Event Archive

W15 Cafe  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Bringing together BCB students, staff and faculty, "Campus Café" is for all of us who want to find ways to stay connected in person, and to learn from each other about ongoing initiatives, clubs, events, career services, DEI and civic engagement opportunities. There is so much going on on campus, it cannot fit onto any bulletin board.
We take Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, as occasion to kick off the Campus Café meetings this semester.

The Factory  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
This event is to educate people on the long history of the ballroom scene to the contemporary scene right now in Berlin. There will be an exhibition where people can walk through for half an hour, then there will be a presentation. To put this all into practice, a Vogue workshop will be given by a prominent member of the Berlin Ballroom Scene. Depending on its success, we would like to continue workshops throughout the semester.

W15 Cafe  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Disastrous floods now cover nearly one-third of Pakistan, causing billions of dollars in damages to crops, houses, and other buildings, and severely impacting the lives of 33 million people, many of whom have been displaced from their homes. Come join your peers and the Civic Engagement team in a discussion over at the W15 Cafe on climate change awareness, and learn about how you can help the relief efforts in Pakistan!

This event is part of the Involved Campus Talks series.

Outside the Akademie der Kuenste on Pariser Platz (by Brandenburger Tor)  5:45 pm – 8:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
As part of the class 'Berlin Outsider', historian and activist Nathaniel Flakin will lead an (Anti)Colonialism walking tour through Berlin. This event is open to the entire BCB community.

The tour will meet just outside the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz (by Brandenburger Tor) at 5:45pm on Wednesday, 21 September. After walking around Mitte, the tour will go to Wedding, and you can travel up there by bike or U-Bahn. The tour will be end just before 20:00 at U-Bhf Rehberge. 

For those not in enrolled in the class, there's a 10 euro suggested donation. You can also check out Nathaniel's Revolutionary Berlin: A Walking Guide, which was released this year by Pluto Press. If you'd like to attend, please RSVP by email to [email protected] to reserve your place.
 

Online Event  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
In April 2019, during the early days of a mass sit-in in Khartoum calling for the fall of the alBashir regime, this image of Alaa Salah, a young Sudanese woman reciting poetry, went viral. Within days, the photo appeared in prominent media outlets, including The New York Times, which argued that images such as this “derive their power in part from the sheer quotidian nature of the individual, armored not in defensive gear or in depersonalizing military garb but in the clothes of the everyday.” Taking this image as a starting point, Sara Abbas looks at feminist activism during the ongoing revolution in Sudan, situating it within the history of women’s struggles since independence. Highlighting the shifts that are taking place in how women, especially young women, conceive of the “political”, Abbas argues that devoid of an intersectional lens, such images serve to depoliticize struggles for gender justice, and obscure more than they show.

Sara Abbas is a political scientist and current recipient of the “inequalities” fellowship at the Open Society Foundations. She is researching and writing a manuscript on the imaginations and collective practices that have arisen in the sit-in spaces (protestor camps) during Sudan’s ongoing revolution. Sara is a contributor to Diversity on Common Ground: Ten perspectives on contemporary feminism (2020) and A Region in Revolt: Mapping the recent uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (2020).

Live Information Session with BCB Admissions
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Please fill out the form below to register and receive the access link to this Admissions event.



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K24, Seminar Room 11   12:30 pm – 1:45 pm CEST/GMT+2
Collaborations, including international ones, such as those supported by OSUN,  can produce much excitement, but also some uncertainty and anxiety regarding communication and expectations. With the help of some intercultural techniques and positioning exercises, we can start a process of reflection on the privileges and blind spots we might be unaware of, and how those can influence our academic collaborations. This session will offer some tools to take the first step in becoming a more "ethical" research partner.

W15 Cafe  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
Join the Student Life Committee for a discussion of current topics relevant to the BCB community. This meeting, topics for discussion will be decided for the Fall 2022 semester. If you've got a topic you'd like covered this semester, let us know by joining us in the W15 café. 

Student Life Committee meetings are open to everyone at BCB, and are an opportunity for us to come together as staff, faculty, and students to discuss issues that are important to our community. 
 

Humboldt University   Workshop on Tactics for Resistance and Advocacy in Authoritarian Spaces: Turkey, Hungary, Poland and beyond
15 September 10:00-17:30, 16 September 9:30-12:30 

The past decade has seen a spectacular rise of new forms of authoritarianism in Europe and its surrounds, rooted in a global triumph of neoliberalism and relying on modes of populist democratic legitimation (see Brown 2018; Sajó, Uitz, and Holmes 2021; Vormann and Lammert 2019; Wiatr 2019). This workshop asks what can be done to resist this process–especially in locations where authoritarianism transformation has already greatly narrowed the space for independent civil society and media, and protest runs the risk of jail sentences, criminal investigations or worse.

We look specifically to the intertwined fields of law and culture. This is not only because regimes at the center of our analysis–in Turkey, Hungary and Poland–have combined the use of lawfare and the attempt to capture the judiciary as a last check on authoritarian rule with a specific scripting of acceptable narratives about national identity, values and futures and a policing of acceptable voices (Wiatr 2019). But it is also because legal and cultural institutions and practices remain only partially captured (Moustafa 2014). Domestically and through transnational networks they offer avenues for advocacy and resistance when other paths may seem closed.

Bringing together interdisciplinary scholars from the fields of law, politics, performance, literature and visual art, with a focus on the countries mentioned above, this workshop will explore the following questions: How are legal discourses and institutions being used to counter-hegemonic ends? Are there examples and tactics that are already circulating, or which can be shared? Beyond the courtroom narrowly conceived, which “fora” (Weizman 2014; Keenan 2014) should we be looking at? What does it do to broaden the scope for resistance and recognize its aesthetic dimensions? In what ways can writers and artists effectively counter authoritarian scripts? What alliances are needed with legal and political actors and institutions, domestically and internationally? Further, how does one negotiate the need to speak out versus the risks of doing so?

Workshop participation possible by pre-registration only Kerry Bystrom [email protected] or Zeynep Kıvılcım [email protected]. 

 

Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Learn about the OSUN student mobility opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students available at participating institutions within the OSUN network. OSUN student mobility is a tuition exchange study abroad opportunity with scholarships available through the application.

Cafeteria Garden (Rain location: W16)  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
The Involvement Fair is your chance to meet the student clubs and organizations and find out how to get involved this semester. Several campus resources will also have tables where you can learn more about the services they offer.

 

Friday, September 2

1.00 PM – 3.00 PM Contemporary German Politics, Tour led by Aaron Allen
Meeting Point: Brandenburg Gate

What are the challenges and opportunities confronting modern day German politics? This tour will offer key insights into the institutions and decisionmakers influencing the current Ampelkoalition. Participants will visit Berlin’s government district which will include (but is not limited to) sightseeing the Reichstag (and the adjacent parliamentary buildings), the Bellevue Palace, the Chancellery, and the Bundesrat.

Saturday, September 3

11.00 AM – 1:30 PM South Berlin/ West Asia: The "Middle East" in Neukölln, Tour led by May Zeidani Yufani
Meeting Point: U7/U8- Hermannplatz near the golden statue
To Register: Please email May at [email protected]
 A post orientalist walk through Neukölln: all the way on the other side of Berlin lies a little neighborhood called (North) Neukölln. A lot of strange and unfamiliar things happen there (or maybe they remind us of home?). We will take a walk (long one, so come with comfortable shoes!) through the busy streets, taste some of what it has to offer and hear (only a bit) of it's very interesting, sometimes weird, history. Join me in getting to know my side of Berlin!
11.30 AM – 2.00 PM Floating University Tour, Tour led by Faiza Lynar
Meeting Point: We meet at U Südstern (subway station) at
11.30am. http://shorturl.at/cjLR3
To Register: Please email Faiza at [email protected]

The Civic Engagement team is inviting you to Floating University tour with one of the members. Floating University Berlin exists since 2018 and is all about urban practice on and in the rainwater retention pool of former Berlin Tempelhof airport. It's a "natureculture learning site", a laboratory for urban experiments and international exchange on urban development and many other things. People go there to learn from each other. The focus is on transdisciplinary learning and mediation, especially of disciplines that traditionally have little contact with each other, such as urban development and dance, water management and visual arts, architecture and waste management. Floating University is not floating and it's not a university, it's not an easy place to describe and best explored during a visit. So come along!
More info: https://floating-berlin.org/


8.00 PM – 10.00 PM Sunset walk up to the Flakturm at Humboldthain, Walk led by Dorien Schoemaker
Meeting Point: Gesundbrunnen Bahnhof (outside, next to the Curry Baude stand)

On the ruins of a bunker built in the 2nd world war, there is a beautiful view over Berlin, as it's on top of a hill. Now it's a great place for watching the sunset together with friends, and unwind a little after a long day. After the sun has set, there is plenty of time to continue the night & discover Berlin's nightlife further!


Sunday, September 4

10.00 AM – 6.00 PM From Potsdam to Nikolassee, Day trip led by Miksa Gáspár
Meeting Point: Front of the Cafeteria

Join this day-trip and explore the wonderful town of Potsdam and the pleasant water of Nikolassee with me. We will visit the castle of Potsdam, will grab something in the city center for lunch and then head to the Nikolassee for a late-afternoon dip. Sunscreen, comfy shoes and water bottle are recommended, the good mood is guaranteed. (In case of bad weather, we will visit the museum at Wannsee instead).


12.00 PM – 3.00 PM Memorial of the Socialists, Tour led by Frances Grimm
Meeting Point: U-Bahnhof Lichtenberg
https://goo.gl/maps/wz3W5D1c5jsvjgPW6

This tour invites all students new and old to visit the final resting place of the leaders of Berlin's November Revolution (Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) and other famous German socialists. We will discuss the exciting history of the revolution as well as read some of Luxemburg's most famous writings. The starting point will be U-Bahnhof Lichtenberg, from where we will make our way to Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde.


12.00 PM – 5.00 PM Berlin Graffiti Tour, Tour led by Yensen LeBeau
Meeting Point: Courtyard of W15 and K30

Berlin is notoriously one of the most "bombed" cities in Europe, which in the lingo means it's a hotspot of graffiti, tagging, and street art. Come tour what the east has to offer as we travel from campus down to the Spree with stops along the way, take a loop around Friedrichshain, and get a taste of both the incredible art and the history of Berlin's graffiti scene. Complete with a lesson in the basics of street art back on campus, it's sure to be a blast.
 

6:30 pm – 8:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
The Welcome Reception is an opportunity for the BCB community to come together after the first day of classes, welcome our new community members, and reconnect with one another.

Sammlung Scharf Gerstenberg  10:00 am – 6:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
For the third time, Bard College Berlin has won the award "Eine Uni ein Buch," an initiative supported by several German foundations. The book we picked is Goya's "Los Desastres de la Guerra," a series of prints published in book format that depict the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain. The themes are frightfully contemporary and relevant. Together with the Scharf Gerstenberg Collection BCB organized the exhibition of Goya's works and an events program that reflects on topics such as war, migration and exile.

The exhibition shows around three dozen original prints and all four print cycles by Goya, including "La Tauromaquia" (1814-1816) and "Los Disparates" (1819-1823). The exhibition will run from August 19 to November 6, 2022. 

Events:

Conversation
Goya’s Unsparing Anti-Heroism, A Conversation With Laura López Paniagua and Geoff Lehman
Wednesday October 12 at 6.30 p.m.
Laura López Paniagua (contemporary art) and Geoff Lehman (Renaissance art), both art historians and lecturers at Bard College Berlin, will engage in a conversation with the audience as well as the exhibited works about the role and impact of Goya’s oeuvre.

Panel Discussion
Real Talk: Showing What Cannot / Should Not Be Shown, A Panel Discussion
Wednesday November 2 at 6.30 p.m.
Sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck together with displaced students and alumni/ae from Bard College Berlin will discuss the complexities of showing images of war crimes to shake audiences out of their complacency. Omar Haidari (Afghanistan) graduated from BCB in 2021 and works for the NGO Aseel. Aisha Khurram (Afghanistan) studies at BCB. Limo Kinder (Ukraine) studies at BCB. Teresa Koloma Beck, conducts research on conflict, violence and globalization and teaches at the Helmut Schmidt Universität in Hamburg. Ameenah Sawan (Syria) graduated from BCB in 2022 and is enrolled at the SOAS University of London.

Film Screenings
September 29, 6:30pm - Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (Konrad Wolf) [German-language only]
October 26, 6:30pm - Goya in Bordeaux (Carlos Saura) [Spanish language with German subtitles]
November 30, 6:30pm - Goya's Ghosts (Miloš Forman) [English language with German subtitles]

Students may visit the exhibit and all events for free at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg if they present their student ID at the front desk. To attend the film screenings for free, RSVP by email to Bendetta Roux ([email protected].edu) at least 24 hours in advance of the screening and bring your student ID to the event.

Eine Uni – ein Buch is an initiative of the Stifterverband and the Klaus Tschira Foundation in cooperation with DIE ZEIT.

  10:15 am – 12:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

 

6:30 pm – 8:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Performers can sign up in advance here. Sign-ups on the night of are also possible.

 

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

Theater event 
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

"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. 

5:00 pm – 8:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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

6:00 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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

Exhibition event - panel - workshops - film screening
4:00 pm – 11:55 pm CEST/GMT+2
(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.

  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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
 

  12:30 pm – 4:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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. 

5:30 pm – 8:35 pm CEST/GMT+2
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

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

May is Mental Health Awareness Month
Bard College Berlin  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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!

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

  A Science & Religion Project Talk
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
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.

9:00 pm – 11:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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 IvčevićFelix LeVequeKai Parcher-CharlesIsaac StewartSarah Wolbach

Location: Schreinerstr. 59, 10247 Berlin

How to engage with your neighbor-hood?
Bard College Berlin  11:00 am – 1:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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.

5:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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.
 

  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
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.
 

  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.


Download: Declaration_of_BA_Thesis_Title.pdf Declaration of BA Thesis Title

P24, Seminar Room 8 & Online  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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.

4:45 pm – 5:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
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.

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

Bard College Berlin  1:00 am – 1:50 am CEST/GMT+2
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. 

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

P24_SR8 & Online  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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.

Online Lecture Series
3:00 pm – 4:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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 WomenFor information on the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lectures from Fall 2021 >>

Online lecture series
3:00 pm – 4:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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 For information on the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lectures from Fall 2021 >>

Online Event  7:30 pm – 8:45 pm CEST/GMT+2
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?
 

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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.

7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Eugene Jarecki is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning director of dramatic and documentary subjects who has twice won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, first in 2005 for WHY WE FIGHT and again in 2012 for THE HOUSE I LIVE IN. His other films include the Emmy award-winning REAGAN (HBO, 2011), THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER (BBC/Sundance, 2002) and FREAKONOMICS (Magnolia, 2010). In 2002, Jarecki wrote and directed the dramatic feature THE OPPONENT for Lions Gate Films. 

A public intellectual on domestic and international affairs, Jarecki has been named a Soros Justice Fellow at the Open Society Institute and a Senior Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stowart, Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, FOX News, CNN, and many other outlets, while also being featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and GQ, among others. As Founder and Executive Director of The Eisenhower Project, a public policy group dedicated to promoting greater public understanding of the forces that shape U.S. foreign and defense policy, he published the 2008 book The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (Simon & Schuster). He is also the creator of Move Your Money, a 2010 online video that sparked a national movement to shift personal banking away from "too big to fail" banks into community banks and credit unions in 2010. To date, more than 4 million Americans have "moved their money." 

Mentored in his youth by legendary filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, Jarecki worked as a stage director before turning to film. When he was 21, his first short film Season of the Lifterbees was selected for screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Since then, he has continued to receive wide critical acclaim as both a dramatic and documentary director in film and television. "Combining the skills of journalist and poet," writes Variety writes, "Eugene Jarecki sets the gold standard for political documentaries." 

Often motivated by his outrage at areas of corruption, exploitation, or injustice in contemporary life, Jarecki's films combine compassion with rigorous inquiry, weaving story, emotion, and penetrating analysis into a human tapestry of unforgettable sounds and images.

  An Internship Seminar (IS331) Talk
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
For artists who are living the life they have always dreamed of, it’s easy to keep forgetting that. And if dreams are the easiest access we have to our inner selves, our subconsciousness, that part of our being is the most interesting for artists, since art also allows for experiences that can't be described in words. Our biggest challenge, then, lies in balancing our dreamy state of being with the state of being that has to run a label, recording studio, and get projects through funding processes.

Kaan Bulak is a composer and pianist who writes music, performs on stage with his ensemble and creates sonic experiences. Along the way, Kaan has started releasing electronic music and played live sets in clubs. In 2017 he was able to gather commissions by classically oriented institutions and moved over to classical stages to perform with his ensemble, as a soloist with symphony orchestras, and solo concerts. For electronically augmenting the grand piano, he co-designed a radial loudspeaker specifically for classical concert halls. With such speaker concepts and his label Feral Note, which focuses on music between electronic and acoustic sounds, his aim is to bring underground sounds, artists, and attitudes to classical stages.

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

W16, Reading Room & Online  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
No matter if you are looking for a mini job, an internship, or a job for the time after graduation, job apps are omnipresent in our contemporary digital world. But what are the most common job apps in Germany? What are their up- and downsides? Learn more about different platforms, how to use them, and what might be different about them in Germany.

Join in person or remotely: https://meet.google.com/cab-dwca-gjf

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
In this campus talk, Prof. Ahmed Hmeedat will discuss the historical linearity of the Palestinian cause, as well as the importance of art and architecture in representing Palestine, reshaping political reality, and resistance. While acknowledging that art has aided the Palestinian cause, he believes that transitioning to aesthetic themes that emphasize the re-imagination of a better future will have a bigger impact on the decolonization process than investing in commemoration art. He'll address questions like, what does grievability in art mean? and to what extent does Palestinian art need grievability in the international art world?Ahmed Hmeedat holds a BA degree in International Law from Al-Quds Bard College in East Jerusalem (the only liberal arts college in the Middle East), also holds another an LL.M. in American Legal System from Syracuse University College of Law in Upstate New York; as well as a rich experience working in immigration law field (business and humanitarian immigration) and non-profit organizations in the United States.
 
He is also an artist who contributed to establishing the first Palestinian museum in Washington D.C., the Museum of the Palestinian People, in 2019. The opening co-exhibit, “Re-imagining A Future in Palestine” has featured some of Ahmed’s artwork. Ahmed is a self-taught artist who experiments with a variety of media, including watercolors, acrylic, oil, ink, and charcoal. Hmeedat’s art expresses the plight of the refugees and reminds people that the Nakba is an ongoing reality for Palestinians. His recent work, Searching for the Blue has been featured by Symposeum Magazine in the United States. 
 
Now, Ahmed works at Al-Quds Bard College- East Jerusalem, as Recruitment and Communication Officer, also teaches as an instructor in the Human Rights and International Law Program. His current spring course is Resistance, Art of Activism and Human Rights.

A Science & Religion Project Series Talk
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
The knowledge-making practices to which Europeans gave the name “science” became closely entangled with European colonization. In India, British colonizers found systematic forms of knowledge making that they deprecated as inferior to European science, while simultaneously converting them into European objects of knowledge to assist colonization. This process resulted in the development of “colonial sciences”, different knowledge forms brought together for purposes of colonial governance and resource extraction. What were the indigenous knowledge forms that the British encountered in India? How did they map onto the English word science? Did the making of the colonial sciences affect developments in post-colonial Indian science and technology? This lecture will consider these questions in order to understand what “science” means in India today.

Minakshi Menon is historian of science who studies natural knowledge making in colonial South Asia. She is a member of Research Group Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she leads a Working Group on the seventeenth-century Dutch herbal the Hortus indicus malabaricus. She is currently working on a book manuscript with the working title Empiricism’s Empire: Natural Knowledge Making, State Making and Governance in East India Company India (1784-1840). She recently edited a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture on “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia” (2022).

A Science and Religion Talk
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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.
 

Online lecture series
3:00 pm – 4:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
In 2006, Esther Cooper Jackson, a renowned Black civil rights activist, social worker, and leftist thinker, participated in a community event in Harlem. Among many things, she also talked about her Cold War-era political activism and underlined that “more and more of us need to become internationalist.” What does this statement mean for transnational feminist solidarities today? How to pick up on Esther Cooper Jackson’s call thoughtfully and ethically? What are the prospects to engage with histories of socialist internationalism for social justice struggles today? To engage with these questions, I return to alternative histories of transnational feminist solidarities rooted in practices of socialist internationalism. Today, many past solidarities associated with the Soviet Union and socialist internationalism have been excluded from transnational feminist inquiry and devalued. However, our current ongoing context of the pandemic, rise of the global right, imperial violence, and authoritarian politics make obvious the transnational interdependencies and raise concerns about the possibility of feminist solidarity and care between distant communities. To approach the contemporary urgencies, I look at the link between past radical struggles in the U.S. and the former second world. In this way, I focus on alternative geographies of connection, togetherness, and solidarity that appear marginal, insignificant, or invisible for conventional historiographies and traditional geographic arrangements. For this talk, I will address why to study the various histories of socialist internationalism and what significance these stories can have for contemporary transnational feminist solidarities.

Tatsiana Shchurko is a researcher and queer feminist activist from Belarus. In 2021, she completed her PhD in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Her dissertation explores hidden or unclaimed histories of socialist internationalism for their relevance today. Specifically, Tatsiana explores the relations between Black women and state socialist women and “sister cities” solidarities to reevaluate how internationalist ideas and transnational mobility play a fundamental role in producing a sense of agency and resistance to global injustices.

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 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 For information on the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lectures from Fall 2021 >>

12:30 pm – 2:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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

Online Event  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
This is a short introduction on options and possibilities to stay in Germany after graduation. We will look at work permits, seeking-work permits, continuing study permits etc. However, be aware, this is only informational, BCB cannot actually help you to apply for a permit if you are no longer enrolled.

5:30 pm – 8:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
We cordially invite you to the public presentation and exhibition of art works from this year’s graduating cohort.

For the first time at BCB, graduates had the opportunity to add a creative component to their final thesis project. The outcomes of this creative research include painting, creative writing, olfactory art and performance.

Please join us in celebrating this special occasion!
Works by Amelia Sheesley, Amineh Sawan, Flora Keene, Leijla Zjakic, Rashana Shabazz.

a series of workshops, talks, and info sessions
7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
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

Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
Brainstorm and get information on fundraising strategies! Join to find out where to get started with funding for your project idea.
This is a hybrid event, drop by in W16 or join online.

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

1:00 pm – 2:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
What are Critical Muslim Studies (CMS)? How can CMS inform your academic journey including research and practice?

In a post-migration Europe, what can we learn from critical theories that find their origins outside of the eurocentric worldview? How can theories of emancipation be implemented to create safe spaces for self-critic and self-development for marginalized groups? Is it possible without betraying the origin of the tradition and belief? Without being instrumentalized in one's own essentialization?

This talk will highlight how Hasnaa Mukhtar accidentally got introduced to CMS and how it positively influenced, shaped, and informed her doctoral research on gender-based violence in Muslim communities and advocacy for the intervention and prevention of the issue.

Hasnaa Mokhtar is the Postdoctoral Associate at Rutgers University’s Center for Women’s Global Leadership. She holds a Ph.D. from Clark University and her dissertation focused on narrative power and the invisible trauma of gendered violence in Kuwait. She is a scholar, researcher, and activist, with expertise on the Arabian Gulf, focusing on narratives of Muslim survivors of gender-based violence. Hasnaa’s writings have been published in mainstream media and in academic journals. Previously, Hasnaa served as the executive director of the Center for Nonviolent Solutions in Worcester, MA, and more recently as the special program director at Peaceful Families Project.

This event is in partnership with the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education and is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  

  Online Event  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
The topic of this open Student Life Committee meeting is CONNECTIONS TO PANKOW:

Here are some questions to guide our conversation:
How do we connect with our neighbors? In Pankow and in Berlin?
How can we build relationships with the people near campus, through events, community projects, etc.

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

 

8:00 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
Food will be served after Maghreb prayer (approx. 8 pm) in the garden behind K24. In case of bad weather the event is postponed.

Let’s come together and celebrate Ramadan, sharing our traditions from back home and creating new ones. We will be preparing some food together from 6 pm in the kitchen of K24 for those who are interested (please let us know if you are coming so we can keep in line with the Corona regulations). 

Afterward, we will enjoy the evening hanging out, socializing, and of course with Iftar and food. There will be vegan and meat options. We will take care of the food basics and drinks. You just need to show up!

With this Iftar, we would like to celebrate openness and acceptance of individual relations to spirituality and tradition. All are invited No matter if you are practicing, less-practicing or non-practicing, or non-Muslim.

Looking forward to seeing you all...
 

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

  Info & Exchange Meeting on Current Volunteer Options for Refugees from Ukraine
(in person/online meetup)
Bard College Berlin  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Description:The war in Ukraine has been going on for nearly 6 weeks. Millions of people have had to flee their homes, thousands are arriving in Berlin every day. Some have contacts in Germany, others are facing a completely unknown and uncertain future and need to rely on local support.
Many people in Berlin, including BCB students, faculty and staff, have been active in support of people affected by the war over the past weeks. We invite the BCB community to get together to exchange experiences and ideas for meaningful engagement and consider options for getting involved.

  Info & Exchange Meeting on Current Volunteer Options for Refugees from Ukraine
(in person/online meetup)
7:30 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
The war in Ukraine has been going on for nearly 6 weeks. Millions of people have had to flee their homes, thousands are arriving in Berlin every day. Some have contacts in Germany, others are facing a completely unknown and uncertain future and need to rely on local support. 

Many people in Berlin, including BCB students, faculty and staff, have been active in support of people affected by the war over the past weeks. We invite the BCB community to get together to exchange experiences and ideas for meaningful engagement and consider options for getting involved.

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

A guest lecture hosted by the Science and Religion Project
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
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). 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.

Hybrid Lecture Series
7:30 pm CET, the Factory and Online
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Raphael Moussa Hillebrand will talk about his unusual background and education as a dancer in hip hop, about his choreography, working with children and difficult groups, his international projects, and about his work as a politician. Raphael is the first person of color to receive the prestigious German Dance Award (2020) recognizing his unique contributions in the fields of hip-hop, choreographic innovation, and community integration. Born in Hong Kong to German and West African parents, raised in Berlin, Raphael came to dance through B-Boy battles (Winner of Battle of the Year, 2006) and hip hop practice. He has a masters in choreography from the Ernst Busch Hochschule (HZT) and works regularly with/for the German Goethe Institute on international projects. He has choreographed “Der Rap des Niebelungen”, toured extensively, and is deeply engaged with Die Urbane — the political party in Germany intent upon using the positive energy in hip hop to help foster a culture that supports the best in each individual, to challenge high vs low culture, and to redefine freedom in the context of urban spaces.

This event is part of the lecture series: "Dance and Community Building: Utopian Practice in the 21st Century" which is funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Join on zoom >>

Info Session
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
The BCB Internship Program gives you the opportunity to gain an off-campus workplace experience in a field that interests you. You can work 10-13 hours/week in an internship while also exploring various questions regarding work in the internship seminar taught by Asli Vatansever and Florian Duijsens. Most internships are generally unpaid, but you can earn academic credits through the internship seminar. If you are a current or upcoming third-year student and curious about BCB’s Internship Program and the opportunity to gain practical experience alongside your studies while interning for an organization/individual in Berlin, please save the date and join us!

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CEST/GMT+2
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/

Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
Join the screening and discussion of "2040": A film investigating numerous solutions that can contribute towards climate mitigation and imagining what a future would be like where they have been implemented at scale.

With the contribution of course participants of this semester's "Civic Engagement" course (student contact for this event: Jeanne).

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CEST/GMT+2

Online Event  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
What do I want from my career?
What are my core values?
What activities do I most enjoy, professionally or in my free time?
What are my interests?
What are my strengths and aptitudes? Soft skills and hard skills?
Do I want to specialize in certain technical skills or take on a management role?
etc.

Learn more about how to join the UN, GIZ, Foreign Service, or work for the Goethe-Institute. Or are you planning to create your own business or NGO and follow your creative and artistic profession?

Share your idea and win a food container!
Bard College Berlin  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
The food industry is a major contributor to climate change. At the same time, climate change is likely to diminish continued progress on global food security through production disruption. Limiting our own household's food waste is a first step in response to this global issue that anyone can take. Posters and flyers on tips on limiting food waste will be put up around campus to raise awareness of how everyone can be more mindful when food shopping, how to store food correctly, and recipes on how to limit our food waste.

Take part in our ideas competition on campus by sharing a tip for more sustainable food consumption. The best four ideas will be rewarded with a nice food container!

With the contribution of course participants of this semester's "Civic Engagement" course (student contact for this event: Lovisa).

The "Limiting Food Waste Ideas Competition" is part of the Climate Week at BCB, that was prompted by the Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice on March 30, 2022. It is an invitation to a joint reflection and discussion of the global challenges posed by changing climate, identifying both how we and the societies we live in contribute to the climate disaster, and what are possible local & personal responses to address it.

Bard College Berlin  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Clothing swap events encourage us to develop a greater awareness of what we actually need and use, and to circulate the clothes we have in our community. They present a way of changing our wardrobe without leaving a carbon footprint. We also see Tuesday's event as an opportunity to discuss consumption patterns in our society and how the fashion industry is contributing to climate change.

The Clothing Swap is part of the Climate Week at BCB, that was prompted by the Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice on March 30, 2022. It is an invitation to a joint reflection and discussion of the global challenges posed by changing climate, identifying both how we and the societies we live in contribute to the climate disaster, and what are possible local & personal responses to address it.

an Info Session
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Come to this info session to learn the proper and most effective way to write a cover letter.

An Online Talk
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Fred Abrahams is presenting a talk and conversation on documenting violations and seeking justice in the Ukrainian war. 

Fred Abrahams is Associate Program Director at Human Rights Watch in Berlin, responsible for training HRW's research staff, developing research methodology, and supervising work by the Crisis & Conflict and Technology & Human Rights divisions. He has documented human rights and laws-of-war violations in places such as Albania, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Sri Lanka, Syria and Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Abrahams has a bachelor's degree in German and International Studies from Washington University and a master's in International Affairs from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He previously taught at Columbia University and The New School in New York and is currently offering the BCB course "Making the Case: Human Rights Research and Reporting."

  Online Event  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The topic of this open Student Life Committee meeting is COMMUNICATION.

Here are some questions to guide our conversation: What channels of communication exist? How do we share information in these channels? Can we streamline our email communication? If so, how? How do students receive and process information about happenings at the college, events, important information, etc.? Is there a difference between information on the public website vs an internal one? What role do community spaces play in communication of campus information? What solutions can we find for Covid-19 and for the Cafeteria space? How do we engage in conversations around difficult topics?

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CET/GMT+1
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/

Factory Performance Space  9:00 am – 12:15 pm CET/GMT+1
BCB students are invited to join Nina Tecklenburg's class Postdramatic and Contemporary Theater in Berlin for an open workshop with the performance collective Henrike Iglesias.

“MY DEAR BELLY” - Theater collective Henrike Iglesias invites BCB students to a three-hour theatrical experiment involving sound, live video, writing and performance, using those tools to work on topics like beauty, body positivity and self-love. Malu and Marielle, two members of Henrike Iglesias, will do their best to rebuild a rehearsal space for our students, in which they can try out some of the strategies the collective has been using to generate scenes for their shows. Throughout the workshop the students will get the opportunity to perform themselves and/or support others in working on their scenes. No previous knowledge needed, only open minds and hearts. 

The workshop will take place in the factory performance space. Participation is limited to a total of 14 students. 

HENRIKE IGLESIAS, a theater collective based in Berlin and Basel, has been working together since 2012. Henrike’s permanent crew includes Anna Fries, Laura Naumann, Marielle Schavan, Sophia Schroth, Eva G. Alonso and Malu Peeters. They understand pop cultural and mass media phenomena as a mirror of social conditions and grievances and have made it their mission to illuminate them from feminist perspectives. Together and in smaller constellations, as well as with various collaborators they do performance theater, installations, parties and much more, if you ask. 
 
MARIELLE SCHAVAN, born in Düsseldorf in 1991, has studied creative writing and Inszenierung der Künste und der Medien at the University of Hildesheim and now works as a performer, dramaturg and writer and also does social work. 

MALU PEETERS, born in The Netherlands in 1984, studied Composition and Image & Sound at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and makes (spatial) sound and music for performing arts, XR installations, radio and experimental film.

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

  Bring poetry from your culture and share it with the community
Bard College Berlin  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
For this years' Weeks Against Racism we have planned a poetry night for students to share a piece of their culture with the community. Bring a piece of writing of your choice and read it at W15. It can be in any language and on any topic of your choosing. Feel free to also bring a snack from your country. We will have a discussion together about the poetry and learn more about where the members of this community come from. There will be drinks and pizza and a celebration of our diversity!
If you are interested in coming, please register and feel free to submit your piece of writing if you would like it to be printed.

 

A Global Modernisms Lecture
4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
During the first half of the twentieth century, an epochal period defined by two world wars, fascism, and the British empire’s disintegration, a set of intertextual lyric routes circulate between Bengali, Spanish, and Portuguese-language poets (although none of them could read the other’s poetry in the original language). These “lyric routes” between the peripheral but high modernist metropoles of Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Havana, Mexico City, and Santiago are pivotal in reshaping key aesthetic debates and poetic experiments reflexively cognizant of the limits of European discourses of Westphalia and “civilization.” Moreover, the often playful translations of verse from a previous translation, rather than the language of the original text, render new poetic forms and philosophies of language for critical concern.

This lecture focuses on the specter of Rabindranath Tagore’s verse and celebrity in Latin America during a pivotal moment of world decolonization during the interwar period. As intellectual, art, and literary historians demonstrate, not just Tagore’s Nobel Prize recognized oeuvre and prose-poem Gitanjali, but a number of earlier writings, dramatic plays, doodles, and paintings come to yield enormous influence on major Latin American poets, philosophers, and intellectuals. Yet the translations and incorporations of Tagore’s poetic-philosophy by Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Jose Lezama Lima, Victoria Ocampo, and (eventually) Octavio Paz are not mere passive translations but offer a critical reservoir of lyric transculturation registering a specifically modernist disenchantment with European modernity. At stake in this comparative framing is not just a story of reception between South Asia and Latin America, but critical reconfigurations of the political ideals of universality as world-making through poesis.

Munia Bhaumik is the Program Director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives at the University of California, Los Angeles and an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, politics, and law. Her research and teaching critiques racial and gender inequities as well as the multiple social factors impacting whose lives count before the law. Dr. Bhaumik received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta where she engaged with new Asian/Latinx immigrant and African American community voting rights alliances in the South, while also developing a vibrant undergraduate degree program in comparative literature and critical theory. Based on her research about noncitizens as the “uncounted,” data and democracy, as well as on poetry as political action across the Global South, she received the prestigious Stanford Humanities Center, Herman Melville Society, and Cornell Society for the Humanities faculty awards. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Bhaumik also spent a decade as a primarily Spanish-speaking labor/community organizer on the staff of leading progressive organizations in Los Angeles shaping national debates about social justice through direct action. Equally motivated by the humanities as by social movements, particularly the ethical dilemmas communities-of-color are mobilizing in this global (post)metropolis, her work brings to attention research protocols in alliance with the demands for abolition and noncitizen citizenship as well as multilingual, queer, migrant, worker, healthcare, and Black equal rights.

This is the third lecture in the Global Modernisms lecture series.  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.

  Bard College Berlin  1:00 pm – 1:45 am CET/GMT+1
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/

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
With Spring Break approaching, you may be wondering:
-How can I have an awesome trip without awesome amounts of funds?
-What is the difference between Interrail and Eurail, and should I even care?
-Where am I supposed to sleep?
-How do I travel solo?
-How do I stay safe/stay healthy/convince my mother that I won't be kidnapped?

We have answers! Welcome to Euro Travel on the Cheap with Tina, who has traveled 55+ countries on a budget and takes personal satisfaction in finding flights for less than €20.

At this session, we'll talk magic flight deals, the pros and cons of group tours, and all the poorly advertised Deutsche Bahn and VBB tickets you never knew about.

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

St. Maria Magdalena  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Bard College Berlin Class "Berlin, City of Music: A History of Western Classical Music Made in the Hauptstadt" is hosting an evening of musicality for the community.  The students will give a lecture-demonstration followed by a concert performed by BCB Faculty Paul Festa.  
All are welcome.  Entry free. Optional donations for Ukrainian refugees taken at the door.

6:00 pm: History and Analysis –
by: Chibuzo Ezekwenna, Emily James, Jiayao Gao, Naama Simon, Tymoteusz Schodowski

6:30 pm: Paul Festa Concert
violin, Partita #2 in d minor for solo violin by J.S. Bach, 1720

  2:00 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
On behalf of OSUN’s Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice project we would like to warmly invite all OSUN students and faculty to a two-part workshop on collaborative research and teaching.

On Day One, we will hear three research presentations by OSUN faculty: Aysuda Kölemen (Bard College Berlin) will unpack the discourse and practice of everyday motherhood in contemporary Turkey, Elena Kim (American University of Central Asia) will share her research on child marriage, and Allison McKim (Bard College) will reflect on the workings of race, gender, and drugs in the era of mass incarceration. After the presentations, we will split into break-out rooms to discuss our colleagues' work in more detail and explore how these individual research projects can be enriched by questions from different disciplines and geographical locations. After a short break, we will hear from two academic teams who are recipients of OSUN collaborative research grants: Angela Serrano (Universidad de los Andes), Magda Hinojosa and Camila Páez (both Arizona State University) will present their project titled “Tackling Gendered Labor Exploitation: Splits and Paths for Labor Unions and Feminist Movements in Latin America” and Haley McEwen (University of the Witwatersrand), Aiko Holvikivi and Tomás Ojeda Güemes (both London School of Economics) in collaboration with Billy Holzberg (King’s College London) will share their plans for an upcoming roundtable on “Transnational Anti-Gender Politics”. These two presentation will likewise be followed by discussion in break-out rooms.

Day Two will focus on teaching practices. We will kick off the workshop with three presentations on selected texts we are considering to assign in our network collaborative courses next academic year: Srila Roy (University of the Witwatersrand) will present on Angela Davis' Women, Race, and Class and Sara Salem's On Transnational Feminist Solidarity: The Case of Angela Davis in Egypt, Alys Moody (Bard College) on He-Yin Zhen’s “On the Question of Women’s Liberation” and her other selected writings, and Elena Kim (American University of Central Asia) and Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin) on Audre Lorde's Notes from a Trip to Russia. After discussing these readings in detail, we will move on to a more general discussion on possible texts, assignments, approaches, tools, connections, formats, and more that could help us to engage collaboratively with feminism, the arts, and social justice.   

Workshop will be hosted on Zoom.  

  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Join the Open Society University Network to learn how you could study abroad this Fall with OSUN institutions from Dhaka to Bogota and Berlin to Bulgaria.
 
Representatives from the following participating OSUN institutions will be present:
·      Al-Quds University - Bard College of Arts and Sciences
·      American University in Bulgaria
·      American University of Central Asia
·      Bard College Annandale
·      Bard College Berlin
·      Bard Globalization and International Affairs
·      BRAC University, Dhaka Bangladesh
·      Central European University, Vienna
·      Universidad de los Andes
·      University of the Witwatersrand

Please find the Zoom link in your emails.
 

Lecture, The Factory and online
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
What lies in between theory and aesthetics? Situatedness and migration? Sounding and listening? Performing and perception? The Universal Self and the Colonial Other? What understandings transpire in imagining beyond social imaginations of racial, national, cultural, gender, or disciplinary borders and boundaries? What knowledges emerge through hearing? How can processes of soundings and listening transform us towards a postmigrant society? In this artist-talk, meLê yamomo speaks about his biography and philosophy as an artist-scholar migrating between continents, cultures, artistic practices, and academic disciplines.
 
meLê yamomo has lived in Lucena City, Los Baños, Metro Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and now inhabits Amsterdam and Berlin researching, teaching, and creating performance/theatre and sound/music. He is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Performance, and Sound Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the author of Sounding Modernities: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and project leader and principal investigator of the projects »Sonic Entanglements« and Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS). meLê is a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê also curates the Decolonial Frequences Festival and hosts the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works as artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies. 

Open to the BCB community in person at The Factory.
To join online, please contact BCB Events.

This talk is part of the OSUN funded Research Creation Project.

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Hybrid Lecture Series
The Factory and Online
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Royston Maldoom is a pioneer in the field of Community Dance. He has initiated and worked at sustaining projects in Europe, Africa, South America, and Palestine. His work with 250 school children and the Berlin Philharmonic with Sir Simon Rattle, documented in the film Rhythm is It, inspired a generation of educators and fostered extensive funding for dance-artist residencies in the schools in Berlin. He has received an Order of the British Empire and a Bundesverdienstkreuz from the German government in recognition of his untiring work, along with numerous other international awards. Royston’s autobiography, Tanz um dein Leben (Fischer Verlag) was on the Spiegel bestseller list for over 23 weeks. He is a sought-after lecturer and workshop leader. Along with an overview of his projects, we will talk about the challenges he has faced in working with children and is currently facing in Palestine, and we will discuss his theories about "categories and strategies” to help define the word Community.

Royston trained at the Royal Ballet in London. His choreographies have been performed by Dance Theater of Harlem, Scottish Ballet, Ballet San Marcos (Peru). His group, Mercury Dance, won Bagnolet choreographic competition in Paris. Royston has created large-scale community-based projects for the London Symphony Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, and the Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

This event is part of the lecture series: "Dance and Community Building: Utopian Practice in the 21st Century" which is funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Join on zoom >>

Caste: Suture of Oriental and Occidental Mesh
Online Event  3:45 pm – 5:15 pm CET/GMT+1
Dr. Suraj Yengde is one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals. Named as one of the "25 Most Influential Young Indian" by GQ magazine and the "Most influential Young Dalit" by Zee, Suraj is an author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Caste Matters was recently featured in the prestigious "Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade" list by The Hindu. Caste Matters is being translated in seven languages. 

Suraj holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies. Suraj's recent appointment was Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and was part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He has studied in four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America), and is India’s first Dalit Ph.D. holder from an African university (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). He is an International Human Rights attorney by qualification from India and the UK.

Suraj has published over 100 essays, articles, and book reviews in multiple languages in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and labor, migration in the global south. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies. He has been nominated for India's highest literary award "Sahitya Akademi" and is a recipient of the "Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award" (Canada, 2019) and the "Rohit Vemula Memorial Scholar Award" (2018).

Suraj has worked with leading international organizations in Geneva, London, and New York. He is a co-convener of Dalit-Black Lives Matter symposium and the Dalit and Black Power Movement. He runs a monthly Ambedkar Lecture Series at Harvard. He is an associate editor of Southern Journal of Contemporary History.

His talk will discuss Dalit public and print sphere of the 19th – 20th century, the formation of Dalit consciousness and anti-Brahminism, the census and the role of the British in mismanaging this very important phase, and a critical take on postcolonial and subaltern scholarship. 
 

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

  Students wishing to transfer credit towards the Bard College Berlin BA program should first consult their Academic Advisor. After this initial consultation, students should contact the Registrar’s Office for further information on the process and to formally request credit recognition. The semester deadline for requesting the transfer of credit is the end of week 5.  Students transferring to the BA program at the College must also follow this procedure in order to receive formal recognition of their previous university studies. 

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Online Event  9:10 pm – 11:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Although Italy's colonial empire had been small and short-lived, today numerous material traces - street names, monuments, buildings etc. - can be found in Italian public spaces. By marking physical locations on a digital map, the project Postcolonial Italy aims at making historical knowledge available to a large audience to stimulate a public debate on Italy's silenced colonial past. Material traces are not only geographically captured, but also - and this is crucial - historically contextualized. The map intends to recall the manifold connections between Italian public spaces and the colonial and fascist past, which often remains absent from collective memory.

This event is offered by Bard College, Annandale, as part of the Modernism and Fascism: Cultural Heritage and Memory course in cooperation with Bard College Berlin through Global Modernisms, an OSUN Network Collaborative Course.

Affiliations: Daphné Budasz (European University Institute, Florence), Markus Wurzer (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale)

Daphné Budasz is a PhD researcher at the department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She studied history at Lausanne University and at Queen Mary University of London. She also completed a professional master degree in public history at Université Paris-Est Créteil. Daphné has worked for the French magazine L’Histoire and as an assistant curator for the House of European History in Brussels.
Her current PhD research deals with the history of race, cross-cultural intimacy and Indian migration in British East Africa (1895-1923). Besides her research, she is involved in several public history projects. She is notably one of the founders of the French public history organisation La Boîte à Histoire.

Markus Wurzer is historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle an der Saale. He studied history and German language and literature at the Universities of Graz and Bologna. He was a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of History at the University in Graz as well as a university assistant at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University in Linz. His research has taken him to the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Harvard University in Cambridge/MA and the European Academy (EURAC) in Bolzano/Bozen. He is co-coordinator of www.postcolonialitaly.com and member of the Steering Committee of “Evidence and Imagination – Special Editions”. Wurzer has received numerous prizes for his work, including the 2016 award of the Dr. Alois Mock Europa-Stiftung for his MA thesis and the 2019 award of the Theodor Körner Fonds for his dissertation. In his PhD thesis he focused on Italy’s colonial enterprise against Ethiopia (1935-1941) in visual culture and family memories. Drawing on the photographs of Italy’s German-speaking soldiers from the province of Bolzano/Bozen as a case study, the thesis explored private photographic practices, the construction and diffusion of colonial (and fascist) visual culture, and followed its persisting traces in family memory until the present day.

Online Lecture Series
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Gender-based violence is a heavily politicized issue in India with diverse organizations supporting women’s legal claims. Meanwhile, law enforcement personnel are both sexist and have limited abilities to enforce the law. How do women claim rights within these conditions? How do rights negotiations impact gender inequality, legality, and state authority? Using participant observation and in-depth interview data, Roychowdhury shows how women are compelled to demonstrate “capability” when they claim rights against violence. Law enforcement personnel respond favorably to women who mobilize collective threats and do the work of the state themselves, while ignoring women who are meek and docile. They incorporate “capable” women into regulatory functions, urging them to complete case processing duties, negotiate extra-legal settlements, and deploy violence. The talk urges listeners to reconsider existing theories of law and gender-based violence, arguing that the study of India may house insights for how law enforcement relates to survivors in other parts of the world.

Poulami Roychowdhury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Her research focuses on politics, law, and gender. She has published in a range of journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Law & Social Inquiry, Gender & Society, and Signs. In this lecture, she will be talking about her recent book, Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India, published with Oxford University Press in 2021.

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. 

  1:00 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
The topic of this open Student Life Committee meeting is COMMUNITY.

Here are some questions to guide our conversation: How can we build community as BCB? How do we encourage students to be involved, to start clubs, to attend events? How can we work around the barriers to being in-person from COVID and the need for community gathering spaces? How do we combat the feelings of isolation from the pandemic? What do we want our community to look like? What are our community values? How do we make sure everybody feels included and is treated equally?

 

Online Lecture Series
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  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)Upcoming lectures: 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 For information on the Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice lectures from Fall 2021 >>

Project leader: Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin)

Project assistant: Liza Tabliashvili (Bard College Berlin)

Global Modernisms

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. The Project is led by BCB Faculty Prof. Dr. Laura Scuriatti and Prof. Dr. James Harker, with colleagues from the American University in Beirut, Bard College in Annandale, and the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá.

Daphné Budasz and Markus Wurzer: Public Spaces and the Material Presence of Empire's Memory in Italy
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
9:10 pm – 11:00 pm CEST

Although Italy's colonial empire had been small and short-lived, today numerous material traces - street names, monuments, buildings etc. - can be found in Italian public spaces. By marking physical locations on a digital map, the project Postcolonial Italy aims at making historical knowledge available to a large audience to stimulate a public debate on Italy's silenced colonial past. Material traces are not only geographically captured, but also - and this is crucial - historically contextualized. The map intends to recall the manifold connections between Italian public spaces and the colonial and fascist past, which often remains absent from collective memory.

This event is offered by Bard College, Annandale, as part of the Modernism and Fascism: Cultural Heritage and Memory course in cooperation with Bard College Berlin through Global Modernisms, an OSUN Network Collaborative Course.

Daphné Budasz is a PhD researcher at the department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. She studied history at Lausanne University and at Queen Mary University of London. She also completed a professional master degree in public history at Université Paris-Est Créteil. Daphné has worked for the French magazine L’Histoire and as an assistant curator for the House of European History in Brussels.
Her current PhD research deals with the history of race, cross-cultural intimacy and Indian migration in British East Africa (1895-1923). Besides her research, she is involved in several public history projects. She is notably one of the founders of the French public history organisation La Boîte à Histoire.

Markus Wurzer is historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle an der Saale. He studied history and German language and literature at the Universities of Graz and Bologna. He was a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of History at the University in Graz as well as a university assistant at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University in Linz. His research has taken him to the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Harvard University in Cambridge/MA and the European Academy (EURAC) in Bolzano/Bozen. He is co-coordinator of www.postcolonialitaly.com and member of the Steering Committee of “Evidence and Imagination – Special Editions”. Wurzer has received numerous prizes for his work, including the 2016 award of the Dr. Alois Mock Europa-Stiftung for his MA thesis and the 2019 award of the Theodor Körner Fonds for his dissertation. In his PhD thesis he focused on Italy’s colonial enterprise against Ethiopia (1935-1941) in visual culture and family memories. Drawing on the photographs of Italy’s German-speaking soldiers from the province of Bolzano/Bozen as a case study, the thesis explored private photographic practices, the construction and diffusion of colonial (and fascist) visual culture, and followed its persisting traces in family memory until the present day.

Dr. Suraj Yengde: Caste: Suture of Oriental and Occidental Mesh
Thursday, March 10, 2022            
3:45 pm – 5:15 pm CEST
Dr. Suraj Yengde is one of India’s leading scholars and public intellectuals. Named as one of the "25 Most Influential Young Indian" by GQ magazine and the "Most influential Young Dalit" by Zee, Suraj is an author of the bestseller Caste Matters and co-editor of award winning anthology The Radical in Ambedkar. Caste Matters was recently featured in the prestigious "Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade" list by The Hindu. Caste Matters is being translated in seven languages. 

Suraj holds a research associate position with the department of African and African American Studies. Suraj's recent appointment was Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and was part of the founding team of Initiative for Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability (IARA) at Harvard University. He has studied in four continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America), and is India’s first Dalit Ph.D. holder from an African university (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). He is an International Human Rights attorney by qualification from India and the UK.

Suraj has published over 100 essays, articles, and book reviews in multiple languages in the field of caste, race, ethnicity studies, and labor, migration in the global south. Currently, he is involved in developing a critical theory of Dalit and Black Studies. He has been nominated for India's highest literary award "Sahitya Akademi" and is a recipient of the "Dr. Ambedkar Social Justice Award" (Canada, 2019) and the "Rohit Vemula Memorial Scholar Award" (2018).

Suraj has worked with leading international organizations in Geneva, London, and New York. He is a co-convener of Dalit-Black Lives Matter symposium and the Dalit and Black Power Movement. He runs a monthly Ambedkar Lecture Series at Harvard. He is an associate editor of Southern Journal of Contemporary History.

His talk will discuss Dalit public and print sphere of the 19th – 20th century, the formation of Dalit consciousness and anti-Brahminism, the census and the role of the British in mismanaging this very important phase, and a critical take on postcolonial and subaltern scholarship. 

Dr. Munia Bhaumik: Translating Tagore in Latin America
Thursday, March 17, 2022
4:00 pm – 5:15 pm CEST

During the first half of the twentieth century, an epochal period defined by two world wars, fascism, and the British empire’s disintegration, a set of intertextual lyric routes circulate between Bengali, Spanish, and Portuguese-language poets (although none of them could read the other’s poetry in the original language). These “lyric routes” between the peripheral but high modernist metropoles of Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Havana, Mexico City, and Santiago are pivotal in reshaping key aesthetic debates and poetic experiments reflexively cognizant of the limits of European discourses of Westphalia and “civilization.” Moreover, the often playful translations of verse from a previous translation, rather than the language of the original text, render new poetic forms and philosophies of language for critical concern.

This lecture focuses on the specter of Rabindranath Tagore’s verse and celebrity in Latin America during a pivotal moment of world decolonization during the interwar period. As intellectual, art, and literary historians demonstrate, not just Tagore’s Nobel Prize recognized oeuvre and prose-poem Gitanjali, but a number of earlier writings, dramatic plays, doodles, and paintings come to yield enormous influence on major Latin American poets, philosophers, and intellectuals. Yet the translations and incorporations of Tagore’s poetic-philosophy by Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Jose Lezama Lima, Victoria Ocampo, and (eventually) Octavio Paz are not mere passive translations but offer a critical reservoir of lyric transculturation registering a specifically modernist disenchantment with European modernity. At stake in this comparative framing is not just a story of reception between South Asia and Latin America, but critical reconfigurations of the political ideals of universality as world-making through poesis.

Munia Bhaumik is the Program Director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives at the University of California, Los Angeles and an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, politics, and law. Her research and teaching critiques racial and gender inequities as well as the multiple social factors impacting whose lives count before the law. Dr. Bhaumik received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta where she engaged with new Asian/Latinx immigrant and African American community voting rights alliances in the South, while also developing a vibrant undergraduate degree program in comparative literature and critical theory. Based on her research about noncitizens as the “uncounted,” data and democracy, as well as on poetry as political action across the Global South, she received the prestigious Stanford Humanities Center, Herman Melville Society, and Cornell Society for the Humanities faculty awards. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Bhaumik also spent a decade as a primarily Spanish-speaking labor/community organizer on the staff of leading progressive organizations in Los Angeles shaping national debates about social justice through direct action. Equally motivated by the humanities as by social movements, particularly the ethical dilemmas communities-of-color are mobilizing in this global (post)metropolis, her work brings to attention research protocols in alliance with the demands for abolition and noncitizen citizenship as well as multilingual, queer, migrant, worker, healthcare, and Black equal rights.

This is the third lecture in the Global Modernisms lecture series.  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.

 

Discussion, The Factory
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1
What are the promises, premises and pitfalls of studying art today? How different are art schools in the US compared to Germany? How does an art school like Städelschule react to and engage with the political, social and cultural challenges of our time? Join us in an open and informal conversation with Yasmil Raymond, Rector of the internationally-renowned Städelschule on these and many more topics.

Yasmil Raymond is an author and curator and since April 2020 Rector of the Städelschule and Director of Portikus. Raymond, who grew up in Puerto Rico, draws from many years of experience as a curator in US-museums before moving to Frankfurt. She was curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, at the Dia Art Foundation, and Associate Curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. At these institutions, she curated seminal exhibitions on artists such as Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Tomas Saraceno, Tino Sehgal, Allora & Calzadilla, Yvonne Rainer, Franz Erhard Walther, Trisha Brown, Yoko Ono and Carl Andre. Yasmil Raymond received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999, and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2004.  
 

7:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Online Lecture 
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
Every age has its Bacon, and all contain a grain of truth: Bacon the prophetic visionary of modern science and technology, Bacon the diehard empiricist and foe of theory, Bacon the exploiter of nature, Bacon the crafty statesman, Bacon the master of English prose. But who was Bacon in his own time and place? This lecture situates Bacon and his reformed natural philosophy back in his original historical context, a time of novelty and upheaval.

Prof. Dr. Lorraine Daston is Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

This event is hosted by the Early Modern Science core and the Science and Religion Project, and supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. 

What does it mean today and how is it taking us closer to liberation?
Online Event  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
With great thinkers and activists like Sojourner Truth, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and many more Black feminist thought has brought us concepts like Intersectionality, self-love as a radical act, identity politics, representation, misogynoir and many more many of which became buzz word that shapes current politics and activism.

An introduction to Black Feminist Thought, its successes, and its criticism.
Open to all who are interested!

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Online Lecture
 
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1
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). 

The workshop is offered by P.E.A.C.E Int. and will be led by Mbolo Yufanyi Movuh Ph.D.
Online  12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
"The belief that African peoples, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny".
An ideology formed by the ideas of many, including Steve Biko, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Julius Nyerere, and Malcolm X, Pan-Africanists share a sense of a united African people and her diasporas.
A Workshop for African and Black students to explore how Pan-Africanism is relevant to them today.
 

The Factory, BCB Campus
9:00 am
Join us for a movement-packed morning with internationally renowned artist collective Gob Squad! This workshop offers an insight into the strategies that Gob Squad use when creating new works. The session will explore Gob Squad's approach to text, improvisation and game-play. Two members of the collective will introduce some of their methods which blend autobiographical, personal and the political.
 
The workshop will take place in the factory performance space as part of Nina Tecklenburg’s Postdramatic and Contemporary Theater in Berlin. Participation is limited to a total of 15 students. Please email to: [email protected] 
 
 
ABOUT GOB SQUAD
Hello. We are Gob Squad, a group of UK and German artists. We make performances and videos which search for beauty in the everyday, and look for words of wisdom from a passing stranger. We are an artists collective, the seven core members working collaboratively on the concept, direction and performance of our work. Other artists, performers and technicians are invited to collaborate on particular projects.
We try and explore the point where theater meets art, media and real life. As well as theatres and galleries, we place our work at the heart of urban life – in houses, shops, underground stations, car parks, hotels or directly on the street. Everyday life and magic, banality and utopia, reality and entertainment are all set on a collision course and the audience are often asked to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators and bear witness to the results.
We started the company in Nottingham in 1994 but are now more or less based in Berlin, although we regularly make and present work in the UK, organized through our Nottingham office. Our work is regularly shown throughout Europe, and we’ve toured to all the continents apart from Antarctica.

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

  Bard College Berlin  7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Virtual Talk by Reinhard Fischer, Berliner Landeszentrale für politische Bildung
3:45 pm CET
The talk will look at the democratic setup of the German state and cover the different levels of politics that influence political decisions: Municipal level, State level, Federal level, and the European Union. Following the processes of political decision-making, we will also take a closer look at the relationship between the State and the civil society level. In Germany the State regulates and organizes many different areas: health, education or welfare. But there are public and private actors (welfare organizations, public media, foundations, unions, religious communities) that take over areas of public life, operate in the public interest and support the public to pursue a common goal independently from or in cooperation with the State. How does civic engagement and civil society action fit into these structures?

Register at [email protected] to attend virtually

Hybrid Lecture Series
7:30 pm CET
Jo Parkes is a freelance dance artist (D/UK). For over two decades, she has worked internationally with co-creative, participatory dance and creates installations, events, performances and videos. She is the founder and artistic director of Mobile Dance e.V. Mobile Dance offers art projects at the intersection of artistic and socio-political concerns. Mobile Dance has created projects in which hundreds of artists in Germany and the UK have been employed in participatory dance. 

In 1995, Jo received a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her Master's degree in Choreography at the University of California (UCLA). She earned a degree (First Class) in English Literature and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. In 2019, she won the Honorary Award in the German Dance Prize. Her most recent work, The Walking Projekt, received the IKARUS prize (DE) in 2021. From 2019 - 2021, Jo was on the board of Aktion Tanz: Tanz in Bildung und Gesellschaft e.V. and is currently visiting professor at HZT, Berlin (UdK/Ernst Busch).  

This event is part of the lecture series: "Dance and Community Building: Utopian Practice in the 21st Century" which is funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Join on zoom >>

Online Discussion
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.

This event is open to the BCB Community only. Participants will be expected to complete a set reading.

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).