• Künzler Daniel

This course looks at some aspects of digitalisation in the Global South with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The main learning objective of the course is that students recognise how in different contexts digital technologies influence people's lives and how technologies themselves are shaped by people. The course begins with an introduction that shows the extreme poles in which this region is located in the public perception and the scientific literature: Outcast in the global context ("digital divide") or source of digital innovation ("mobile money revolution"). These perspectives are nuanced and supplemented by a historical perspective that highlights alternative paths to digital innovation. A following block then deals with the digitalisation of citizenship and social policy. This block discusses the increasingly biometric infrastructure of citizenship, the advantages and disadvantages of biometric identification of beneficiaries, and the use of mobile money to disburse money transfers. The next part looks at the relationship between digitalisation and politics. Twitter hashtags are increasingly used by social movements for mobilisation. Established political actors also use social media to influence elections (e.g., via Cambridge Analytics). Even post-electoral violence uses social media for mobilisation but can also be reconstructed with the help of digital tools. The fourth part focuses on personal relationships mediated through digital channels. It begins with a look at transnational personal relations and then looks at how fraudulent relationships have also become increasingly digitalised. The course concludes with a look at the impact of digitalisation on popular culture. Digitalisation has greatly changed the production of films. In football, transnational digital television and sports betting has had a massive impact.

It is also possible to write a seminar paper on another aspect of digitalisation in addition to the written assessment.

Assessment/entitlement to ECTS points

3 ECTS

Attendance
Regular attendance and active participation

Compulsory readings
Reading the compulsory readings in preparation for the session

Written assignment
Students choose a topic and document their research and the results in a research diary. In the final session(s) of the course, each student has an individual 10-minute Q&A with the lecturer. This Q&A is ungraded and a prerequisite for the assessment and grading of the research diary.

6 ECTS

Seminar paper
It is also possible to write a seminar paper on another aspect of digitalisation in addition to the written assignment.

If there is suspicion of the systematic use of a chatbot (e.g. Chat GPT) for content-related aspects of the assignment/seminar paper, the person concerned may be called to an oral examination on the topic of the assignment/seminar paper.