News & Events

Bard College Berlin is pleased to announce the winner of the DAAD Award. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) has enabled Bard College Berlin to select one excellent international student with an impressive record of academic achievement and civic engagement.

The DAAD Award is a monetary award of €1000 that is part of DAAD funding in the STIBET program. It honors outstanding international students in Germany with an exceptional record of engagement for social, political, cultural or humanitarian causes.

Following the review of many qualified applications, the DAAD Award was offered to senior student Margarethe Hattingh (BA in Economics, Politics, and Social Thought). The committee was impressed not only with Margarethe’s excellent academic and civic engagement record, but also with the recommendations she received from BCB faculty.

Margarethe Hattingh is currently an editor and writer for Bard College Berlin’s student blog “Die Bärliner,” a member of the organizing team of the upcoming Liberal Education Student Conference, as well as a math tutor for her BCB peers. She previously worked as an assistant in BCB’s Civic Engagement Office, as a teacher of English to sixth-graders at a school in Berlin, and interned with the Berlin-based NGO Office for the Implementation of Equal Treatment.

“What this award means is that somewhere out there someone cares about the engagement of students in not just academics, but in the society around them; it means that this sort of engagement is valued, and that non-German students are also seen as valuable to Germany,” stated Marga upon receiving the award, noting that “the deserving [students] are too many to count”. She added that “the award means I can feel optimistic about the value I have contributed in my time here, and that I can continue to do more meaningful and impactful work with the money I have received.”

Florian Becker, BCB’s Managing Director, awarded the DAAD certificate to Margarethe during the traditional end-of-year celebration held on December 17, 2018 and open to the entire campus community.

Photo (left to right): BCB's Director of Public Affairs and Development Bendetta Roux, senior student and DAAD Award recipient Margarethe Hattingh, and Managing Director Florian Becker

On December 14, 2018 Professor of Migration Studies Agata Lisiak participated in a workshop titled "Lifestyles, Dwelling and Postmigratory Societies" organized by the Mobile Worlds research team at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

In her talk “At home in the city? Migrant mothers navigating the urban,” Lisiak discussed the different ways in which the meanings and functions of migrants’ homes help us better understand the intersection of migration, gender, and the urban.

On December 14^th and 15^th, Bard College Berlin hosted a colloquium, “Life Writing: New Forms, Uses, Genres.” Scholars from institutions in Germany, Italy, and Russia joined Bard College Berlin faculty for two days of seminar discussion and presentations.
 
“Life Writing” encompasses all written accounts of actual individuals, from biography and autobiography and memoir to letters, diaries, testimony, essays and hybrid genres such as autofiction and biofiction. Presentations approached life writing from many perspectives: the historical development of its forms, the limits of life writing genres, the use of life writing in political contexts, and the relationship between life writing and fiction.
 
BCB faculty participants included Ulrike Wagner, Jeffrey Champlin, Kerry Bystrom, Catherine Toal, Laura Scuriatti, and James Harker. 
 

The article "When private vice hurts public virtue: of blind men, elephants and the politics of market failure" by Professor of Politics Boris Vormann was recently published in the journal Economy and Society. 

In the article, Vormann contends that, contrary to mainstream economic thought, the various types of market failure (notably externalities, public goods and information asymmetries) are not separate descriptions of distinct empirical phenomena, but simply offer different perspectives on the same problem. Because these types of market failure do not stand in an orthogonal, equidistant relationship to one another, if, when and how a market failure occurs is by no means objectively clear. Using the cases of higher education and the global financial crisis, Vormann argues that the conditions in which markets fail, like markets themselves, are socially embedded, context-specific, and the result of often unrecognized political decision-making. 

Link to article>> 

The paper “When Punishment Strikes Late. The Effect of a Delay in Punishment and Punishment Feedback on Cooperation and Efficiency” by BCB faculty member Israel Waichman and Lukas Stenzel was accepted for publication in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics.

This experimental study centers on the effect of a delay in peer punishment on public good provision. It finds that, even under a delay in the effect and feedback of punishment, peer punishment is very effective in facilitating cooperation. However, peer punishment is only efficient (in terms of the overall group's welfare) when a salient link between received punishment and past contributions is established.