[Applied] Foreign Affairs Integration provides pre-diploma students with a framework for incorporating an experimental, artistic, transcultural, and transdisciplinary approach into their (pre-)thesis work. The course is grounded in applied research (situated and outward-looking), encouraging students to leave their disciplinary and personal comfort zones by engaging with sites, situations, experts, local actors, and other forms of knowledge in relation to the interests and questions of their respective pre-thesis projects.

The course supports students in developing their studio projects methodologically, thematically, and artistically. Through applied research, discussions, encounters, verbal presentations, and graphical documentation, students test and expand their studio approaches while critically reflecting on how knowledge is produced, gathered, and translated into their work.

The course outcome is an individual collection of fragments of knowledge—in the form of a set of cards—that serves as a backbone and repertoire for the content, methodology, and argumentation of each student’s project.

[A]FA Integration includes individual meetings and ongoing research, a mid-term presentation of work-in-progress reviewed by the [Applied] Foreign Affairs teaching team, and a final group presentation/exhibition in which students present their collections in a shared space, together with the teaching team and invited guests.

[Applied] Foreign Affairs Integration is only offered to students of the I oA in their pre-diploma semester.

It is taught by Baerbel Mueller, with guests invited to a final presentation.

This term, only students who have been participating in [A]FA projects previously can be accepted.