Seminar Dam(n) building (Rob Boddice)
The seminar will revolve around the issues raised in Blackbourn's Conquest of Nature. In essence, the seminar deals with the political, social and environmental pros and cons of dam building, the potentialities for conflict, fear of failure, and the actual cost, in the German experience, of lives (through military targeting). The German case study, which is at the heart of Blackbourn s text, will serve as a starting point for a more general discussion of dam building.

Seminar Introduction to the Philosophy of Water (Bruno Macaes)
Images of water have always been used to explain the meaning and goal of the philosophical enterprise. We may even suspect that such images lie at the basis of our understanding of reality as a whole. If water is the most basic element and the source of our understanding of nature, we must strive to understand it in a fundamental way, as source and origin rather than one thing or substance among many others.

Seminar Water as Culture and Memory: Claudio Magris's Danube (Laura Scuriatti)
This seminar will focus on Claudio Magris's novel Danube, first published in Italian in 1986. Magris, an eminent scholar of German and Austrian literature and culture, narrates of a physical and spiritual journey along the Danube from his sources to the Black Sea, exploring in parallel the roots of European culture as well as his own beliefs. Within this complex narrative style, which fuses geopolitics, history, and literature with fictional digressions and anecdotes from daily life, the river becomes a complex metaphor for an existential and historical quest. The aim of the seminar is to investigate the way in which water, here exemplified by the river Danube, is seen as central not only to human survival, but also to the development, encounter and preservation of specific cultures and their respective memories and histories. Through the analysis of the images and role of the river in the text, the seminar also aims to prompt students to address the concept of "property" when applied to both cultural and geographical objects whose nature would seem to defy attempts at appropriation.

Seminar Shipwreck (Catherine Toal)
For this seminar we read a text which provides an overview of the philosophical tradition through the persistence of a single motif, the witnessing of a shipwreck at sea. We will focus in particular on the meaning of the sea in this trajectory, how the idea of its dangers and potential for humanity have structured questions of individual security, knowledge and compassion.

Seminar The Human Right to Water (Rafael Ziegler)
The seminar will offer a space for the discussion of the human right to water within the context of authority, territory and knowledge in a globalized world. The core questions will be: What is the human right to water? As the flow of water, just like that of capital, is not bound by territorial borders, what are the framework and principles with which to think about such a right and its enforcement.