300654 Anthropology of Global Order and Disorder (MA: Soziologie der globalen Welt) (S) (SoSe 2026)

Many people today experience a growing sense that established orders are coming apart. Economic insecurity, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapid technological change intersect with intensifying social expectations, making work, family life, and long-term planning increasingly fragile. While such conditions are newly experienced by some, in other social and historical contexts instability and unpredictability have long been normal features of everyday life.

This course takes these uneven experiences as an entry point to examine how order and disorder are politically produced, relationally lived, and historically situated. Drawing on ethnographic studies from different parts of the world, it explores how social, political, and economic arrangements are made, contested, and reconfigured in moments of crisis and transformation.

Focusing on themes such as power and governance, markets and inequality, infrastructure, and technological change, the course offers analytical tools to understand how global processes are enacted in everyday life - and how disorder itself can become a durable condition of contemporary social and political order.