OSUN

The project explores the way research-based art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about migration and displacement as urgent global challenges. Building on a Research-Creation approach to teaching migration history in dialogue with the visual arts, which pioneered at Bard College Berlin, the initiative will progressively draw together students, professors, and artists from across the participating institutions over two academic years.

Project Leaders: Dorothea von Hantelmann and Marion Detjen

Research Creation >>

This initiative aims to provide a sustainable platform for students and academics from all OSUN institutions to explore transnational feminism through art, rigorous academic work, and collaboration with local and international initiatives. Transnational feminism, unlike mainstream feminism, involves the critical analysis of feminist theory and practice, and a deep exploration of inequalities that exist between women. The integration of institutions, nations, and disciplines will create a holistic curriculum and help to combat narrow, Western feminist ideals.

Project Leader:  Agata Lisiak

Transnational Feminism >>

As a political project with deep roots in the Enlightenment, feminism has been concerned with the relationship between individuals and their political and social communities from its inception. For centuries women have experienced that the societies they inhabited did not consider them as individuals, citizens and members of the community with equal rights. This interdisciplinary course examines a variety of feminist projects as they grew out of these experiences, and took on distinctive shapes, developing practices and theoretical frameworks all geared toward assessing, questioning and refashioning women’s places, voices and legal status in their respective communities, thus al.

Project Leaders: Laura Scuriatti and Ulrike Wagner
 

Digital Theaters studies how the performing arts in exemplary locations have fundamentally altered their reach, audience, institutions, and quality of social encounter by going digital and what that suggests about the future make-up of the performing arts sector. By using the OSUN network, the seminar highlights that questions about the current changes to and precarious futures of cultural production should be discussed in a global civic context that mirrors how we currently come together: physically distanced but virtually.

Project Leaders: Nina Tecklenburg and Ramona Mosse 

Global Modernisms is a collaboration among OSUN institutions that focuses on
modernism’s transnational exchange, aiming to open up the modernist canon and integrate
approaches to teaching and research on modernism.

Project Leaders: Laura Scuriatti and James Harker

The Visual Politics Project gives students the tools and theoretical know-how to understand how institutions as diverse as governments, political and humanitarian organizations, culture industry, and civil society shape what images people see and how they make sense of them. Bringing together the subjects of politics, global studies, postcolonial studies, visual art, as well as media and cultural studies, the course will introduce students to critical theories of race, empire, nation, development, and sovereignty as well as the key tools of visual analysis.  

Project Leader:  Hanan Toukan

The Socrates Project offers university-level courses in the humanities and social sciences to adults in the wider community of Berlin who have been denied educational opportunities in the past, including those who have not completed secondary school. The evening courses, taught in English or German, tackle the big questions of life and society in a friendly atmosphere yet with academic rigor. 

Socrates Project >>

The Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative aims for the proactive integration of scholars forced to seek alternative teaching, research, or advanced study positions at OSUN institutions outside their home countries due to threat from authoritarian regimes, persecution for their views and identities, or other risks. The Initiative also provides affiliation and support for those who cannot relocate. 

Threatened Scholars Initiatives >>

Rethinking how we engage with the humanities and redefining what they are in the light of changing technologies, an increasingly connected global landscape, the ongoing ecological crisis, and calls to create more inclusive universities. This collaboration will inspire and support the growth or development of centers at each locale dedicated to innovative pedagogy. 

EHCN >>

The OSUN Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives are expanding higher educational and research opportunities to areas affected by crisis and displacement. Organized by Bard College and Arizona State University, the Hubs deliver high-quality, contextualized connected learning opportunities customized to meet student needs in each location. 

Hubs for Connected Learning >>

The OLIve Academy Year university preparatory program builds on almost 20 years’ experience of OLIve faculty working on programs for structurally marginalized groups. Across the three core members of the consortium, OLIve will recruit students of refugee backgrounds to prepare them for entry to BA and MA degree programs.

OLIve Academy Year >>