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The project is under the direction of Professor of Political Thought Ewa Atanassow and BCB faculty Dr. Ross Shields. The BCB Science & Religion Project, is a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.
Stefani Engelstein – The Wisdom behind Flowers and Bees: The Creation of Ecology in 1793
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 7:30 pm CET
In 1793, Christian Konrad Sprengel first proved that many plants cannot reproduce without insects, and that the structure of the flowers lures, entices, and even coerces insects into their role as pollinators. While many theologians had argued from design to intelligent designer, Sprengel’s flowers introduced the fundamentally new idea of designed cooperation between species. The word ecology wouldn’t be coined for another 75 years, but nature suddenly seemed a lot more integrated. Not all naturalists were enthusiastic: Goethe, in particular, was horrified by the idea that the purpose of a living being could lie outside itself. We will think together about Sprengel’s methods and concept of science, about his conclusions about the Creator and final purposes, and about why his idea was so shocking and disturbing to some thinkers.
Stefani Engelstein is Professor of German Studies and of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her work focuses on literature and science, aesthetics, gender, and political theory. She is the author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY Press, 2008), and co-editor of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi Press, 2011) She is currently working on two book projects as a Visiting Scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin: German Idealism and the Making of the Opposite Sex and Reflections from Germany on Diversity and Violent Pasts: An Essay in Six Cemeteries.
Aaron Tugendhaft – Heavenly Reason in the Medieval Islamic World
Thursday, February 17, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
In 1194, the Egyptian philosopher and rabbinical authority Musa ibn Maymun (aka Maimonides, Rambam) responded to a series of queries by the Jewish community of southern France concerning the efficacy of astrology. This lecture will explore the religious and political dimensions of ibn Maymun's response within the context of how the astral sciences---both astronomy and astrology---were conceptualized in the medieval Islamic world.
Aaron Tugendhaft teaches history and philosophy at the Ramaz School in New York City. From 2018-2021, he taught in the core at Bard College Berlin, where he also served as inaugural director of the Science and Religion Project. He is the author of The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (Chicago, 2020) among other books.
This event is cohosted by the Science and Religion Project and the Early Modern Science core, and supported by the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS).
Georg Toepfer — Unity or Diversity? Christian Origins of and Resistance to Valuing Diversity
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
The current discourse on diversity and its evaluation has not one root, but many. It ties together developments in the fields of biology and bioethics, aesthetics and economy, law and global justice. Somehow the concept ‘diversity’ has managed, in particular in the arena of politics, to bring the heterogenous problems associated with these diverse fields under one heading. An important background for this success story is the rich cultural history of ‘diversity’. It comprises ancient narratives about divine creation, paradise and Noah’s ark as well as political ideas of cultural pluralism, egalitarianism and non-hierarchical representation of individuals. In his talk, Toepfer will focus on the Christian elements in this long history. They refer, among other things, to a more respectful attitude toward animals than the Romans had in ancient times, to debates about the emergence of a “diversity” of ecclesiastical orders, each with different rules (diversitas statutorum), in Medieval times, and the “diversity images” in the physico-theological context of Early Modern times that put the logic of diversity into the visual sphere by showing an egalitarian, non-hierarchical representation of diverse living things.
Georg Toepfer is co-director of the research area “Lebenswissen” at the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. He studied biology and philosophy and received his diploma in biology from the University of Würzburg, his PhD in philosophy from the University of Hamburg and a post-doctoral degree (habilitation) in philosophy from the University of Bamberg. His principal area of research is the history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a special focus on the the transfer of concepts between biology and other fields. Major publication: Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (3 vols., Metzler 2011).
Ross Shields – Mephisto on Method: Goethe the Scientist, Goethe the Poet
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST
A Science and Religion Talk
The most celebrated author in the history of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered the investigation of nature to be his true calling. And while some aspects of his scientific project can easily be dismissed as romantic (his polemic against Newton’s theory of light), others were obviously ahead of their time (his work on comparative anatomy, of which Darwin took notice). But is there a meaningful connection between Goethe’s poetic talent and his approach to nature? What role can intuition play in a discourse dominated by well-defined concepts? What was Goethe’s contribution to scientific debates concerning teleology and mechanism? analysis and synthesis? induction and deduction? This session will inquire into the relation between science and poetry by comparing a scene from Goethe’s Faust I, in which Mephistopholes discusses natural science, with Goethe’s own reflections on the natural world.
Ross Shields has been a guest professor at Bard College Berlin since 2019. In Fall of 2022 he will join the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin to develop a project on Wittgenstein’s theory of linguistic models. He is currently working on a monograph titled The Critique of Pure Feeling: Goethe Reading Kant.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey – Dis/enchanting Emergence: On Ilya Prigogine’s Science of Self-Organization
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
A Science & Religion Project Talk
Nineteenth-century emergentism promised to mediate between mechanism and vitalism — that is, between the assumption that processes of the living are reducible to Newtonian physics and the claim that they require non-physical life forces or souls. Soon dismissed as neo-vitalist, it was re-habilitated in the 1970s through sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-organization. While emergence has become a popular notion that is mobilized in a host of different theories, disciplines, and contexts, its function remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between neo-vitalism and neo-mechanicism. Focusing on Ilya Prigogine, an influential protagonist and popularizer of the sciences of self-organization in the 1970s and 80s, and with a brief comparison to Francisco Varela, co-inventor of the notion of autopoiesis, the seminar explores some aspects of emergence’s bifurcation and multistability, including its relation to time and eternity, non-dualist thought, and the attempt to explain the mysteries of life and consciousness.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has directed since 2006. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote a dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (PhD 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and at the Universität Siegen (2003-06) in the VW-project ‘Mystik und Moderne’. He has directed the interdisciplinary projects Tension/Spannung, ERRANS, and Reduction at ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several interdisciplinary volumes, including Biomystik: Natur – Gehirn – Geist (2007), Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014), De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts (2017), and Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure (2020).
Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: .
Transnationalism has been a key element of socialist and intersectional feminist movements from their very inception. In the early twentieth century, Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai worked together closely to advocate for the rights of women workers everywhere. African-American poet, teacher, and activist Audre Lorde connected with her peers across the world – including Black women in Germany – to jointly develop strategies for survival and battle sexual, racial, and class oppression. More recently, scholars and activists Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, in their Feminism for 99%, have built on the accomplishments of the International Women’s Strike (2017) and mobilized for feminist solidarity across borders.
Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice seeks to develop the promising connections available via OSUN to foster feminist collaborations in academia and beyond. It offers a sustainable platform for students and faculty from OSUN institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, inspire each other through artistic practice, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Partners:
Participating faculty come from disciplines ranging from political science through law to media studies and literature:
Project leader: Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin)
Project assistant: Liza Tabliashvili (Bard College Berlin)
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, April 21, 2022 – Thursday, May 5, 2022
BCB Careers and Civic Engagement are once more teaming up for a two-week "From Passion to Profession" program. This program focuses on practical guidance in preparation for post graduation as well as turning one's passion into a career.
Upcoming events:
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 – Monday, May 9, 2022
This semester's Senior Thesis Presentations are taking place from April 26 - May 9. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year.
Tuesday, 26 April, 2022
Wednesday, 27 April, 2022
Thursday, 28 April, 2022
Friday, 29 April, 2022
Monday, 2 May, 2022
Tuesday, 3 May, 2022
Wednesday, 4 May, 2022
Thursday, 5 May, 2022
Friday, 6 May, 2022
Monday, 9 May, 2022
Contact: [email protected].
Monday, May 2, 2022
Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, will be answering questions about musical and critical works on the syllabus listed below.
Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, published in 2007, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, was published in 2020. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Contact: [email protected].
Passion to Profession: Post-Grad Options in Germany & Abroad
Monday, May 2, 2022
Online Event
Discover different career paths to go after graduation: how to find and apply for internships, traineeships & entry level jobs? Where to find MA or PhD programs and scholarships for it? What is a voluntary social year (FSJ)? How could you find funding for your own art project or business idea? And who and how can one apply for unemployment?
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
Tuesday, May 3, 2022
Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women’s activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women.
None of these women was a ‘perfect’ leftist. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward with their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women’s issues seriously, these five women pursued novel solutions with lessons for today's activists.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a Member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have also been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, Quartz, NBC Think, The Lancet, Project Syndicate, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is also the author of eleven books, including: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018 and 2020), which has already had fourteen international editions. Her most recent book is Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions, co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein and with Oxford University Press in 2021. She is also the host of the podcast, A.K. 47 - Forty-seven Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai.
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, a new project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from OSUN colleges to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Other lectures in the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lecture series:
Contact: [email protected].
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
The last two decades have registered an outstanding wave of naked protests globally. In Africa, the proliferation and hypervisibility of that which is erroneously called genital cursing can be explained by multiple factors, including the power of the digital sphere and the intensification and multiplication of negative biopolitical conditions. This lecture traces the historical trajectory of mature women’s insurrectionary disrobing and examines its recent deployment during moments of socio-political duress. Thirdly, I meditate on the impact of the sharing affordances of Internet media to reframe the terms of the debate around women’s agency. As news and images of the gesture travel outside of their original site of performance, the women’s agency takes on new forms. Diverging, thus, from the longstanding logic that frames the women as endlessly empowered and empowering, I propose that we think of their agency as naked, in the keys of instability and openness.
Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race, taking her archives literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media, her most recent work has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2020), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), African Literature Today ALT 36 (2018), Critical Interventions (2017), Research in African Literatures (2016), and Fieldwork in the Humanities (2016). Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, working on two monographs, “The Problem of Pleasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, a new project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from OSUN colleges to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Other lectures in the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lecture series:
Contact: [email protected].
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
P24_SR8 & Online
Hear from Bard Alumni Andreas Knab how he turned his liberal arts degree into a career and ask him questions on how he got started in Berlin and is now the Director of the Center for the Future at the Factory Berlin.
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Networking in a global network: Join to identify unique ways to connect across the Bard and OSUN global networks. Explore career and graduate school opportunities, student engagement initiatives and calls for proposals. Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Join us for a drop-in conversation during lunch break to chat about the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the opportunities it provides for students. Financial support for thesis research, project grants, student conferences and much more is available to students in the global OSUN network. https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/opportunities/Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Paul Festa's section of the LT326 writing workshop invites you to join them for a critique of student work and Q&A with Louisa Hall on Thursday, 5 May 2022 at 16:45 CET. The course will have read Chapter Two of her 2018 novel Trinity, seven linked stories whose common thread is the figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals. She is a professor at the University of Iowa, and the Western Writer in Residence at Montana State University.
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 5, 2022
P24, Seminar Room 8 & Online
In this session we’ll cover both traditional and non-traditional job-hunting strategies to help you build your network and work your way into an exciting career.
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
Contact: [email protected].
Friday, May 6, 2022
The situation of women and girls in Afghanistan has been steadily deteriorating since the Taliban takeover of the country. Girls’ access to education is heavily curtailed, robbing a generation of girls and young women of a basic right and future opportunities. We are honored to invite you to a talk with Afghan scholar Ahmad Ghani Khosrawi, which will also focus on possible ways forward by pointing out what people in Europe and Germany can and ought to do in response. In the second half of the event, participants have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in a conversation with Dr. Khosrawi and some of BCB’s Afghan students.
Dr. Ahmad Ghani Khosrawi is the former Dean of the Humanities and Literature Faculty of Herat University, where he also founded the German Department. He got his PhD from JMI University in New Delhi, India, and is currently a researcher at Bard College Berlin. Dr. Khosrawi is a scholar, humanitarian, and author published in several countries.
Snacks and drinks will be served at the event.
Contact: [email protected].
Friday, May 6, 2022
Please join us to celebrate the end-of-semester practicing arts events: Open Studios and Performance Factory.
Upstairs in the factory will be presentations of painting, drawing, collage, and video works, while the downstairs rooms are dedicated to performance and dance.
Outside you can see a display of models from the model-making class.
Drinks and refreshments will be served - almost like in pre-pandemic times.
Contact: [email protected].
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Bard College Berlin
A workshop introducing intercultural and intergenerational Communication skills.
Especially when volunteering with people of different generations and cultural backgrounds, challenges can become very apparent. In the workshop, we will get a glimpse into the world of interpersonal communications and learn a trick or two on how we can communicate more efficiently, and maybe more important, peacefully. We will try to improve our mindful speaking abilities, develop effective communication skills and improve intergenerational communication.
Contact: [email protected].
Saturday, May 7, 2022
It is a tradition that the writers in Clare Wigfall's fiction writing workshop give a much-anticipated reading of their work as the finale of their course. Once again, they are returning to the charming Wein Salon in Friedrichshain! Please join us for a cozy and intimate evening of beautiful and surprising stories and words written by the students over the course of the semester. All BCB students, friends, and faculty members are warmly welcome.
Writers presenting:
Dash Charlesworth
Leyla Cubukcuoglu
Johannes Furtwängler
Luiza Garcia Zanardi
Meizhong Hu
Simon Ivčević
Contact: [email protected].
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Nineteenth-century emergentism promised to mediate between mechanism and vitalism — that is, between the assumption that processes of the living are reducible to Newtonian physics and the claim that they require non-physical life forces or souls. Soon dismissed as neo-vitalist, it was re-habilitated in the 1970s through sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-organization. While emergence has become a popular notion that is mobilized in a host of different theories, disciplines, and contexts, its function remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between neo-vitalism and neo-mechanicism. Focusing on Ilya Prigogine, an influential protagonist and popularizer of the sciences of self-organization in the 1970s and 80s, and with a brief comparison to Francisco Varela, co-inventor of the notion of autopoiesis, the seminar explores some aspects of emergence’s bifurcation and multistability, including its relation to time and eternity, non-dualist thought, and the attempt to explain the mysteries of life and consciousness.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has directed since 2006. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote a dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (PhD 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and at the Universität Siegen (2003-06) in the VW-project ‘Mystik und Moderne’. He has directed the interdisciplinary projects Tension/Spannung, ERRANS, and Reduction at ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several interdisciplinary volumes, including Biomystik: Natur – Gehirn – Geist (2007), Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014), De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts (2017), and Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure (2020).
This event is part of a series of seminars organized by the BCB Science & Religion Project, a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.
Contact: [email protected].
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Join us for a drop-in conversation during lunch break to chat about the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the opportunities it provides for students. Financial support for thesis research, project grants, student conferences and much more is available to students in the global OSUN network. https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/opportunities/Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Bard College Berlin
In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month we will host an Information session concerning Accommodation. Everything you wanted to know and never had the time to ask about Disability Accommodations, both academic and residential!
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 12, 2022
You are cordially invited to a student exhibition and joint reading exercise with author, art curator, photographer, filmmaker, political theorist, and professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on Art and Power.
The artistic research projects in this exhibition are inspired by and working from Azoulay’s proposition in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) that it is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the imperial knowledge production and the technologies that make it possible. Azoulay argues that gestures of repatriation and reparation are inadequate if they persist to function within and uphold the histories, institutions and epistemologies that persevere today and are entrenched in ongoing imperial practices.
As part of the creative research component of the course Art and Power (AR191) taught by Prof. Hanan Toukan, students will unravel the intricacies of practices rooted in imperialism by demonstrating their creative research on topics such as colonialism and museums; nationalism and imperialism, state-building and art; Cold War and post 9/11 cultural diplomacy; art and the global economy, decolonizing museum initiatives, as well as migration, art and borders; curatorial politics, and more.
Alongside the exhibition students and interested members of the Bard community are invited to read and think with Azoulay about ways to unlearn imperialism and write a new (potential) history of the world.
Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
This event is generously funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education
Contact: [email protected].
Friday, May 13, 2022
12:30 Prof. Dr. Clara Weinhardt: "The rise of Brazil, India and China and special rights for developing countries in the WTO"
13:00 Dr. Steffen Murau: "The Evolution of the Offshore US-Dollar System. Past, Present, and Four Possible Futures"
13:30 Dr. habil. Andreas Kruck: "Rising Powers and Private Standards in the Global Political Economy"
14:00 Dr. Lukas Haffert: “Mechanisms of Persistence in International Political Economy: the Case of German Inflation Aversion”
14:30 Dr. Mirjam Dageförde: “Failing representation in Europe? Citizens’ perspective”
16:00 Dr. Kai Koddenbrock: “The Global Political Economy of financial policy space”
Each presentation is ca. 20 minutes long.
Contact: [email protected].
Friday, May 13, 2022
Open class-room presentation of the “Animism” class (Andreas Weber)
With presentations by:
Grace Kahn
Moeko Yamada
Anirudh Sathish
Daniel Kovacs
Simone Kyle
Lila O’Connell
Selo Uǧuzeş
Eva Ingver Gimenez
Jacopo Mavica
Grace Muellner
Kaitlyn Woodburn
Hazar Kolancali
Contact: [email protected].
Saturday, May 14, 2022
(a pitch = a voice, a register, a throw, a gradient/slope/difference/angle, also a ploy/sales pitch, a turf/field/space; bad luck)
The great sociologist Stuart Hall has theorized diaspora as "a land of no return": a land where new discursive interstitial spaces are created, "weaving the differences"; where lots of presences can be detected, where translations happen, previously silenced truths emerge, power relations are reordered, and hybridity becomes identical with culture. This, as a consequence and result of the movement of human bodies, may sound playful. But the moving bodies and the minds have to work on the ruins of imperialisms and nationalisms of all sorts, threatening the globe. The diasporic pitch asks to negotiate identity and find a voice on the rubbles of a battlefield, from which the flames can strike at any time.
The artistic projects in this exhibition want to show both: some of these ruinations, in the wars, the refugee bureaucracy, the business of the international NGO’s etc., and some of these interstitial spaces, where life and death at and across inhumane borders can be communicated.
The accompanying program explores the broader implications: A panel with the philosopher Omri Boehm and the sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck will discuss the potentials of radical universalism and the duty to civil disobedience. Student-led workshops will draw attention to new “diasporic pitches” by BCB’s Afghani student-activists and by Ukrainian young artists. There will be Ukrainian pottery-making, and there will be Afghan burgers, and drinks and Slovenian Potica, and the night will close with a screening of Diana El Jeiroudi’s acclaimed documentary film “Republic of Silence”.
The event and the exhibition are part of an OSUN network course between Bard College Berlin, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Our partner classes will join the event via Zoom.
Venue:
Callie’s
Lindower Str. 20
Wedding, 13347 Berlin
Program:
4.30 pm Opening of the Exhibition
5 pm Guided Tour
6 pm Welcome and Drinks
6.30 pm “Radical Universalism” - Keynote lecture by Omri Boehm (New School for Social Research, New York) with response by Teresa Koloma Beck (Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg), moderated by Sam Zamrik (poet and BCB Alumni)
8 pm Food and Drinks
9 pm Screening of “The Republic of Silence” (2021) by Diana El Jeiroudi
Participants:
Omri Boehm (New School for Social Research, New York)
Andjela Despotović (Bard College Berlin)
Ava Dubbelboer (Bard College Berlin)
Jeanne Dupuy-Saint-Martin (Bard College Berlin)
Lily Ellerbrock (Bard College Berlin)
Michaela Foster (Bard College Berlin)
Omar Haidari (BCB Alumni)
Lena Kocutar (UdK, BCB Alumni)
Anastasia Kolesnyk (Odessa/Berlin)
Teresa Koloma Beck (Helmut Schmidt Universität, Hamburg)
Aisha Khurram (Bard College Berlin)
Victoria Martinez (UdK, BCB Alumni)
Jacopo Mavica (Bard College Berlin)
Julia Mazal (Bard College Berlin)
Bruno Oliveira (São Paulo, Brazil)
Vala Schriefer (Bard College Berlin)
Lejla Zjakic (Bard College Berlin)
Sam Zamrik (FU Berlin, BCB Alumni)
Larysa Zolotova (Odessa/Berlin)
This event was organized and curated by Marion Detjen (Bard College Berlin) and Dorothea von Hantelmann (Bard College Berlin) with María Carri (CCS Bard College Annandale) and helped funded by the Open Society University Network.
Contact: [email protected].
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Photography Exhibition
at WIRWIR Project Space | Stuttgarter Str. 56, 12059 Berlin-Neukoelln
The beginning and advanced BCB photography classes will be presenting two one-day exhibitions at WIRWIR Project Space.
Classes
FA106 Beginners Black and White Photography Class: The Slow Photo
The presented work culminates a semester-long in-depth study of beginning darkroom photography.
A presentation of selected photographs by the following students will be on view: Nicolas Chiriboga, Anna von Rosenstiel, Jiayao Gao, Gracie Kuppenbender, Miriam Lubin, Rose, Nadis, Cristina Paz, Liz Sullivan and Elma Talic
FA304 Merging the Photo with the Book Form (Advanced Photography)
The exhibited books showcase a range of techniques and styles of the book form.Fiona French, Fredrike Giron-Giessen, Caroline Goudsmit, Zoe Knable, Zachary Ngin, Bindi Peluce, Glória Nogueira, Lily Taggart and Natalie Viebrock
Instructor: April Gertler
Contact: [email protected].
Sunday, May 15, 2022
The beginning and advanced BCB photography classes will be presenting two one-day exhibitions at WIRWIR Project Space.
FA108 Beginners Digital Photography: Your Own Point of View
Individual photo projects from five different points of view by Lucie Bégard, Evangelia Dalton, Roman Foudon, Carlotta Garrione, Aria Hadžiosmanović, Jacco Hoogvliets, Eva Ingver Gimenez, Charlie Kahn and Zofia Polak will be presented.
FA323 Inside / Outside – Documentary Photo Essays (Advanced Photography)
A presentation of personal photo essays by Kais Alshaar, Harmony Baker, Maxwell Ennis, Yuang Huang, Daniel Kovacs, Cristina Paz, Dina Ramzi, Qais Sangarkhail and Selo Uğuzeş
Instructor: Carla Åhlander
Contact: [email protected].
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
"You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
Never was such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then took place since the world began.
The students of TH 137 Adapting Novels for the Stage: Virginia Woolf's Orlando warmly invite you to a presentation of short scenes and theatrical adaptations inspired by Orlando that they've been working on throughout this semester. All BCB students, friends, and faculty members are warmly welcome.
Contact: .
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Contact: [email protected].
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Bard College Berlin
Join us for a drop-in conversation during lunch break to chat about the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the opportunities it provides for students. Financial support for thesis research, project grants, student conferences and much more is available to students in the global OSUN network. https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/opportunities/Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Friday, May 20, 2022
Performers can sign up in advance here. Sign-ups on the night of are also possible.
Contact: [email protected].
Science and Religion Project Lecture Series
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 – Tuesday, May 10, 2022
The Science and Religion Project at Bard College Berlin provides interested students with an opportunity to expand their knowledge of the history of science, the history of religions, and the issues that arise when the two are considered together. At the core of the project is a fellowship program for select students who have committed to participating in a series of text seminars over the course of the academic year. Led by world-renowned experts, these seminars focus on the careful study of works from antiquity to the present and from across the globe.The project is under the direction of Professor of Political Thought Ewa Atanassow and BCB faculty Dr. Ross Shields. The BCB Science & Religion Project, is a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.
Stefani Engelstein – The Wisdom behind Flowers and Bees: The Creation of Ecology in 1793
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 7:30 pm CET
In 1793, Christian Konrad Sprengel first proved that many plants cannot reproduce without insects, and that the structure of the flowers lures, entices, and even coerces insects into their role as pollinators. While many theologians had argued from design to intelligent designer, Sprengel’s flowers introduced the fundamentally new idea of designed cooperation between species. The word ecology wouldn’t be coined for another 75 years, but nature suddenly seemed a lot more integrated. Not all naturalists were enthusiastic: Goethe, in particular, was horrified by the idea that the purpose of a living being could lie outside itself. We will think together about Sprengel’s methods and concept of science, about his conclusions about the Creator and final purposes, and about why his idea was so shocking and disturbing to some thinkers.
Stefani Engelstein is Professor of German Studies and of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her work focuses on literature and science, aesthetics, gender, and political theory. She is the author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY Press, 2008), and co-editor of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi Press, 2011) She is currently working on two book projects as a Visiting Scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin: German Idealism and the Making of the Opposite Sex and Reflections from Germany on Diversity and Violent Pasts: An Essay in Six Cemeteries.
Aaron Tugendhaft – Heavenly Reason in the Medieval Islamic World
Thursday, February 17, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
In 1194, the Egyptian philosopher and rabbinical authority Musa ibn Maymun (aka Maimonides, Rambam) responded to a series of queries by the Jewish community of southern France concerning the efficacy of astrology. This lecture will explore the religious and political dimensions of ibn Maymun's response within the context of how the astral sciences---both astronomy and astrology---were conceptualized in the medieval Islamic world.
Aaron Tugendhaft teaches history and philosophy at the Ramaz School in New York City. From 2018-2021, he taught in the core at Bard College Berlin, where he also served as inaugural director of the Science and Religion Project. He is the author of The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (Chicago, 2020) among other books.
This event is cohosted by the Science and Religion Project and the Early Modern Science core, and supported by the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS).
Georg Toepfer — Unity or Diversity? Christian Origins of and Resistance to Valuing Diversity
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
The current discourse on diversity and its evaluation has not one root, but many. It ties together developments in the fields of biology and bioethics, aesthetics and economy, law and global justice. Somehow the concept ‘diversity’ has managed, in particular in the arena of politics, to bring the heterogenous problems associated with these diverse fields under one heading. An important background for this success story is the rich cultural history of ‘diversity’. It comprises ancient narratives about divine creation, paradise and Noah’s ark as well as political ideas of cultural pluralism, egalitarianism and non-hierarchical representation of individuals. In his talk, Toepfer will focus on the Christian elements in this long history. They refer, among other things, to a more respectful attitude toward animals than the Romans had in ancient times, to debates about the emergence of a “diversity” of ecclesiastical orders, each with different rules (diversitas statutorum), in Medieval times, and the “diversity images” in the physico-theological context of Early Modern times that put the logic of diversity into the visual sphere by showing an egalitarian, non-hierarchical representation of diverse living things.
Georg Toepfer is co-director of the research area “Lebenswissen” at the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. He studied biology and philosophy and received his diploma in biology from the University of Würzburg, his PhD in philosophy from the University of Hamburg and a post-doctoral degree (habilitation) in philosophy from the University of Bamberg. His principal area of research is the history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a special focus on the the transfer of concepts between biology and other fields. Major publication: Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (3 vols., Metzler 2011).
Ross Shields – Mephisto on Method: Goethe the Scientist, Goethe the Poet
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST
A Science and Religion Talk
The most celebrated author in the history of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered the investigation of nature to be his true calling. And while some aspects of his scientific project can easily be dismissed as romantic (his polemic against Newton’s theory of light), others were obviously ahead of their time (his work on comparative anatomy, of which Darwin took notice). But is there a meaningful connection between Goethe’s poetic talent and his approach to nature? What role can intuition play in a discourse dominated by well-defined concepts? What was Goethe’s contribution to scientific debates concerning teleology and mechanism? analysis and synthesis? induction and deduction? This session will inquire into the relation between science and poetry by comparing a scene from Goethe’s Faust I, in which Mephistopholes discusses natural science, with Goethe’s own reflections on the natural world.
Ross Shields has been a guest professor at Bard College Berlin since 2019. In Fall of 2022 he will join the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin to develop a project on Wittgenstein’s theory of linguistic models. He is currently working on a monograph titled The Critique of Pure Feeling: Goethe Reading Kant.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey – Dis/enchanting Emergence: On Ilya Prigogine’s Science of Self-Organization
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
A Science & Religion Project Talk
Nineteenth-century emergentism promised to mediate between mechanism and vitalism — that is, between the assumption that processes of the living are reducible to Newtonian physics and the claim that they require non-physical life forces or souls. Soon dismissed as neo-vitalist, it was re-habilitated in the 1970s through sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-organization. While emergence has become a popular notion that is mobilized in a host of different theories, disciplines, and contexts, its function remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between neo-vitalism and neo-mechanicism. Focusing on Ilya Prigogine, an influential protagonist and popularizer of the sciences of self-organization in the 1970s and 80s, and with a brief comparison to Francisco Varela, co-inventor of the notion of autopoiesis, the seminar explores some aspects of emergence’s bifurcation and multistability, including its relation to time and eternity, non-dualist thought, and the attempt to explain the mysteries of life and consciousness.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has directed since 2006. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote a dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (PhD 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and at the Universität Siegen (2003-06) in the VW-project ‘Mystik und Moderne’. He has directed the interdisciplinary projects Tension/Spannung, ERRANS, and Reduction at ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several interdisciplinary volumes, including Biomystik: Natur – Gehirn – Geist (2007), Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014), De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts (2017), and Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure (2020).
Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: .
Save this event: Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice
Online Lecture Series
Tuesday, March 1, 2022 – Wednesday, May 4, 2022
Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice builds on the inspiring accomplishments of recent courses and initiatives offered at various OSUN colleges and universities and acknowledges the importance of transnational feminism as a toolkit for social-justice activism.Transnationalism has been a key element of socialist and intersectional feminist movements from their very inception. In the early twentieth century, Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai worked together closely to advocate for the rights of women workers everywhere. African-American poet, teacher, and activist Audre Lorde connected with her peers across the world – including Black women in Germany – to jointly develop strategies for survival and battle sexual, racial, and class oppression. More recently, scholars and activists Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, in their Feminism for 99%, have built on the accomplishments of the International Women’s Strike (2017) and mobilized for feminist solidarity across borders.
Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice seeks to develop the promising connections available via OSUN to foster feminist collaborations in academia and beyond. It offers a sustainable platform for students and faculty from OSUN institutions to engage in rigorous academic work, inspire each other through artistic practice, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Partners:
Participating faculty come from disciplines ranging from political science through law to media studies and literature:
- Al-Quds Bard College (Laura Menchaca Ruiz)
- American University of Central Asia (Elena Kim, Mokhira Suyarkulova)
- Bard College (Allison McKim, Alys Moody)
- Bard College Berlin (Cassandra Ellerbe, Aysuda Kölemen, Agata Lisiak)
- University of the Witwatersrand (Srila Roy)
- Off-University (Nevra Akdemir, Carmel Christy)
- March 1, 4:00 pm CET: Poulami Roychowdhury, Capability and Incorporation: Pathways to Redress in the Aftermath of Violence
- April 26, 3:00 pm CET: Tatsiana Shchurko, From Harlem to Tashkent: Rethinking Histories of Socialist Internationalism for Transnational Feminist Solidarities
- May 3, 3:00 pm CET: Kristen R. Ghodsee, Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women
- May 4, 3:00 pm CET: Naminata Diabate, Naked Agency / Protest: Between the Occult and the Internet
Project leader: Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin)
Project assistant: Liza Tabliashvili (Bard College Berlin)
Contact: [email protected].
From Passion to Profession program
a series of workshops, talks, and info sessions
Thursday, April 21, 2022 – Thursday, May 5, 2022
7:30–8:30 pm
BCB Careers and Civic Engagement are once more teaming up for a two-week "From Passion to Profession" program. This program focuses on practical guidance in preparation for post graduation as well as turning one's passion into a career. Upcoming events:
- April 21, 730 pm CET: Xenia Muth & Faiza zu Lynar, Funding & Fundraising
- April 25, 7:30 pm CET: Greta Fortwengel, Visa Session
- April 27, 12:30 pm CET: Elena Esser, Job Apps
- May 2, 7:30 pm CET: Judith Weber, Post-Grad Options in Germany & Abroad
- May 5, 1:00 pm CET: Xenia Muth & Faiza zu Lynar, OSUN Networking for your Career and Engagement
- May 5, 7:30 pm CET: Tina-Marie Joaquim, How to Find a Job
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
BA Final Presentations
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 – Monday, May 9, 2022
12:30–2:30 pm
This semester's Senior Thesis Presentations are taking place from April 26 - May 9. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. Tuesday, 26 April, 2022
- Gil Gabman — The Effects of Unlimited Vacation Policy on Employees in the Israeli Tech Sector
- Adam Hardaker — Knowing What You've Done: Self-Assessments and "Green Identity" as Predictors of Environmental Impact
- Ava Simonds — Illusion and Doubleness: Rousseau's Formulation of Political Rootedness in Emile, or On Education
Wednesday, 27 April, 2022
- Nicholas Fellows — Habermas's Public Sphere in the Age of Digital Reproducibility: Democratic Deliberation in Shopper's Heaven
- Yazan Mahboub Alhara — Smart Social Contracts: A Discourse on the Political Philosophy of Decentralized Pacts
- Maxwell Ennis — The Ideal Leader on the Threshold of Christianization and Secularization (Tecosca Cormaic and The Prince)
- Amr Al Jaber — The Future of Money: A Comparison between Central Bank Digital Currencies and Stablecoins
Thursday, 28 April, 2022
- Joshua Lucy — Who Watches the Watchmen: Graphic Novel as a Reflection of American Political Life
Friday, 29 April, 2022
- Joey Walsh — The Representation of National Politics through the Arts, Architecture, and Industry at the 1937 Paris World's Fair
- Lejla Zjakic — Awakenings: The New Art Practice in late 1960s Socialist Yugoslavia
- Adele Martin — Restitution as a Tool: Decolonizing the Ethnographic Museum
- Maya Chami — What Power Does Music Have? The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Barenboim-Said Akademie as a Musical Institution in the Face of Political Conflicts
Monday, 2 May, 2022
- Liza Tabliashvili — Hidden in Plain Sight: Soviet Imperialism and the Construction of Ethnicity in Soviet Member Republics
- Emma Morris — “Quod evenit in labyrintho properantibus: ipsa illos velocitas inplicat”: The Maze and Anxiety in Chapter IX of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
- Rafat Alkotaini — Feather and Keffiyeh
- Angela Li — Truth to Feeling: Authority in Autofiction
Tuesday, 3 May, 2022
- Khalil Hammod — Three Visions of Surveillance: a Comparative Assessment
- Amineh Sawan — Gender Roles and Women Political Participation: Pre and Post 2011
- Ehab Badwi — Syrians in Exile: Challenges of Building a Diaspora Community in Germany
- Sohaib Al Zoubi — Wait, Compete or Leave to Grow? How Do Different States/Political Systems Deal with Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain
- Isabel Pisarsky — Neoliberalism Reinvented: Understanding Tactics of Variegated Populist Nationalism
- Julian Thielman — On The Possibility of Post-Keynesian Neo-Keynesianism: A History of Transformations in The Welfare State, Organized Labor, Technology, and the International Economic Order
- Lucas Engel — Chinese Debt-Trap Diplomacy in Africa: Fiction of Fact Evaluating the Truth Content of Debt-Trap Allegations and Win-win Rhetoric in Four Resource-rich African Countries
- Parviz Khyber — When does state-building fail? Comparing Germany and Afghanistan
Wednesday, 4 May, 2022
- Owen Salamunovich — Intersectionality in the Face of Commodification: The Underground Music Scenes of Berlin since the 1990’s to Present
- Ira Vengurlekar — Paulo Freire's Ideas on Critical Pedagogy and Their Implementation: A Case Study of the Waldorf and Krishnamurti Foundation India Schools
- Enkhbujin Ochirbat — The Economics of NFTs: An Art Market Revolution or a Passing Trend?
- Noor Ender — Fables of the Mundane: The Mythic Functions of Autofiction
Thursday, 5 May, 2022
- Skye Eytina — The Change in the Image and Visibility of the Black American Female Rapper
- Erick Moreno Superlano — Coloniality of Power and the UNHCR: A Critical Analysis of Representational Practices in Venezuela's Caminantes
- Marija Stefanovska — Unemployment, Job Guarantee, and the EU Framework: An Analysis
Friday, 6 May, 2022
- Naama Simon — A Different Model: Reimagining The Family in Tarbut Movement, Israel
- Samet Güçlü — İkizdere: The Depot of Life
- Amelia Sheesley — Scents of Beauty: An Investigation into the Aesthetic Experience of Olfactory Art
- Flora Keene — Reimagining a Future in the Face of Climate Adversity: An Analysis of the Work of Julie Mehretu
- Blue Zahra Lonergan — The Magical Rite of Imazighen Body Art
- Jakov Sharevski — Democratic Backsliding in Eastern Europe Post EU Membership (2003-2021)
- Ahmad Denno — Representation and Political Participation of Citizens with Migration Backgrounds in Germany
Monday, 9 May, 2022
- Jhonatan Garcia — The Influence of the Drug Cartels in Mexican Politics and Society
- Daniela Lima da Silva — The real “problem with the favelas”: Questioning state action and social dynamics in Rio de Janeiro’s slums
- Shreya Shukla — How is Music Used as Resistance to Protest Indian Occupation in Kashmir?
- Aidan Maloof — Method in Madness? Divining a Foreign Policy Doctrine in the Trump Whitehouse
Contact: [email protected].
Wagner, Strauss, and Schoenberg — A Conversation with Alex Ross
Monday, May 2, 2022
6–7 pm
Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, will be answering questions about musical and critical works on the syllabus listed below.Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, published in 2007, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, was published in 2020. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Contact: [email protected].
Passion to Profession: Post-Grad Options in Germany & Abroad
Monday, May 2, 2022
7:30–8:45 pm
Online EventDiscover different career paths to go after graduation: how to find and apply for internships, traineeships & entry level jobs? Where to find MA or PhD programs and scholarships for it? What is a voluntary social year (FSJ)? How could you find funding for your own art project or business idea? And who and how can one apply for unemployment?
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
Kristen R. Ghodsee – Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women
Online lecture series
Tuesday, May 3, 2022
3–4:30 pm
Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women’s activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women.None of these women was a ‘perfect’ leftist. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward with their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women’s issues seriously, these five women pursued novel solutions with lessons for today's activists.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a Member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have also been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, Quartz, NBC Think, The Lancet, Project Syndicate, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is also the author of eleven books, including: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018 and 2020), which has already had fourteen international editions. Her most recent book is Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions, co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein and with Oxford University Press in 2021. She is also the host of the podcast, A.K. 47 - Forty-seven Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai.
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, a new project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from OSUN colleges to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Other lectures in the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lecture series:
- March 1, 4:00 pm CET: Poulami Roychowdhury, Capability and Incorporation: Pathways to Redress in the Aftermath of Violence
- April 26, 3:00 pm CET: Tatsiana Shchurko, From Harlem to Tashkent: Rethinking Histories of Socialist Internationalism for Transnational Feminist Solidarities
- May 4, 3:00 pm CET: Naminata Diabate, Naked Agency / Protest: Between the Occult and the Internet
Contact: [email protected].
Naminata Diabate – Naked Agency / Protest: Between the Occult and the Internet
Online Lecture Series
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
3–4:30 pm
The last two decades have registered an outstanding wave of naked protests globally. In Africa, the proliferation and hypervisibility of that which is erroneously called genital cursing can be explained by multiple factors, including the power of the digital sphere and the intensification and multiplication of negative biopolitical conditions. This lecture traces the historical trajectory of mature women’s insurrectionary disrobing and examines its recent deployment during moments of socio-political duress. Thirdly, I meditate on the impact of the sharing affordances of Internet media to reframe the terms of the debate around women’s agency. As news and images of the gesture travel outside of their original site of performance, the women’s agency takes on new forms. Diverging, thus, from the longstanding logic that frames the women as endlessly empowered and empowering, I propose that we think of their agency as naked, in the keys of instability and openness. Naminata Diabate is an associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A scholar of gender, sexuality, and race, taking her archives literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media, her most recent work has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, and collections of essays, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2020), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), African Literature Today ALT 36 (2018), Critical Interventions (2017), Research in African Literatures (2016), and Fieldwork in the Humanities (2016). Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, working on two monographs, “The Problem of Pleasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, a new project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from OSUN colleges to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Other lectures in the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lecture series:
- March 1, 4:00 pm CET: Poulami Roychowdhury, Capability and Incorporation: Pathways to Redress in the Aftermath of Violence
- April 26, 3:00 pm CET: Tatsiana Shchurko, From Harlem to Tashkent: Rethinking Histories of Socialist Internationalism for Transnational Feminist Solidarities
- May 3, 3:00 pm CET: Kristen R. Ghodsee, Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women
Contact: [email protected].
Passion to Profession: Alumni Perspectives
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
6:30–7:30 pm
P24_SR8 & OnlineHear from Bard Alumni Andreas Knab how he turned his liberal arts degree into a career and ask him questions on how he got started in Berlin and is now the Director of the Center for the Future at the Factory Berlin.
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
BRAVE Peer Supporters - Drop-In Hours
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
7:30–9:30 pm
Bard College BerlinContact: [email protected].
Passion to Profession: OSUN Network(ing) for your Career and Engagement
Thursday, May 5, 2022
1–1:50 am
Bard College BerlinNetworking in a global network: Join to identify unique ways to connect across the Bard and OSUN global networks. Explore career and graduate school opportunities, student engagement initiatives and calls for proposals. Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
OSUN Info Lunch
Thursday, May 5, 2022
1 pm – 1:45 am
Bard College BerlinJoin us for a drop-in conversation during lunch break to chat about the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the opportunities it provides for students. Financial support for thesis research, project grants, student conferences and much more is available to students in the global OSUN network. https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/opportunities/Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Q&A with Louisa Hall
Thursday, May 5, 2022
4:45–5:45 pm
Paul Festa's section of the LT326 writing workshop invites you to join them for a critique of student work and Q&A with Louisa Hall on Thursday, 5 May 2022 at 16:45 CET. The course will have read Chapter Two of her 2018 novel Trinity, seven linked stories whose common thread is the figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer.Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in The New Republic, Southwest Review, and other journals. She is a professor at the University of Iowa, and the Western Writer in Residence at Montana State University.
Contact: [email protected].
Passion to Profession: How to Find a Job
Thursday, May 5, 2022
7:30–8:30 pm
P24, Seminar Room 8 & OnlineIn this session we’ll cover both traditional and non-traditional job-hunting strategies to help you build your network and work your way into an exciting career.
Contact: [email protected] https://bard.zoom.us/j/86874640113.
Thesis Title Declaration Deadline for Fall 2022 Graduates
Friday, May 6, 2022
BA4 students must submit the title of the thesis and the name of the supervisor and of the second reviewer to the Examination Board for approval at the end of week 13 in semester 1 of the 4th academic year.Contact: [email protected].
Talk and Q&A with Dr. Khosrawi: Access to Education for Girls in Afghanistan under Taliban Rule
Friday, May 6, 2022
12:30–2 pm
The situation of women and girls in Afghanistan has been steadily deteriorating since the Taliban takeover of the country. Girls’ access to education is heavily curtailed, robbing a generation of girls and young women of a basic right and future opportunities. We are honored to invite you to a talk with Afghan scholar Ahmad Ghani Khosrawi, which will also focus on possible ways forward by pointing out what people in Europe and Germany can and ought to do in response. In the second half of the event, participants have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in a conversation with Dr. Khosrawi and some of BCB’s Afghan students.Dr. Ahmad Ghani Khosrawi is the former Dean of the Humanities and Literature Faculty of Herat University, where he also founded the German Department. He got his PhD from JMI University in New Delhi, India, and is currently a researcher at Bard College Berlin. Dr. Khosrawi is a scholar, humanitarian, and author published in several countries.
Snacks and drinks will be served at the event.
Contact: [email protected].
Showcase for Practicing Arts Classes
Friday, May 6, 2022
5:30–9 pm
Please join us to celebrate the end-of-semester practicing arts events: Open Studios and Performance Factory. Upstairs in the factory will be presentations of painting, drawing, collage, and video works, while the downstairs rooms are dedicated to performance and dance.
Outside you can see a display of models from the model-making class.
Drinks and refreshments will be served - almost like in pre-pandemic times.
Contact: [email protected].
Coffee, Cake, and a Conversation
How to engage with your neighbor-hood?
Saturday, May 7, 2022
11 am – 1 pm
Bard College BerlinA workshop introducing intercultural and intergenerational Communication skills.
Especially when volunteering with people of different generations and cultural backgrounds, challenges can become very apparent. In the workshop, we will get a glimpse into the world of interpersonal communications and learn a trick or two on how we can communicate more efficiently, and maybe more important, peacefully. We will try to improve our mindful speaking abilities, develop effective communication skills and improve intergenerational communication.
Contact: [email protected].
Literary Reading by the Students of Clare Wigfall's Advanced Fiction Writing Workshop
Saturday, May 7, 2022
9–11 pm
It is a tradition that the writers in Clare Wigfall's fiction writing workshop give a much-anticipated reading of their work as the finale of their course. Once again, they are returning to the charming Wein Salon in Friedrichshain! Please join us for a cozy and intimate evening of beautiful and surprising stories and words written by the students over the course of the semester. All BCB students, friends, and faculty members are warmly welcome.Writers presenting:
Dash Charlesworth
Leyla Cubukcuoglu
Johannes Furtwängler
Luiza Garcia Zanardi
Meizhong Hu
Simon Ivčević
Felix LeVeque
Kai Parcher-Charles
Isaac Stewart
Sarah Wolbach
Location: Schreinerstr. 59, 10247 Berlin
Location: Schreinerstr. 59, 10247 Berlin
Contact: [email protected].
Christoph F. E. Holzhey – Dis/enchanting Emergence: On Ilya Prigogine’s Science of Self-Organization
A Science & Religion Project Talk
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
7:30–9 pm
Nineteenth-century emergentism promised to mediate between mechanism and vitalism — that is, between the assumption that processes of the living are reducible to Newtonian physics and the claim that they require non-physical life forces or souls. Soon dismissed as neo-vitalist, it was re-habilitated in the 1970s through sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-organization. While emergence has become a popular notion that is mobilized in a host of different theories, disciplines, and contexts, its function remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between neo-vitalism and neo-mechanicism. Focusing on Ilya Prigogine, an influential protagonist and popularizer of the sciences of self-organization in the 1970s and 80s, and with a brief comparison to Francisco Varela, co-inventor of the notion of autopoiesis, the seminar explores some aspects of emergence’s bifurcation and multistability, including its relation to time and eternity, non-dualist thought, and the attempt to explain the mysteries of life and consciousness.Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has directed since 2006. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote a dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (PhD 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and at the Universität Siegen (2003-06) in the VW-project ‘Mystik und Moderne’. He has directed the interdisciplinary projects Tension/Spannung, ERRANS, and Reduction at ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several interdisciplinary volumes, including Biomystik: Natur – Gehirn – Geist (2007), Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014), De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts (2017), and Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure (2020).
This event is part of a series of seminars organized by the BCB Science & Religion Project, a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.
Contact: [email protected].
BRAVE Peer Supporters - Drop-In Hours
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
7:30–9:30 pm
Bard College BerlinContact: [email protected].
OSUN Info Lunch
Thursday, May 12, 2022
1 pm – 1:45 am
Bard College BerlinJoin us for a drop-in conversation during lunch break to chat about the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the opportunities it provides for students. Financial support for thesis research, project grants, student conferences and much more is available to students in the global OSUN network. https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/opportunities/Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Access, Ability, and Accommodations
May is Mental Health Awareness Month
Thursday, May 12, 2022
12:30–1:30 pm
Bard College BerlinIn honor of Mental Health Awareness Month we will host an Information session concerning Accommodation. Everything you wanted to know and never had the time to ask about Disability Accommodations, both academic and residential!
Contact: [email protected].
Art and Power
Thursday, May 12, 2022
5:30–8:35 pm
You are cordially invited to a student exhibition and joint reading exercise with author, art curator, photographer, filmmaker, political theorist, and professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on Art and Power.The artistic research projects in this exhibition are inspired by and working from Azoulay’s proposition in her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) that it is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the imperial knowledge production and the technologies that make it possible. Azoulay argues that gestures of repatriation and reparation are inadequate if they persist to function within and uphold the histories, institutions and epistemologies that persevere today and are entrenched in ongoing imperial practices.
As part of the creative research component of the course Art and Power (AR191) taught by Prof. Hanan Toukan, students will unravel the intricacies of practices rooted in imperialism by demonstrating their creative research on topics such as colonialism and museums; nationalism and imperialism, state-building and art; Cold War and post 9/11 cultural diplomacy; art and the global economy, decolonizing museum initiatives, as well as migration, art and borders; curatorial politics, and more.
Alongside the exhibition students and interested members of the Bard community are invited to read and think with Azoulay about ways to unlearn imperialism and write a new (potential) history of the world.
Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
This event is generously funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education
Contact: [email protected].
Candidate Research Presentations: Professorship in International Political Economy
Friday, May 13, 2022
12:30–4:30 pm
12:30 Prof. Dr. Clara Weinhardt: "The rise of Brazil, India and China and special rights for developing countries in the WTO"13:00 Dr. Steffen Murau: "The Evolution of the Offshore US-Dollar System. Past, Present, and Four Possible Futures"
13:30 Dr. habil. Andreas Kruck: "Rising Powers and Private Standards in the Global Political Economy"
14:00 Dr. Lukas Haffert: “Mechanisms of Persistence in International Political Economy: the Case of German Inflation Aversion”
14:30 Dr. Mirjam Dageförde: “Failing representation in Europe? Citizens’ perspective”
16:00 Dr. Kai Koddenbrock: “The Global Political Economy of financial policy space”
Each presentation is ca. 20 minutes long.
Contact: [email protected].
Open class-room presentation of the “Animism” class (Andreas Weber)
Friday, May 13, 2022
4–6 pm
Open class-room presentation of the “Animism” class (Andreas Weber)With presentations by:
Grace Kahn
Moeko Yamada
Anirudh Sathish
Daniel Kovacs
Simone Kyle
Lila O’Connell
Selo Uǧuzeş
Eva Ingver Gimenez
Jacopo Mavica
Grace Muellner
Kaitlyn Woodburn
Hazar Kolancali
Contact: [email protected].
Research Creation Exhibition: The Diasporic Pitch
Exhibition event - panel - workshops - film screening
Saturday, May 14, 2022
4–11:55 pm
(a pitch = a voice, a register, a throw, a gradient/slope/difference/angle, also a ploy/sales pitch, a turf/field/space; bad luck)The great sociologist Stuart Hall has theorized diaspora as "a land of no return": a land where new discursive interstitial spaces are created, "weaving the differences"; where lots of presences can be detected, where translations happen, previously silenced truths emerge, power relations are reordered, and hybridity becomes identical with culture. This, as a consequence and result of the movement of human bodies, may sound playful. But the moving bodies and the minds have to work on the ruins of imperialisms and nationalisms of all sorts, threatening the globe. The diasporic pitch asks to negotiate identity and find a voice on the rubbles of a battlefield, from which the flames can strike at any time.
The artistic projects in this exhibition want to show both: some of these ruinations, in the wars, the refugee bureaucracy, the business of the international NGO’s etc., and some of these interstitial spaces, where life and death at and across inhumane borders can be communicated.
The accompanying program explores the broader implications: A panel with the philosopher Omri Boehm and the sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck will discuss the potentials of radical universalism and the duty to civil disobedience. Student-led workshops will draw attention to new “diasporic pitches” by BCB’s Afghani student-activists and by Ukrainian young artists. There will be Ukrainian pottery-making, and there will be Afghan burgers, and drinks and Slovenian Potica, and the night will close with a screening of Diana El Jeiroudi’s acclaimed documentary film “Republic of Silence”.
The event and the exhibition are part of an OSUN network course between Bard College Berlin, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Our partner classes will join the event via Zoom.
Venue:
Callie’s
Lindower Str. 20
Wedding, 13347 Berlin
Program:
4.30 pm Opening of the Exhibition
5 pm Guided Tour
6 pm Welcome and Drinks
6.30 pm “Radical Universalism” - Keynote lecture by Omri Boehm (New School for Social Research, New York) with response by Teresa Koloma Beck (Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg), moderated by Sam Zamrik (poet and BCB Alumni)
8 pm Food and Drinks
9 pm Screening of “The Republic of Silence” (2021) by Diana El Jeiroudi
Participants:
Omri Boehm (New School for Social Research, New York)
Andjela Despotović (Bard College Berlin)
Ava Dubbelboer (Bard College Berlin)
Jeanne Dupuy-Saint-Martin (Bard College Berlin)
Lily Ellerbrock (Bard College Berlin)
Michaela Foster (Bard College Berlin)
Omar Haidari (BCB Alumni)
Lena Kocutar (UdK, BCB Alumni)
Anastasia Kolesnyk (Odessa/Berlin)
Teresa Koloma Beck (Helmut Schmidt Universität, Hamburg)
Aisha Khurram (Bard College Berlin)
Victoria Martinez (UdK, BCB Alumni)
Jacopo Mavica (Bard College Berlin)
Julia Mazal (Bard College Berlin)
Bruno Oliveira (São Paulo, Brazil)
Vala Schriefer (Bard College Berlin)
Lejla Zjakic (Bard College Berlin)
Sam Zamrik (FU Berlin, BCB Alumni)
Larysa Zolotova (Odessa/Berlin)
This event was organized and curated by Marion Detjen (Bard College Berlin) and Dorothea von Hantelmann (Bard College Berlin) with María Carri (CCS Bard College Annandale) and helped funded by the Open Society University Network.
Contact: [email protected].
Spit & Stars
Saturday, May 14, 2022
6–9 pm
Photography Exhibitionat WIRWIR Project Space | Stuttgarter Str. 56, 12059 Berlin-Neukoelln
The beginning and advanced BCB photography classes will be presenting two one-day exhibitions at WIRWIR Project Space.
Classes
FA106 Beginners Black and White Photography Class: The Slow Photo
The presented work culminates a semester-long in-depth study of beginning darkroom photography.
A presentation of selected photographs by the following students will be on view: Nicolas Chiriboga, Anna von Rosenstiel, Jiayao Gao, Gracie Kuppenbender, Miriam Lubin, Rose, Nadis, Cristina Paz, Liz Sullivan and Elma Talic
FA304 Merging the Photo with the Book Form (Advanced Photography)
The exhibited books showcase a range of techniques and styles of the book form.Fiona French, Fredrike Giron-Giessen, Caroline Goudsmit, Zoe Knable, Zachary Ngin, Bindi Peluce, Glória Nogueira, Lily Taggart and Natalie Viebrock
Instructor: April Gertler
Contact: [email protected].
To Find a Fallen Eye
Sunday, May 15, 2022
5–8 pm
The beginning and advanced BCB photography classes will be presenting two one-day exhibitions at WIRWIR Project Space.FA108 Beginners Digital Photography: Your Own Point of View
Individual photo projects from five different points of view by Lucie Bégard, Evangelia Dalton, Roman Foudon, Carlotta Garrione, Aria Hadžiosmanović, Jacco Hoogvliets, Eva Ingver Gimenez, Charlie Kahn and Zofia Polak will be presented.
FA323 Inside / Outside – Documentary Photo Essays (Advanced Photography)
A presentation of personal photo essays by Kais Alshaar, Harmony Baker, Maxwell Ennis, Yuang Huang, Daniel Kovacs, Cristina Paz, Dina Ramzi, Qais Sangarkhail and Selo Uğuzeş
Instructor: Carla Åhlander
Contact: [email protected].
Orlando Class Presentations
Theater event
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
7–8:30 pm
"You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
Never was such a scene of protestation and demonstration as then took place since the world began.
The students of TH 137 Adapting Novels for the Stage: Virginia Woolf's Orlando warmly invite you to a presentation of short scenes and theatrical adaptations inspired by Orlando that they've been working on throughout this semester. All BCB students, friends, and faculty members are warmly welcome.
Contact: .
BRAVE Peer Supporters - Drop-In Hours
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
7:30–9:30 pm
Bard College BerlinContact: [email protected].
OSUN Info Lunch
Thursday, May 19, 2022
1 pm – 1:45 am
Bard College BerlinJoin us for a drop-in conversation during lunch break to chat about the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and the opportunities it provides for students. Financial support for thesis research, project grants, student conferences and much more is available to students in the global OSUN network. https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/opportunities/Sponsored by: Bard College Berlin.
Contact: [email protected].
Open Mic Night
Friday, May 20, 2022
6:30–8 pm
Performers can sign up in advance here. Sign-ups on the night of are also possible.Contact: [email protected].
New Feminisms, New Questions workshop on campus
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