27 August 2019. “As we all know, opposites attract. What applies to love and everyday life also applies to our public programme in Autumn Semester 2019,” writes Prof. Dr. Florian Wettstein, Head of the Public Programme, in the current public lecture directory.

Sustainability and the throwaway society

In keeping with this, a sociology lecture will be offered this semester about the aesthetics of sustainability, which can be located in the conflict zone between renunciation and profit. Sustainability is not (only) achieved with prohibition but also with the often profitable change of everyday practices. The crucial point in this respect is how we deal with wastefulness and over-consumption. In this context, the business ethics lecture explores the historical and cultural traces of our throwaway society and subjects its consumerism to critical scrutiny.

New beginnings and salvation

Failure and new beginnings are the focal topics of the first lecture series on psychology. Failure shapes and often monopolises our lives. However, there are ways of dealing with failure in a productive manner, and when we look back on our lives, we often find that failure also opened the door to new things. As with failure, so with disaster and salvation and with illness and health: in the history lecture, it will be revealed how people in different eras and societal contexts tried to attain salvation and fend off disaster.