interviene cada factor de la comunicación y cómo contribuyen a su adecuación y eficacia. El conocimiento sobre cómo funciona cada factor y sobre cómo todos ellos interactúan entre sí contribuye una mayor comprensión y a un mejor dominio de las técnicas comunicativas, especialmente en dominios públicos.

This course counts as seminar for module 3.

Seminar: Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods: Seeing and Reading Social Worlds

This course provides a general introduction to the key methods, concepts, and analytical strategies in qualitative research. Students will learn the fundamentals of qualitative inquiry, including research design, interviewing, ethnographic techniques, document analysis, and archival research. Through a combination of readings, discussions, and practical workshop sessions, the course equips students with the skills to design qualitative studies, gather data, interpret meanings, and evaluate qualitative evidence.

Course assessment involves two structured methodological exercises that offer students direct experience in producing and analysing qualitative data. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with and understand the main qualitative research traditions, evaluate their strengths and limitations, and be able to carry out basic qualitative analysis independently.

This course counts as seminar for module 4 or module 7.

Seminar: Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Open Science

This course focuses on replicability challenges in machine-learning (ML) research. Many ML models involve stochastic optimization, complex pre-processing pipelines, and black-box architectures, which make results difficult to reproduce. Students examine these issues and learn strategies for designing transparent and traceable ML workflows.

Using open-source tools and YoKI-hosted models (e.g., Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen Coder), students implement selected supervised and unsupervised ML methods and compare the reproducibility of different systems. The course emphasizes documentation, parameter tracking, and interpretability to reduce opacity and support replicability. In a final project, students attempt to replicate findings from a published ML-based study and assess which parts of the pipeline were stable and fully reproducible.

This course counts as seminar for module 4 or module 7.

Seminar: Contested Natures: Renewable Energies, Tourism and Conservation

Description available soon

This course counts as seminar for module 5a. 

Seminar: Introduction to Academic Writing: From Idea to Publication

This 13-week seminar is a hands-on writing workshop where you will produce your first peer-reviewed academic article. Designed for students ready to move beyond essays toward publishable scholarship, the course combines structured instruction with intensive writing practice, guided by Wendy Laura Belcher's proven methodology.

Writing is learned through writing, not through lectures alone. Each session integrates instruction with active drafting and feedback. You will work incrementally from research question to finished manuscript, receiving support from your instructor and accountability from your peers. We read and respond to each other's work in progress, build a writing community, and hold one another accountable to real deadlines.

The article you develop in this course becomes your own intellectual property. Whether you refine it into a Hausarbeit, incorporate it into your thesis, or submit it to a journal, you will have created a foundational piece of your scholarly identity.

This course counts as seminar for module 8.

Practical: Feeling the Field: Emotions, Ethics, and Subjectivity in Qualitative Research

Qualitative fieldwork is rarely just an intellectual exercise. It is embodied, relational, and often emotionally overwhelming — yet the messier dimensions of research are routinely left out of academic writing, conference talks, and even supervision meetings. This block seminar takes seriously what usually stays unspoken: the fear before entering the field, the exhaustion of holding other people's pain, the porous boundary (or lack thereof) between “researcher-self” and "personal-self," the way the body carries what the mind cannot yet process, and the long emotional afterlife of empirical work once we are back at our desks.

Across four intensive sessions of five hours each, we will problematize questions that are central to research practice but structurally taboo in academic spaces: How do I take care of myself in the field? What do I do with my emotions — and what do they do with me? Is a clean separation between “the personal” and "the field" ever really possible? What fears surface, and whose fears are allowed to be named? How does the body register fieldwork, and what happens to it afterwards? What are the consequences — visible and invisible — of empirical research for the researcher as a person? And, crucially: how do we translate this tangle of emotions, sensations, fears, and uncertainties into academic writing without flattening it into a footnote or erasing it altogether?

We will also address the relational costs and care practices that surround fieldwork: What happens to family and friendships while we are “in the field,” physically or mentally? What forms of self-care and collective care are possible, necessary, or missing? How can ethics of research be rethought not only as procedural compliance (informed consent, IRB forms) but as an ongoing, embodied, relational practice?

This is a high-intensity, discussion-based seminar. Students are expected to arrive prepared to open up, reflect critically, and engage — drawing either on their own field experiences or on carefully imagined/fictionalized scenarios — with vulnerability, rigor, and each other's contributions. The aim is not therapeutic disclosure for its own sake, but to build a shared vocabulary and methodological sensitivity for engaging with emotions, ethics, and subjectivity as legitimate, analyzable dimensions of qualitative research, rather than as noise to be managed and hidden.

This course counts as practical for module 8.

Colloquium: HCIAS Master's Colloquium

This course counts as colloquium for module 9.