Berlin – Sara Mardini, a 23-year-old Syrian refugee student and scholarship recipient of Bard College Berlin, was arrested in Greece last Tuesday, August 21, 2018. She was on her way back from Lesbos to Germany to resume her studies after a period of several months’ service as a volunteer rescuing refugees in Greek waters. Sara and Sean Binder, a German citizen and fellow volunteer, who was also arrested, are in detention and have been accused of human trafficking, membership in a criminal organization, spying, and money laundering.

Sara and her sister Yusra Mardini, who participated as one of 10 athletes on the “Refugee Olympic Team” in Rio in 2016, became internationally known because they saved the lives of the other 18 forced migrants in their life raft by swimming their water-logged boat to the Greek coast during their own flight across the Mediterranean in 2015.

“We are in close contact with Sara’s legal counsel and these charges seem more about halting the operations of the NGO in question than about any actions of Sara or her fellow volunteer,” said Dr. Florian Becker, Managing Director of Bard College Berlin. “A long period of imprisonment in Greece awaiting a potential trial would be devastating for Sara and her life plans. We will leave no stone unturned to get Sara released from prison, so that she can spend this time in Berlin and continue her studies, which she has earned with so much difficulty.”

After their arrival in Germany, Sara and Yusra continued to be engaged as volunteers, demonstrating great personal commitment to the interests of refugees. Sara was invited as a speaker by Harvard University and Dartmouth College; her sister spoke before the UN General Assembly and with personalities like Pope Francis and Barack Obama.

Sara Mardini became a student at Bard College Berlin in August 2017 when she was awarded a full scholarship under the Program for International Education and Social Change (PIE-SC). The PIE-SC scholarship program is aimed at promising students from regions of crisis or conflict. Currently there are 30 PIE-SC students enrolled in the two B.A. degrees at Bard College Berlin – 27 Syrians, one Iraqi, one Afghan and one Greek student.

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On September 17, 2018 faculty member Seraphine Maerz will participate in a workshop on computational social science (CSS) methods organized by the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. The workshop brings together German and international experts to discuss the interplay between the various theoretical perspectives within CSS, their interface with social science theories, and a resulting methodology.

On September 27, Maerz will give a paper co-authored with Carsten Q. Schneider (Central European University, Budapest) at the conference Frontiers of Democracy, held on September 25-28, 2018 at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Entitled “Out of democratic bounds? An automated text analysis of speeches by European heads of government,” the paper surveys thousands of speeches to argue that the language used by some heads of government inside the EU is more similar to the language used by their authoritarian counterparts. 

On September 19, 2018 BCB's Professor of Art and Society Dorothea von Hantelmann will give a lecture titled "The Exhibition. A Lecture Demonstration" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade.

“We can, and this is the perspective of art history, understand museums and exhibitions as places, as repositories for art objects, which classify and present important treasures of a cultural heritage. Or we can, and this is a more sociological and anthropological approach, see them as institutions that derive their social function from the fact that they carry specific values and concepts into society. My lecture both explores and demonstrates certain aspects of this second perspective. It analyses the cultural format of the museum and the exhibition as a specifically modern ritual in the historical and contemporary context of Western liberalism. Art institutions are deeply connected to core socio-economic parameters of their time, which they symbolically cultivate and ritually enact. Looking at art spaces as a series of decisive moments of transformation, I will pose the question if the transformations of our epoch are asking for a new kind of ritual, after that of the exhibition.” - Dorothea von Hantelmann

The lecture takes place within the series "What Could/Should Curating Do?" which aims to offer new perspectives on the theories and practices of exhibition-making. 

A new solo show by Egyptian visual artist and BCB visiting faculty Heba Amin opens on September 14, 2018 and runs through November 2, 2018 at the Zilberman Gallery, Berlin. 

Entitled "A Rectilinear Propagation of Thought," the exhibition "addresses the ways in which the colonial imagination has objectified vulnerable bodies, especially women, through the invasive gaze of optical tools. The artworks invoke mechanisms of domination and control through methods of surveying land and systems of surveillance. The exhibition interrogates the politics of technology, particularly on the African continent, and examines the mechanics of observation in relation to technological mediation."

The show is based on a project started by Amin in 2014 which has at its core an 11th century geography text and survey of major trade routes in West Africa - Al-Bakri’s The Book of Roads and Kingdoms. 

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BCB faculty member Martin Binder recently published the article “Smile or Die: Can Subjective Well-Being Increase Survival in the Face of Substantive Health Impairments?” co-authored with Guido Buenstorf (Universität Kassel, University of Gothenburg) in the journal Economics and Human Biology. 

The article addresses the relationship between subjective well-being and life span from a less common angle: subjective well-being and the impact of concrete diseases on survival. Drawing on empirical data from the British Household Panel Survey, the two authors examine whether subjective well-being predicts longer survival in the case of severe health conditions like cancer or heart problems. Once certain methodological pitfalls are avoided, the authors conclude, the data suggests that subjective well-being does not play a role in how specific illnesses decrease survival and the overall effect of subjective well-being in such cases is at best protective rather than curative.