Upheavals, revolutions and rebels in the public lectures

24 January 2017. Last year was witness to remarkable upheavals and changes: the UK decided to leave the European Union, the United States elected Donald Trump its 45th President, and right-wing populist, authoritarian and anti-democratic tendencies are undermining large parts of the world. Prof. Dr. Florian Wettstein, Director of the Public Programme, seized this opportunity to make this radical geopolitical change the subject of discussion in the public lectures.

Putting geopolitical developments into perspective

The history lectures will focus on explanations of current geopolitical developments. On the basis of the historical localisation of nationalists and populists from Cicero to Trump, the lecture will reveal both similarities and differences between historical and current events.

The lecture in political history will be devoted to the United States as a country of integration. In the process, it will disclose the USA's historically ambivalent attitude towards immigration. This attitude manifests itself in the fact that irrespective of the country’s well-known high degree of openness, immigrants also always had to overcome high social, legal and political obstacles.

Revolutions and rebels

Overthrows and revolutions of a different kind are also topics of the Public Programme. Digitalisation and its far-reaching effects on social coexistence are focused on by two lecture courses: The management lecture will home in on the "Digital Society", while the business IT lecture will provide a basis for "Understanding the Digital Age".

In addition, reformers and rebels will take centre stage in the music lectures. One lecture will deal with music at the time of the French Revolution, the other music lecture will look at the late work of the "enfant terrible" of the musical fraternity, Bob Dylan. For the lecture in Swiss literature, the HSG's Public Programme was able to attract a rebel of a nature all his own: Ulrich Knellwolf. He will relate how, as a theologian, he undertook a "buccaneering expedition" into the domain of narrative literature and mutated into a (joyful) "poacher into other people’s hunting grounds".