Ibero-American Studies: Master's Program 'Communication and Society in Ibero-America' Course Catalog Winter Semester 2025-2026
Application period is now open!
FUNDAMENTAL COMPETENCIES
Lecture: Latin American Politics
This lecture introduces students to the key theoretical concepts and the main empirical questions of Latin American politics. It provides students with a broad understanding of the political systems and the social and economic challenges in the macro-region of Ibero-America. Against the backdrop of the enormous political and social diversity in the region, this lecture explores the causes and functioning of different institutional structures and their impact on politics and society. The lecture is structured into four overarching topics. The first thematic block is devoted to the political and economic development of Latin America. The second thematic area covers issues of citizen representation and competition between political parties. The third overarching topic is the change in societal values and the causes and consequences of migration for the region. Finally, the fourth thematic block discusses the influence of political actors and institutions on the capacity of states in Latin America. The lecture enables students to develop their own research questions based on the acquired knowledge of the region. The discussion of different methodological approaches enables them to critically engage with the relevant empirical-analytical literature. Furthermore, students learn to classify individual scientific contributions in higher-level debates and to efficiently elaborate the central statements of scientific texts.
This course counts as lecture for module 1.
Seminar: Care and Displacement: Migratory Responses to Crisis in and from Ibero-America
In this seminar, we examine the entangled relationship between care and displacement as it unfolds across migratory routes shaped by crisis, inequality, and historical violence in, through, and from Ibero-America. Rather than treating care as a secondary or private matter, we approach it as a central social, affective, and political force—one that both sustains and complicates mobility. Drawing on the work of Tronto (1993), Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), and others, we understand care as a practice deeply embedded in power relations, capable of producing dependency and control, but also resistance, solidarity, and survival.
We will explore how care is mobilized in migrant shelters, humanitarian programs, and religious networks, and how it shapes the everyday experiences of those living in displacement. We pay special attention to the racialized, gendered, and legal dimensions of care, and engage with how families are reconfigured through concepts such as home-making, un(doing) family, and the affective geographies of migration.
We will work with ethnographic case studies from across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian Peninsula, and engage literature from migration studies, feminist and decolonial theory, the anthropology of care, as well as feminist and carceral geography. Topics include caregiving under constraint, carceral forms of care, moral economies of humanitarianism, and the political tensions embedded in practices of attending to others during times of crisis.
One of the aims of this seminar is to understand care not as something inherently good or self-evident, but as a deeply situated and often contradictory practice—shaped by histories of inequality, intimate negotiations, and collective strategies of survival. Together, we will ask what it means to care, to be cared for, or to refuse care in contexts of displacement, and how these experiences might help us rethink the social and political dimensions of migration today.
This course counts as seminar for module 2.
Seminar: Comunicación y Sociedad en Iberoamérica
El seminario presenta los fundamentos de las prácticas y procesos comunicativos tomando como referencia la realidad social iberoamericana. La comunicación se descompone en sus diferentes factores, que se interpretan desde una perspectiva sociocognitiva, lingüística y comunicativa. Los contextos iberoamericanos sirven de marco para comprender cómo interviene cada factor de la comunicación y cómo contribuyen a su adecuación y eficacia en contextos sociales concretos. El conocimiento sobre cómo funciona cada factor y sobre cómo todos ellos interactúan entre sí contribuye a 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: Global Environmental Change/Socioenvironmental Change
This course proposes to discuss racism and anti-racism in Brazilian society through Brazilian cinema and theoretical texts by Brazilian researcher. We use the seventh art as a didactic resource to reflect on how whiteness and Blackness shape Brazilian society. Based on this concrete reality, the course seeks to explore how Brazilian social and theoretical debates can also illuminate processes of racialization and otherness in other cultures and societies. The course methodology is based on an active and interactive approach, utilizing translanguaging as a strategy to integrate various forms of communication, allowing students to share their ideas, perceptions, and reflections through critical analysis of films and academic texts theorizing racism and anti-racism. Each session will focus on studying a film, followed by critical discussions and presentations, encouraging analysis of the works’ contexts and their relation to social issues and ongoing research. Course assessment will be divided between an oral presentation based on a critical analysis of one of the films covered, connecting cinema and theory and demonstrating understanding of concepts and their application to real social situations, along with active participation in discussions and critical reflection on films and texts. The course aims to expand students' academic repertoire by integrating theories, practices, and an interdisciplinary perspective on contemporary social challenges, demonstrating how Brazilian cinema serves as a field for social, political, and cultural reflection.
This counts as seminar for module 2.
Seminar: The Dictator’s Handbook and Authoritarianism in Latin America
This seminar offers a structured exploration of authoritarian rule in Latin America, using The Dictator’s Handbook by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith as a conceptual point of departure. The course examines the logic of political survival strategies and situates them within the broader context of regime dynamics, elite coalitions, and state-society relations across the region.
Students engage with core arguments of selectorate theory while critically assessing its analytical reach through historical and contemporary case studies from countries such as Venezuela, Chile, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Argentina. The course provides a comprehensive introduction to the drivers of authoritarian durability and breakdown, with particular attention to how leaders consolidate power, manage opposition, and navigate institutional constraints.
Through a combination of theoretical texts, empirical applications, and regionally grounded scholarship, students reflect on the challenges of classifying regime types, the role of formal versus informal institutions, and the blurred boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism. We also consider the limitations of rational-choice frameworks and explore alternative perspectives rooted in historical institutionalism and political economy.
Throughout the course, students are encouraged to connect conceptual debates to empirical research questions. They are introduced to a range of methodological approaches and data sources relevant to the study of political regimes in Latin America. Structured in-class discussions and short research exercises provide space for analytical reflection and the development of term paper ideas.
By the end of the course, students will have strengthened their capacity for theoretical reasoning, comparative analysis, and empirical design. This seminar is particularly well-suited for students with prior exposure to Latin American politics, authoritarianism, or comparative political regimes more broadly.
This course counts as seminar for module 1.
Seminar: Theories of Social Change
The aim of the seminar is to read key texts on cultural contact theories (Allport 1954, Montagu 1971, Bitterli 1986, Hall 1980, Huntington 1996) in order to review the most important contributions to Latin American cultural theory. The course is aimed especially at advanced or master's level students.
Lecturer to be announced soon.
This course counts as seminar for module 1.
Practical: Communication and Public Spheres in Ibero-America
This practice studies the public sphere, comprised of the media, civil society, and politics, and looks at their relationships from a communication science perspective. The practice, therefore, introduces a selective conceptual vocabulary that is regarded as instrumental to understanding the communicators of political information, such as journalists or today’s ‘users’. Further, the practical focuses on characteristics that typically guide the content of the media and political information and serve to uncover structures of the communication itself.
The practical sets an emphasis on the context in which communication takes place in two dimensions: Firstly, it focuses on the Ibero-American context, and regional case studies inform about public sphere mechanisms around actors, media content, and reception in the macro-region. Secondly, the public spheres are studied under conditions of deeply changed media environments shaped by the production and use of digital media.
The practice mainly builds on quantitative research literature, but previous knowledge of quantitative research is not required. A short introduction to reading quantitative papers is provided.
This course counts as practial for module 3 (for minor: module 1).
Methodological Skills
Lecture: Lecture Series & HCIAS Colloquium
This course counts as lecture for module 4.
Advanced Competencies
Seminar: Citizens and Digital Media
Today’s citizens and democracies experience multiple threats and challenges that can be linked to phenomena on digital and social media. On the one hand, hate speech, disinformation, and polarization harm how we talk to each other and find public consensus. On the other hand, an information overflow in online environments makes it difficult to gain the attention of citizens and mobilize them for political action. But at the same time, the expansion of the public sphere into the online environment has also widened the reach of the messages citizens send to others. This seminar introduces topics and approaches from communication science (and partly political science) that aim to foster our understanding of how citizens use digital media to shape today’s democracies. The topics and approaches consider how individual political participation has changed due to the application of digital media. Further, the seminar also emphasizes how citizens can effectively apply digital media for political action in text-writing practices. Finally, changing norms, attitudes, and values that present important boundary conditions for citizens’ engagement in democracies through digital media are also addressed.
The seminar mainly builds on quantitative research literature, but previous knowledge of quantitative research is not required. A short introduction to reading quantitative papers is provided.
This course counts as seminar for module 5.
Seminar: Research Seminar: Space, Belonging, and Socioenvironmental Change
Socioenvironmental change affects the lived space, and how people relate to, imagine, and experience space has in turn repercussions on activities that address challenges of socioenvironmental change (climate change, pollution, etc.). In this research seminar, we revise and build on research on the role of place and space, home, place-based attachment and belonging, in order to investigate into how people live through, experience, contest, or arrange with socioenvironmental change. What happens to the emotions around home in heat waves? How are people emotionally affected by wind parks installed close to their homes? How do sustainability transitions impact feelings of belonging to certain places or neighborhoods? Students are guided in developing their own little research project, thought about possible qualitative methods they could use, and supported in the process of evaluating and analyzing the data. The seminar is structured in four blocks (theory/research design, methods, data evaluation, analysis). Existing knowledge in the field of qualitative methods would be beneficial, but students with enthusiasm for the topic and a willingness to learn are also very welcome.
This course counts as seminar for module 5a or 7.
Key Transversal Skills
Practical: Comunicación intercultural y comunidad hispanohablante: claves para actuar en un entorno europeo globalizado
Este curso se centra en el estudio de la comunicación intercultural a partir de las experiencias y prácticas comunicativas de la población hispanohablante en el contexto europeo. En un entorno marcado por la globalización, la movilidad internacional y el contacto constante entre culturas, resulta esencial analizar cómo se manifiestan las diferencias culturales en la comunicación, especialmente en ámbitos laborales y sociales donde confluyen diversas lenguas, normas y sistemas de valores. A través del análisis de dimensiones culturales como la jerarquía, la gestión del tiempo, las normas sociales o la orientación hacia las relaciones personales, el curso ofrece herramientas para interpretar distintos patrones de interacción y organización comunicativa. Se prestará especial atención a las diferencias entre culturas de alto y bajo contexto comunicativo, así como al papel de la comunicación no verbal (gestos, contacto visual o espacio personal) y al ritmo de la interacción como factores clave en la construcción de relaciones, la negociación intercultural y la prevención de malentendidos. Con un enfoque interdisciplinario que combina la lingüística, la sociolingüística y los estudios de comunicación, el curso también aborda el proceso de adaptación cultural desde una perspectiva comunicativa, analizando cómo los estilos y códigos culturales pueden influir en la aparición de tensiones o malentendidos en la interacción. El trabajo con estudios de caso y experiencias reales documentadas permitirá analizar las dinámicas comunicativas de las comunidades hispanohablantes en Europa. A partir de testimonios, relatos y materiales discursivos, el alumnado explorará fenómenos como las prácticas lingüísticas en contextos migratorios, la negociación de identidades culturales y el papel del español como lengua de integración, pertenencia y expresión en el espacio público europeo. Este enfoque permite visibilizar las realidades comunicativas que emergen del contacto entre culturas y del proceso de reconstrucción comunitaria en contextos multiculturales. Lejos de limitarse a una perspectiva teórica, el curso ofrece un espacio de análisis crítico y reflexión, donde la comunicación se concibe como una herramienta central para actuar con sensibilidad, eficacia y compromiso en un mundo cada vez más diverso y globalizado.
This course counts as practical for module 7.
Practical: Practicing Quantitative Data Analysis with SPSS
Many of the questions we ask in social sciences require collecting and analyzing quantitative data. This practical introduces into basic data analysis with the statistical software package SPSS. After beginning with a brief methodological introduction (e.g., on formulating hypotheses) and basic statistics, the practical provides how-to-knowledge on creating SPSS codes, allowing modification and analysis of social science data sets. Analysis sessions, for example, include comparing means (t-tests) or testing relationships between two or more variables (correlation analysis, regression analysis). The course is structured as a “block seminar” that combines input and practice sessions and allows students to create and run their own SPSS codes in monitored self-practice sessions. Students of this practice can apply acquired basic SPSS skills in future empirical term papers or theses. Previous knowledge of quantitative data analysis is not required.
This course counts as practical for module 7.
Links
Course Catalog in Ibero-American Studies for BA Students of Heidelberg University
In addition to the master's courses, the HCIAS also offers courses in the area of Ibero-American Studies designed specifically for Bachelor's students. To find out more about the courses offered for Bachelor students, follow the link.
