Event Archive

  W16 Reading Room  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CET/GMT+1
This event will begin at noon CET (Berlin time). 

If you are thinking of studying abroad but are unsure about how it will affect your degree program, worried you won't moderate on time, or don't know what classes to take, please attend this info workshop! Nick will guide you through the credit transfer process and advise you about moderation, credit recognition, and more.

For students unable to attend this event, a second workshop will take place on November 30.

Online lecture series
6:00 pm CET
EU policies of externalization of asylum, militarization of border policing and racialized criminalization of refugee bodies produce spaces of physical deterrence at the borderlands of Europe. To prevent people from moving, Frontex turns a blind eye to brutal pushbacks at the borders and EU provides funds to governments for the construction of inhumane camps, where people live without access to basic rights and remain in limbo for long periods of time. Through new configurations of technology, security and violence, these borderlands, such as in Hungary, Croatia, Poland, and Greece are declared as spaces of “emergency” to justify the measures taken to curb migration and send “a message” to people on the move, while “closed controlled” camps on the Greek hotspot islands are built by EU funding. Focusing on the borderlands of Europe, this lecture will rethink what militarization of migration and architecture of deterrence tell us about the future of Europe.

Begüm Başdaş is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School. Her research interests are in the fields of migration, human rights, political theory, gender and sexuality studies with a focus on EU and Turkey. She received her PhD in Geography from the University of California Los Angeles and her MA in Art History from the University of California Riverside. Her BA was in Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Turkey. Before joining the Hertie School, she was an Einstein Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin at BIM, where she worked on the spatial politics of solidarity and care among Afghan refugees and rights defenders in Greece. She also worked full-time as a human rights campaigner at Amnesty International Turkey for six years. She has a biweekly TV program titled “On the Move with Begüm Başdaş” on Medyascope TV in English and Turkish, where she discusses current issues on migration with different guests.

As a critical feminist geographer, her current research titled “In the Making of New Europe: Embodied Politics of Borderlands and Refugee Resilience” aims to contribute to migration and border studies by examining the reconstruction of EU borderlands at multiple scales through the governance of migration particularly in Greece and the Balkan routes.

This event is part of the Global Histories of Migration lecture series and funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Online Workshop
1:00 - 6:00 pm CET
The commodification of knowledge and the gradual privatization of higher education from the last quarter of the 20th Century onward have radically transformed the academic employment relations. As a result of decreased public funding, contingent employment has become the norm in the academic sector on a global scale. In the meantime, pervasive job insecurity has kicked off waves of academic labor activism over the course of the last two decades. Especially in the leading scientific countries of the Global North, mobilizations of precarious academics have increased significantly despite the obstacles for collectivity and organization posed by precarious employment. Protests against Covid-19-related layoffs at several universities in the UK and the US and the latest academic strike wave that swept the UK and France in late 2019/early 2020 represent some of the more recent examples. But prolonged unionized struggles or unionization attempts, wildcat strikes, campus protests, and campaigns against fixed-term academic employment organized by advocacy groups and solidarity networks have been going on and off for some time now in several countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, France, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and Germany.

In view of this rather surprising and encouraging uproar, this online workshop on December 11, 2021 brings together academic labor activists from the US and Europe. The main aim is to contribute to an extended exchange of activist know-how among various academic labor movements. It is planned as a virtual-only, one-day event, featuring only invited speakers but open to public upon registration. Workshop language is English. The event is organized jointly with the Global Affairs Committee of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, supported by Bard College Berlin, and funded by the Philipp-Schwartz-Initiative of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation.

Speakers: 

Theresa O’Keefe is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at University College Cork where she directs the MA in Sociology of Sustainability and Global Changes.

Aline Courtois is a senior lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Bath.

Eleonora Priori is a Ph.D. student in Economics and Complex Systems at the University of Turin (Italy).

Peter Ullrich is a sociologist and senior researcher in the research unit “Social Movements, Technology, Conflicts” at the Technical University Berlin and fellow at the Institute for Protest and Social Movement Studies and the Center for Research on Antisemitism. He works as a consultant for the scholarship department of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University and is president of the Rutgers AAUP AFT New Brunswick chapter and a charter member of Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education.

Todd Wolfson is associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.

Justine Modica is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at Stanford University, and a PhD minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

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Online lecture
7:30 pm
This talk will explore the Muslim reception of Socrates focusing on the Neo-platonic influence of the Enneads on Muslim mysticism, the translations and commentaries of Plato's Republic, and the wisdom literature that emerged presenting Socrates as a sage. Prof. Hamza Yusuf is the President of Zaytuna College, a multi-faith academic community in Berkeley, California. His books and translations include The Content of Character: Ethical Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad; The Prayer of the Oppressed; The Creed of Imam al-Tahawi, Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms, and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart; and Caesarean Moon Births: Calculations, Moon Sighting, and the Prophetic Way. He is a member of the Supreme Fatwa Counsel serving under his mentor, Shaykh Abdallah b. Bayyah, and serves as vice president for the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, an international initiative which seeks to address the root causes that can lead to radicalism and militancy. He holds licentia docendi in several Islamic subjects, a BA in Religious Studies, and a PhD in North and West African intellectual history.

Lecture
Kurdish cinema, categorized as such since the 2000s, is a transnational cinema that is produced from various locations including Germany, France, the UK, Turkey, Rojava, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Within this transnational nature of filmmaking, films mostly reveal narratives on Kurdish people who faced deterritorialization, forced migration, exile, or the obligation of leaving their hometown due to lack of resources and income.

Leaning on these in this lecture,  Özgür Çiçek will question and reveal certain junctures that she came across during her ongoing post-doctoral research in Berlin. For instance, how do the migrant directors of Kurdish descent in Germany, like Ayse Polat, Yüksel Yavuz, Miraz Bezar, Hüseyin Tabak, and Soleen Yusef, make use of filmmaking for coming to terms with displacement, inequality, statelessness, and exclusion? In an interview Dr. Çiçek conducted with Yüksel Yavuz for instance, he stated that he moved to Germany when he was sixteen, but only after finishing and screening his first documentary titled My father, the Guest Worker (1994) when in his late-twenties, he felt like he arrived in Germany. So how does filmmaking function for releasing and recuperating displacement and exclusion? What are the narrative tendencies that motivate/obstruct belonging and recuperation? What is the impact of creation on the state of belonging? And what is the impact of belonging on creation and creativity? How do the film aesthetics and narratives evolve in time for exilic or migrant directors through their post-migrant lives?

Özgür Çiçek is a film scholar and researcher who is based in Berlin. Currently she is a Philipp Schwartz Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Cinepoetics: Center for Advanced Film Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program at Binghamton University, New York in 2016. Her research interests include national/transnational cinemas, minor cinemas, migrant cinemas, memory studies, and documentary filmmaking. For her current project, she examines the motivations and dynamics behind Kurdish filmmaking in Germany. More information on her research at: www.ozgurcicek.de

Online lecture series
2:00 pm CET
For this talk Akwugo Emejulu will examine how 'intersectional vulnerabilities' are experienced and made sense of by women of color activists in Europe. She names intersectional vulnerabilities as a broad, sometimes contradictory, set of emotions, all tied to activists’ complex experiences of insecurity and community. Intersectional vulnerabilities are those risks and rewards, derived from women of color activists’ positioning in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and legal status, which shape the possibilities of women of color’s activist labor. These vulnerabilities are Janus-faced, in that they are experienced as social harms that oftentimes lead to community. Prof. Emejulu attempts to grapple with the bittersweetness of vulnerability and how the banality of harms meted out to women of color nevertheless contains the seeds of resistance, solidarity and self-love. 

Akwugo Emejulu is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include the political sociology of race, class and gender and women of color's grassroots activism in Europe and the United States. She is the author of several books including Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, forthcoming) and Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017). She is co-editor of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). 

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. 

Lecture series
4:15 pm CET
Prize-winning journalist Ben Mauk will discuss his work covering the human rights violations committed by the Chinese state against its Muslim Uyghur minority, and the forced migration of Uyghurs to neighboring states such as Kazakhstan. Ben Mauk is an investigative journalist and writer who regularly publishes in such media outlets as the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the London Review of Books. He has taught English Literature and Writing at the University of Iowa and is co-founder of the creative writing center, Berlin Writer’s Workshop. His coverage of the persecution of the Uyghurs has been internationally lauded and recognized with the New York University Award for Investigative Reporting and the Jamal Khashoggi Award.
 This event is part of the Global Histories of Migration lecture series and funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Online discussion
8:00 pm CET
Imagine Plato attending the first performance of Euripides’ The Bacchae. He would have been in his early twenties, living in Athens, and given what we know about the audiences of Attic drama, it’s likely he would have been in attendance. What was that experience like for Plato? About this, of course, we can only speculate, but it’s reasonable to assume that his experience of performed dramas at the Theater of Dionysus inform the speculations about tragedy that Socrates makes in the Republic.

The Bacchae was written for performance at a specific place and time, but in the two and a half millennia since, it has inspired countless new performances and adaptations. The Bacchae lives today both as a written text, as constituted and translated by scholars and poets, and as the source for new incarnations. While we can only speculate about Plato’s own experiences in the theater, the ongoing reception of ancient drama by contemporary artists presents us with new opportunities to take Plato’s example and to endeavor to be thoughtful spectators of drama in performance.

This event brings together BCB’s professor of theater Nina Tecklenburg, Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College Thomas Bartscherer, and composer Dylan Mattingly to discuss the relation between theater and the political. We will pose questions of performance and the political by looking at recent adaptations of The Bacchae by Ulrich Rasche, Lileana Blain-Cruz, and the music of Dylan Mattingly. In all of these very different engagements with Euripides’ work, the question of performance remains a crucial point of intersection. We will explore this theme in each adaptation and pose wider questions regarding the relation between art and politics today.

Prof. Dr. Nina Tecklenburg is a performance maker and scholar of theater and performance. Since 2002, as a performer, co-director and dramaturge, she has realized a host of projects with diverse artists and performance groups, among others Interrobang (of which she is a founding member), She She Pop, Gob Squad, Lone Twin Theatre, Baktruppen, Rabih Mroué. Works she has (co-)created have been shown at the Public Theater NYC, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, The Barbican London, Wiener Festwochen, Esplanade Singapore, Heidelberger Stückemarkt, Kunsten Festival des Arts Brussels, Theatre de la Ville Paris, Sophiensaele Berlin, Volksbühne Berlin and many more.

Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. His current projects include When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he’s co-editing with Ewa Atanassow and David Bateman for Cambridge University Press and the new, critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s last book, The Life of the Mind, both of which will be published in 2022. His collaborations with Dylan Mattingly include Stranger Love, a six-hour opera that will premiere in Los Angeles in 2023, and a work in progress performance and film titled The History of Life.

Dylan Mattingly’s work is fundamentally ecstatic, committed to transformative experience. His music has been described as “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, and “in the pantheon of contemporary American composers” (Prufrock’s Dilemma) and is often informed by his scholarship on Ancient Greek music and poetry. Mattingly is the executive and co-artistic director of the NY-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. Among the ensembles and performers who have commissioned Mattingly’s music are the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly’s in-development 6-hour multimedia opera, Stranger Love, has recently been presented on the PROTOTYPE Festival, the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Day of Imagination, and will be premiered in Spring 2023. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.

Online discussion
7:00 pm CET
In this installment of the Palestine Event Series we discuss issues of international solidarity, law and historical responsibility and how they connect to Palestine, Israel, Germany and the world. 

Sophie Al-Issa is a junior at Al-Quds Bard College majoring in International Law and Human Rights. She is currently a program intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and aims to pursue a career in advocacy and human rights law. Sophie is particularly interested in the question of Palestinian refugees and has worked with NGOs that tackle issues of injustice.

Nadija Samour (LL.M.) works as a criminal defense lawyer specializing in political criminal proceedings and international criminal law. Previously, she studied at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and worked at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In her work, she deals with Palestine as a question of international law, as well as a third world approaches to this matter.

This event is part of the Global Histories of Migration lecture series and funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Lecture Series
4:30 pm CET
Shenila Khoja-Moolji will share a chapter from her forthcoming book which tells the story of how Shia Ismaili Muslim women recreated community in the aftermath of multiple displacements over the course of the twentieth century. This chapter, in particular, considers cookbooks written by three displaced women to uncover how they engage in memory-work and placemaking in the diaspora through the sharing and modification of Ismaili food cultures. The chapter provides an opportunity to reflect on women’s labor in faith communities as well as the lifeworlds of refugees.  

Dr. Khoja-Moolji is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of gender and Islamic studies. Her research interests include, Muslim girlhood(s), masculinities and sovereignty, and Ismaili Muslim women's history. She investigates these topics empirically in relation to Muslims in Pakistan and in the North American diaspora. Dr. Khoja-Moolji is the author of award-winning book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (2018), and Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (2021). She is currently working on a book that traces the transnational lives of displaced Ismaili Muslim women. 

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. 

Online lecture and discussion
2:00 pm CET
BCB’s Internship Seminar is excited to host Dominique Haensell, a writer, translator, independent researcher, and journalist, and the co-editor-in-chief of Missy Magazine, the German-language magazine for pop, politics, and feminism. She’ll be talking about her work and leading a discussion on the seminal short text “Coalition Politics” by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Born in the UK and raised in Germany, Haensell studied English Philology, Comp Lit and Critical Theory at the FU Berlin and King’s College London. In 2019, she completed a PhD at the JFKI’s Graduate School of North American Studies. Her monograph Making Black History: Diasporic Fiction in the Moment of Afropolitanism was published in 2021 and won a De Gruyter Open Access Award. Currently, she is working on a new book project, a hybrid memoir about Afro-German identity, German colonialism and her family’s relationship to German colonial Africa. She has been on the jury of various literary awards, regularly moderates literary panels, and is a member of different research groups such as Women of Color Resist and the African Atlantic Research Group (AARG). She lives in Berlin with her partner and daughter.

Online discussion
7:30 pm CET
Discovery, either when considered as a process of uncovering or of creation, involves conjuring into existence the new. What does not or does not yet exist plays a predominant role in science and technology. What do scientists look for and how does their way of searching influence what they find? The antechamber of discovery is not, as is frequently thought, an inscrutable “private art” marked by a punctual “Eureka!” moment. It is a rich cultural, social, economic and political space where sought-after imaginary perpetrators--often referred to by scientists as demons--have recognizable characteristics that have remained fairly constant throughout many centuries. A study of the half-empty glass of scientific research reveals surprising patterns in the search agenda that has shaped modern science and technology.

Jimena Canales is an award-winning author and scholar focusing on the history of science in the modern world. She is currently a faculty member at the Graduate College at the University of Illinois-Urbana, Champaign. She was previously the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science at the University of Illinois and an Associate Professor at Harvard University. Canales is the author of A Tenth of a Second: A History, The Physicist and The Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, and Simply Einstein. Her books have been voted Top 10 Books about Time (The Guardian), Best Science Books for 2015 (Science Friday, NPR, Public Radio International and Brainpickings), Top Reads for 2015 (The Independent), and Books of the Year for 2016 (The Tablet).

Online discussion
6:00 pm – 8:30 pm CET/GMT+1
After the precipitous withdrawal of the U.S. and its allies from Afghanistan in August, tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with the Western Allies are stranded in Afghanistan, fearing for their lives and futures. Comparatively few have been evacuated to the West. Women, queer people, and minorities like the Hazara are especially endangered. While every day civic and political rights are being more restricted by the Taliban, many are trying to flee to neighboring countries. But entering Uzbekistan, Iran, and Pakistan has become almost impossible. In Pakistan, which advocates for the legitimacy of the Taliban, the mood against refugees is tipping. Prices for a visa, transportation, smugglers, food, and everything else are skyrocketing. Desperation is growing among the people left behind and in Afghan diasporas around the world.

Join us for an online event discussing the current developments with BCB students from Afghanistan. 

Schedule:
6:00 pm: Welcome and introduction by Marion Detjen
6:05 pm: Streaming of prerecorded discussion from part 1 of the event, featuring: Qais Sangarkhail, Ibrar Mirzai, and Sayed Parviz Khyber
7:05 pm: Statements by respondents: Fatima Airan and Pashtana Durrani
7:20 pm: Discussion with the audience

Speakers:

Qais Sangarkhail, (Humanities, Arts, and Social Thought ‘23)

Having survived Taliban rule in Afghanistan, he arrived alone in Germany aged 22. He went on to study Humanities at Bard College Berlin, with a full scholarship and now he is in his third year of BCB's BA program. Today he is working to raise awareness on issues concerning the violations of human rights and rights to education in Afghanistan as a diaspora in Berlin.


Ibrar Mirzai (Economics, Politics, and Social Thought ‘24)

Ibrar is a second year BA student at Bard College Berlin. He has been living in Germany for over a year after having spent three years in Hungary. He grew up as a second generation Afghan in Pakistan and always felt connected to Afghanistan through culture, language and ethnic identity. “Today, another generation of Afghans are losing their homes and livelihoods - another generation of Afghans are going to live in exile. The world has to stand up in solidarity with Afghans." 

Sayed Parviz Khyber (Economics, Politics, and Social Thought ‘22)

Sayed was born in Afghanistan and has lived most of his life as a refugee first in Pakistan and then in Hungary, graduating from high school there. He is currently in his final year of the Economics, Politics, and Social Thought BA program at BCB. He has worked as a social worker in refugee integration programs in Hungary until 2019 and is now a member of the European Commission Expert Group on the Views of Migrants in the Field of Migration Asylum and Integration.

Respondents:

Pashtana Durrani

Pashtana is a former refugee who was born in Pakistan's refugee camp and is now an educator and the director of LEARN, Afghanistan. She is also a global youth representative for Amnesty International and the Malala Fund Education Champion. Pashtana was evacuated from Afghanistan very recently and currently is in the US.
 Fatima Airan

Fatima Airan is a former senior specialist at the Ministry of Finance of Afghanistan who graduated from the American University of Central Asia in 2019 after completing her bachelor in Economics. Fatima along with her sister was evacuated in August after the Taliban's takeover and she is currently waiting for relocation in Kigali, Rwanda.
This event is part of the Real Talk Series and supported by the Open Society University Network Threatened Scholars Initiative and the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Event recording on YouTube:


 

Lecture
P24, Seminar Room 8
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm CET/GMT+1
BCB is pleased to invite Berlin-based curator Tina Sauerlaender to an on-campus discussion concerning her working with artists that use Augmented and Virtual Realities in their practice. She will outline the possibilities of exhibiting VR art in museums and showcasing artworks through apps or online websites, including the current AR intervention "Augmented Species – Invasive Sculptures in Hybrid Ecologies" that is currently experienceable at the Neue Nationalgalerie here in Berlin. This lecture is part of the seminar of John von Bergen's "FA199 – Virtual Reality in The Artist's Studio".

Tina Sauerlaender is an art historian, curator, speaker and writer based in Berlin. She focuses on the impact of the digital and the internet on individual environments and society as well as on virtual reality in visual arts. She is Artistic Director of the VR ART PRIZE by DKB in Cooperation with CAA Berlin. With her independent exhibition platform peer to space she has been curating and organizing international group shows since 2010, e.g. The Unframed World. Virtual Reality as Artistic Medium for the 21st Century at HeK Basel in 2017. She is Co-founder of Radiance VR, an international online platform and research database for virtual reality experiences in visual arts. She is a PhD Candidate at The University of Art and Design Linz, Austria. Her research topic is artistic self-representation in digital art. She gave talks on Virtual Reality & Art at re:publica (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), New Inc (New York), Kunsthalle (Munich), University of Applied Arts (Vienna), Digifest (Toronto), Technical University (Prague) or Roehrs & Boetsch (Zurich).

12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1
Author Suzanne McConnell and John W. Kluge Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin in 2021 discusses her collaboration with the late Kurt Vonnegut on Pity the Reader, a style and advice book for aspiring writers.

Suzanne McConnell is a writer, editor, and educator. She taught writing and literature at Hunter College for thirty years and was the Scholar/Facilitator in Literature and Medicine at two New Jersey hospitals—the University of Medicine and Dentistry and the Department of Veteran Affairs. Since 2006, she has been fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review.
 
McConnell’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in publications including the Huffington Post, Provincetown Arts, Waterstone Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Saint Ann’s Review, The Fiddlehead, and Poets & Writers, among others, and her work has been translated into Chinese, for the Yangtze River Series. A student and friend of the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut, McConnell’s short memoir about him was published in The Brooklyn Rail; the book she co-authored with Vonnegut, Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style, was published by Seven Stories Press in 2019.
 
Twice nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, McConnell has held writing residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her stories have won first prizes in the New Ohio Review Fiction Contest and Prime Number Magazine Flash Fiction Contest.
 
McConnell holds a BA in sociology from the University of Arkansas and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She and lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.


Please email [email protected] to sign up for the event.

This event is a collaboration between Bard College Berlin and the American Academy in Berlin.

Lecture Series
2:30 pm CET
When we say "never again!" in the context of World War II and the fascist political ideology, which, as some claim, have returned in the 21st century, what do we mean exactly? Does this exclamation confirm an existing reality? Or is it a sort of spell cast to contradict what we see? And if yes, then what exactly do we see? From the perspective of living in Warsaw, we might recognize the historical patterns of fascist descent in today's exclusions and inequalities. However, in today's globalized academia and public debate more broadly, the question of translation and translatability of particular experiences immediately appears. The conversation should thus have a twofold structure: testing the possibilities and limitations of historical comparisons as well as the politics and limits of translation of such analysis in the globalized debate. I will thus address the project of transnational feminism from a specific Central European perspective of both historical and today's antifascist analysis conducted as a feminist one. The perhaps obvious, yet still insufficiently emphasized centrality of feminism in today's antifascism will thus be emphasized. 

Ewa Majewska is a feminist philosopher and activist living in Warsaw. She has taught at the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, ICI Berlin, and IWM in Vienna. She published one book in English (Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common, Verso 2021) and four books in Polish as well as 50 articles and essays in journals, magazines and collected volumes including e-flux, Signs, Third Text, Journal of Utopian Studies, and Jacobin. Her current research is in Hegel's philosophy, focusing on the dialectics and the weak; feminist critical theory and antifascist cultures.

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. 

Discussion
6:30 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
After the precipitous withdrawal of the U.S. and its allies from Afghanistan in August, tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with them are stranded in Afghanistan, fearing for their lives and futures. Comparatively few have been evacuated to the West. While every day civic and political rights are being more restricted by the Taliban - especially women’s rights to work, to education and to political participation -, many are trying to flee to neighboring countries, countries that have actually closed their borders. In Pakistan, which advocates for the legitimacy of the Taliban rule, the mood against the refugees is tipping. Prices for a visa, transportation, smugglers, food, and everything else are skyrocketing. Desperation is growing among the people left behind and in Afghan diasporas around the world.

Join us for an evening discussing the current developments with BCB students from Afghanistan. Refreshments will be served.
 
Part 2 (time and date tbc) will be an online event in which the discussion from part 1 will be screened and then discussed with select guest speakers.

Speakers:

Qais Sangarkhail, (Humanities, Arts, and Social Thought ‘23)

Having survived Taliban rule in Afghanistan, arrived alone in Germany aged 22. He went on to study Humanities at Bard College, Berlin, with a full scholarship and now he is in his third year’s bachelor program. Today he is working to raise awareness on issues concerning the violations of human rights and rights to education in Afghanistan as a diaspora in Berlin.


Ibrar Mirzai (Economics, Politics, and Social Thought ‘24)

Ibrar is a second year BA student at Bard College Berlin. He has been living in Germany for over a year after having spent three years in Hungary. He grew up as a second generation Afghan in Pakistan and always felt connected to Afghanistan through culture, language and ethnic identity. “Today, another generation of Afghans are losing their homes and livelihoods - another generation of Afghans are going to live in exile. The world has to stand up in solidarity with Afghans." 

Sayed Parviz Khyber (Economics, Politics, and Social Thought ‘22)

Sayed was born in Afghanistan and has lived most of his life as a refugee first in Pakistan and then in Hungary, graduating from high school there. He is currently in his final year of the Economics, Politics, and Social Thought BA program at BCB. He has worked as a social worker in refugee integration programs in Hungary until 2019 and is now a member of the European Commission Expert Group on the Views of Migrants in the Field of Migration Asylum and Integration.

This event is part of the Real Talk Series and supported by the Open Society University Network Threatened Scholars Initiative and the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Discussion
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Kiarina Kordela will lead a discussion on the role of miracles in the development of Early Modern Science, based on the assigned reading Peter Harrison: "Miracles, Early Modern Science, and Rational Religion," in Church History. Participants will are asked to consider the following discussion questions: What is the difference between a miracle and a natural law? Between a miracle and an unprecedented event? Between an unprecedented event and a natural law? How many times does something exceptional need to occur before it becomes expected? How can a religious system be grounded? (and a scientific system?) Why, according to Harrison’s article, is “miracle” a modern concept? Following Harrison’s line of argumentation, what is the relation between religion and science?
A. Kiarina Kordela, Professor of German & Director of Critical Theory Program, Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, works on philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, social and political theory, and biopolitics. She is the author of Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure (Routledge, 2018), Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology (SUNY Press, 2013), and Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007), and the co-editor of Spinoza’s Authority: Volume 1: Resistance and Power in Ethics, and Volume 2: Resistance and Power in Political Treatises (both: Bloomsbury, 2018), and Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), as well as of numerous articles in collections and journals.

This event is the first in 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.
 

Workshop Series
BCB Careers and Civic Engagement are teaming up again this Fall semester for a series of events about taking your ideas and passions for social justice, art or politics and turning them into professional careers. Join us for workshops, talks or practical guidance for your next steps in your project, work or after graduation.
 Program: 

 HOW TO FIND A JOBMon, Oct 25, 7:30 - 8:30 pm, in person,P24, Seminar Room 8In 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.
 INTERNSHIP PROGRAM INFO SESSION Wed, Oct 27 12:30 - 2:00 pm, in person,P98A Lecture HallDo you want to find out more about exciting internship opportunities in Berlin? Learn more about how to enroll and to apply for the Spring 2022 BCB Berlin Internship Seminar or how to navigate finding your own internship.
 OSUN NETWORK(ing) for YOUR CAREER and ENGAGEMENTThurs, Oct 28, 7:30 - 8:30 pm, online,P24 Conference RoomNetworking in a global network: Join Career Services professionals 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. 
 TALK with ESZTER BOROS from CAREERS IN THE COMMON GOODMon, Nov 1, 7:30 - 8:30 pm, in person/onlineP24 Conference RoomFind out about possible career paths "in the common goods" with an emphasis on themes such as sustainability, human rights and entrepreneurship, and a program centered on self- reflection and career choice.
 POST-GRAD OPTIONS in GERMANY and ABROADWed, Nov 3, 7:30 - 9:00 pm, onlineDiscover different routes to go after graduation: internships, traineeships, graduate schools, voluntary social year (FSJ) etc.
 FUNDING & FUNDRAISING Thurs, Nov 4, 7:30 - 8:30 pm, in person/onlineP24 Conference Room Brainstorm on fundraising strategies and start organizing your campaigns. Find out where to start to get funding for your project idea. 

 

Discussion
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm CEST/GMT+2
The second installment in the Palestine event series will feature  the distinguished scholars Toufic Haddad and Shir Hever discussing the economic aspects of the Israel/Palestine paradigm. Economy makes the world go round, but which framing is most suited to the economic aspects of Israel/Palestine? And what are the main questions at hand?

Dr. Toufic Haddad is the Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant's Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem. He is the author of Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territories (I.B. Taurus, 2016), and co-editor of Between the Lines: Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S. ‘War on Terror’,(Haymarket Books, 2007, with Tikva Honig-Parnass).

Dr. Shir Hever is an economist, journalist and scholar. He is a board member of the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace and his most recent book is The Privatization of Israeli Security (Pluto Press, 2017).

Discussion
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST/GMT+2
Siarhei Biareishyk will discuss the codification of Marxism as a metaphysical program in the Soviet 1920-30s. In the context of debates surrounding genetics and Lamarckian biology, we will consider Stalin's intervention in scientific developments, which was largely guided by quasi-religious adherence to the dialectical materialist understanding of nature rather than experimental data. Our conversation will focus on the so-called Lysenko Affair, in which a school of biology that insisted on the inheritance of acquired traits (as opposed to genetic research) came to dominate scientific discourse through the mediation of the Bolshevik Party and Stalin himself.


Siarhei Biareishyk is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. From 2017 to 2019 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin, working in the cluster "World Literature." He is currently completing his book, Spinozan Mediations: The Limits of Materialist Thought in Novalis and His Contemporaries.  

This event is the first in 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.

Lecture Series
1:00 pm CEST
Gendered violence increased against women in conflict affected areas compared to a relatively stable society. This lecture shall consider the gendered nature of conflict and explores the relationship between gender and conflict. It aims to deepen our understanding of the complex role that gender plays in war context. 
 
Dr. Ashjan Ajour will focus on the case of Palestinian women's resistance and experience of living under Israeli occupation.  In colonized Palestine there are complex and intersecting causes of violence against women in their everyday life. Women can’t afford to separate the struggle for social and gender justice from the struggle against colonialism. In general, colonial oppression affects men and women in different ways. According to Spivak (1988), women are subjected to a double-colonisation by both male counterparts and the dominant colonial powers; the Palestinian case is a good example of this. When Palestinian women challenge colonial power gender norms and the meaning of femininity and masculinity are destabilised. Sumud (Steadfastness) is an important element for Palestinian women in their encounter with the Israeli occupation, and also in their everyday life.

Ashjan Ajour completed her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London in August 2019, her research interests and teaching experience are situated in sociology; gender studies and feminist theories and movements; political subjectivity; incarceration; decolonization and global indigenous politics. She taught in the United Kingdom and Palestine at Goldsmiths, Warwick University and Birzeit University. In 2019 she engaged as a Teaching Fellow in Sociology at Warwick University convening modules in Gender Studies. Her last publications are an article by Cultural Politics (Duke University Press): The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity, and a forthcoming book by Palgrave Macmillan: Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body.

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. 

Lecture Series
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, an initiative that 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 closely together 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 colleges 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 Witwatersrand (Srila Roy) And a collaboration with Off-University (Nevra Akdemir, Carmel Christy) 
Upcoming lectures: October 11, 1:00 pm CEST:  Ashjan Ajour, Violence. Gender and Resistance in Palestine November 2, 2:30 pm CET: Ewa Majewska, Feminist Antifascism - a book presentation and debate on today's counterpublics November 17, 4:30 pm CET: Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Writing as Witnessing: Reimagining Displaced Muslim Women's Lifeworlds Through Archival Marginalia December 7, 2:00 pm CET: Akwugo Emejulu, Intersectional Vulnerabilities and the Banality of Harm: The Dangerous Desires of Women of Color Activists 
Project leader: Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin)
 
Project assistant: Liza Tabliashvili (Bard College Berlin)
 

Discussion
9:00 am CEST
9:00 am – 10:00 am CEST/GMT+2
Sahar Rahimi (Monster Truck) has created a variety of theater and performance works that deal with asymmetrical power relations. Centering around topics such as structural discrimination of disabled people or repressive postcolonial dynamics Monster Truck’s performances build on the social power structures inherent in the theatrical event (directing, watching, being watched) in order to create a challenging social space of confrontation, revelation and negotiation. Sahar Rahimi will give us insights to Monster Truck’s work and discuss the possibilities and limits of theater’s political potential.

 Sahar Rahimi, born 1981 in Tehran/Iran, is a director, performer and visual artist. She studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen and is co-founder and co-artistic director of the performance group Monster Truck.

Monster Truck works in the fields of theater, performance, video and visual arts. The group realizes national and international projects in the independent scene and at municipal theaters, including the Sophiensaele Berlin, the Mousonturm Frankfurt, the Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspiel Bochum, and the Nationaltheater Gent, and has been a guest at numerous festivals, such as the Impulse Festival, the Radikal Jung Festival, the Israel Festival, and the lagos_live Festival. For her work Monster Truck was awarded the Favoriten Festival Prize and the Tabori Prize.

Lecture Series
7:30 pm CEST
In the past two years there has been an unprecedented rise in interest and argument about slavery -  largely on the back of the BLM movement and the brutal killing of George Floyd. African slavery in the Americas matters for a multitude of reasons. It affected three continents, over four centuries -  and saw more than 12 million Africans loaded onto Atlantic slave ships. It was also basic to the rise of major powers in Europe (Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and Britain) and across the Americas. Yet the system which created such power -  and wealth -  was brought to its knees in the space of a few decades in the 19th century. Slavery was regarded as essential in – say 1750: a century later, it was doomed. Why?

James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York and recently was Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in California. He has written widely on the history of slavery and on modern British social history. His book Black and White, won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, and in 2008 he was awarded an O.B.E. for services to scholarship.

This event is part of the Global Histories of Migration lecture series and funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

10:00 am -12:00 am film screening
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm guest talk
BCB Faculty member Isabell Spengler is hosting a screening and talk with director and performer Lucile Desamory as part of her course:  "Far-feeling: Telepathic Improvisations and Expanded Cinema."

Desamory's film Télé Réalité  is about three Congelese producers that are planning a reality TV show about the carnival in Belgium. Hawaly, their Burundian show-runner is supposed to prepare the shooting in Belgium effectively but her Belgian colleague is too busy with the supernatural. 

Further information on the film >>

Lucile Desamory is interested in the frontiers of perception, in the „too much“, the falsified – in the spurned narratives. This interest in marginal phenomena always requires to change the medium. She uses painting, drawing, embroidery, collage, photography, film, and her voice. She combines these techniques into larger webs such as installations, films, radio plays and live performances like for instance in the installation “Wild Inconsistency”, Beaufort Triennale 2015, the film ABRACADABRA 2013 Tate Modern and Anthology Film Archive NYC, in the radio plays and the performance Asteroseismology 2018 with Sabine Ercklentz and Margareth Kammerer. Many projects are created as collaborations. She has just finished her second feature film “Télé Réalité” a collaboration with two filmmakers from DR Congo, Glodie Mubikay and Gustave Fundi, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
Lucile Desamory lives and works in Berlin.

5:00 pm CEST
Another term at Bard College Berlin has concluded and a new cohort of alumni have joined the community. When navigating the first few steps of one’s career path, building a network and learning from more experienced peers is an invaluable part for success.

Join us for an opportunity to learn more about the unique career paths of our guest speakers, a chance to form new connections and to catch up with old acquaintances.

We will meet on Wonder.me, a digital networking space that allows participants to move around and mingle freely in a virtual event space.

Sign up here.

Guest Speakers:

Lucian Cosinschi
ECLA ’04, Chief Experience Officer, Zayed University X Minerva

Geraldine Hepp
ECLA ’05, Global Community Director, Amani Institute; Founder, East African Soul Train

Aya Ibrahim
BCB ’15, Reporter, Deutsche Welle

Natalia Irina Roman
ECLA ’08, PhD Candidate, Visual Artist, Art Consultant

9:30 am - 7:30 pm CEST
9:30 am - 6:30 pm CEST
There has always been a desire and necessity to tell the difficult times, to uncover how they have been lived. Letters were written, diaries were kept, cameras captured the moments. Memories, narratives, images, and utterances have been shared across all kinds of media in diverse forms. Do these exposures have a capacity to heal us or others? Or do they trap us in our traumas by constantly reproducing them? What kinds of recuperating potentials can we ascribe to our screen cultures across film, media, and art in troubling times?

Amid the turbulent events of our age that rapidly emerge and expand in personal, social, and political realms, we are prompted to explore questions of healing. During a global pandemic, and while we are spending more and more time on screens, this workshop aims at a critical inquiry of the recuperating forms, mediums, and creativities across screen cultures. Experienced in bodies, homes, institutions, environments, and borders, difficult times can leave us in loss, deprivation, confusion, anxiety, fear, and grief. Yet, as the great number of cultural and artistic works and everyday practices show, these are also the times when transformative questions, ideas, and practices of recovery can flourish. By rethinking recuperative potentials of narrative devices, performances, mediums, and everyday practices across film, media, and art, this workshop aims to explore ideas about and possibilities of healing through creative agencies around the screen.

Organizers:
Özgür Çiçek, Freie Universität Berlin
Özlem Savaş, Bard College Berlin

Keynote speakers:
Ann Cvetkovich, Carleton University
Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University

Full program here>>
 

5:00 pm CEST
Bard College Berlin has the pleasure to invite you to the online graduation celebration
of the academic year 2020-2021.

The ceremony will take place on Saturday, May 22 at 5pm CET on Zoom.

Lecture
5:00 pm CEST
Prof. Dr. Hakim Abderrezak discusses his scholarship and creative work, which centers on the so-called “refugee crisis.” In his talk, he will ask, “How do modes of creative expression—such as fine art, literature and cinema—address misnomers, misunderstandings and misconceptions and redress our biased visions of this global human migratory phenomenon?”; “Are scholars and artists able to impact issues that affect real people? How can our work make a contribution and a difference?”

Abderrezak will share his experience and work as a Franco-American scholar of North African ancestry teaching in the United States, who has published and painted about the current implications of the criminalization of forced migration, the militarization of seas, the persecution of those fleeing wars, the prevention of maritime crossings, the fortification of borders and the demonization of dreams of a better life for individuals hailing from the Global South.

Hakim Abderrezak is an associate professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Minnesota.  He is currently the ANDREW W. MELLON FELLOW IN THE HUMANITIES - CLASS OF SPRING 2021 at the American Academy in Berlin.  His research focuses on migration which he connects with artistic production.

He completed his BA and MA in English-language and American literature at the Université de Rouen and PhD in French studies at Northwestern University. Abderrezak is the author of Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music (Indiana, 2016) and co-editor of a special issue of Expressions Maghrébines. He has been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, visiting scholar in the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, and visiting professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Philipps Universität in Marburg. His work has also appeared in journals including SITES: Contemporary French and Francophone Studies and Journal of North African Studies.

The SHORE (Students Helping to Organize for the Refugees of Europe) project will contribute to the student and activist perspective.

This event is organized in cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin and the U.S. Embassy Berlin and moderated by Prof. Kerry Bystrom and Director of Civic Engagement  Xenia Muth.

Workshop
10:00 am - 6:00pm CEST
In view of the entanglement of entrenched quasi-feudal hierarchies and neoliberal reforms in the so-called leading scientific countries, the 'Free as a Bird: Academic Precariat and the State of Academic Freedom in the Global North' workshop on May 18, 2021 aims at expanding the discussion on academic freedom to the underexamined relationship between labor devaluation and critical knowledge production. For this purpose, the event brings together a number of distinguished scholars and activists working on issues related to labor precarity, political freedoms, discrimination, and intersectional inequalities in academia.

This event is organized by BCB faculty members Aslı Vatansever and Aysuda Kölemen and funded by the Philipp-Schwartz-Initiative. 

Program

Panel I: 10:00 - 12:00 am

10:15-10:40 am
Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool): The double bind of academic freedom: state and/or market capture in UK and Venezuela

10:45 -11:10
Sanaz Raji: Understanding the Nexus between Marketsized Higher Education, Surveillance and the Hostile Environment in the UK

11:15 - 11:40
Daniel Mekonnen (Geneva, Leiden): Neither in nor out:  A forced migrant's view on demographic diversity of the Swiss sector of higher education and its knowledge production processes

Panel II: 1:00 to 3:00 pm

1:00 - 1:25 pm
Dan Hirslund (University of Bergen): Disappearing freedoms. On intersections of career and labor in Nordic countries

1:25 - 1:50 pm
Ana Ferreira (CICS.NOVA, Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences, Lisbon): Embodying scientific precariousness through the narrative of "passion for science": neither academic freedom nor autonomy

1:50 - 2:15 pm 
Lisa Cerami (University of Rochester, NY): What is tenure?

2:15- 2:40 pm
Colin Cameron (Northumbria University): It's Not Much of a Surprise That So Little Changes

Panel III: 4:00 - 6:00 pm

4:00 - 4:25 pm
Britta Ohm (Berlin, Heidelberg) : Political freedom and structural unfreedom: dependencies, disenfranchisement and low-cost academic labor in Germany

4:25 - 4:50 pm
Max Kramer (Free University of Berlin) & Sarbani Sharma (University of Tübingen): Reflexivity and Temporality of Conceptual Labor in Anthropology

4:50 pm - 5:15 pm
Giuseppe Acconcia (University of Padova):  Academic Freedoms of Fixed-Term Researchers in Italy: Politicizing Occupational Precarity




 

5:00 pm CEST
Glenn Patterson is a novelist from Belfast, and the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University. He has written about the politics and society of Northern Ireland in the essay collections Lapsed Protestant and Here’s Me Here, and in his most recent non-fiction book, on the consequences of Brexit, Backstop Land. He is the author of ten novels, including The International, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young and Gull, and is a screenwriter and documentary maker. At this event, he will read from Backstop Land and from his latest novel, Where Are We Now? 

A cooperation between Bard College Berlin, Literary Field Kaleidoscope, and the Centre for British Studies at Humboldt University

Organized by:
Prof. Gesa Stedman (Humboldt University)
Prof. Catherine Toal (Bard College Berlin)
 

Reading
8:00 pm CEST
It has become a tradition now that the writers in BCB faculty member Clare Wigfall's fiction writing workshop give a reading of their work as the finale of their course.  Pre-pandemic, the event was always held in the back room of an intimate, candle-lit Wein-Salon in Friedrichshain.

When Covid struck, the readings moved online, creating a "virtual salon" where the writers in the class could share the wonderful stories written over the course of the semester with an audience now spanning the globe.

Please join us at the close of this semester for a literary evening which promises to be moving, surprising, and entertaining.  Bring a glass of wine, or, depending on which time zone you're in, a coffee if it is more appropriate.  All BCB students, faculty members, friends, and family are warmly welcome.  

Writers presenting:Wanda AlvesováDefne BabacanSerena BirkmannNina CazinMiksa GáspárTymoteusz SchodowskiTara SeymourElma TalićBlythe WeissLuiza Zanardi

Previous event in this series: Die Bärliner – Poetry Reading, Friday, May 7, 2021.

Student Exhibition
5:00 - 8:00 pm
How can we get engaged by means of performance art?

In Performing Pankow, students from BCB Professor of Theater and Performance Nina Tecklenburg's course "Critical Acts: Introduction to Performance Studies" conducted an extensive midterm research project and performed a community building event in BCB's Pankow neighborhood.

Works included site-specific interventions, sound pieces and installations. The artistic projects were based on historical sites of civic engagement, mainly during GDR times, which course members initially studied during a historical and autobiographical walk through the neighborhood led by novelist and historian Annett Gröschner. Sites included the Old Parish Church Pankow where the Peace Circle Pankow was founded in the early 1980s, including oppositional feminist movements; or the former presidential chancellery at the entrance of Schloßpark and its legendary post-wall democratic round table movement in late 1989. 

Students created artistic responses to these places, questioning the present status of former concerns from their various personal and cultural perspectives. The exhibition features the video documentations of these projects.

Corona safety: 
 Access to the events is limited to the BCB Community. Prior registration is requested.


Featuring works by:
 Works by:María José Sarmiento IsaacEzgi KarayelGracie KuppenbenderLangston StahlerLuiza Garcia ZanardiNaama SimonWanda Alvesová

Discussion
12:30 pm CEST
As university departments consider what it means to "decolonize" a curriculum and reckon with the institutional legacies of modern European imperialism -- especially slavery and racist ideologies -- this discussion addresses fundamental questions about the political formations claiming to be, or that have been called, "empires": what are the chief characteristics of three of the most world-altering empires -- Ancient Rome, the British Empire, and the United States?  What has been the relationship between beliefs about these empires and their historical reality? What lessons can be drawn today from the knowledge of how ancient, modern, and contemporary empires actually functioned?

This event is a cooperation between Bard College Berlin and the American  Academy in Berlin. 

Speakers:

Nandini Pandey is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works on the literature, culture, history, and reception of early imperial Rome. She is the Spring 2021 Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History at the American Academy in Berlin.

Erik Linstrum is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he works on modern Britain in its imperial and global contexts. His research explores the politics of knowledge and the circulation of information, with particular focus on science and technology, war and violence, and the long history of decolonization. He is the Spring 2021 Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Boris Vormann is Associate Professor of Politics at Bard College Berlin. His current research project examines the developmentalist qualities of the U.S.-American state in building a logistical empire of frictionless circulation from its early beginnings in the 18th century until today -- and how this history of active statecraft contrasts with national mythologies of an exceptionally small state.

Introduced and Moderated by:
Berit Ebert (American Academy)
Catherine Toal (Bard College Berlin)
 

Lecture
7:00 pm
In this talk Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison speaks about her own personal relationship to Dante's Divine Comedy as well as her work translating and transferring his work into a Jamaican vernacular and setting.  She will also be sharing some of her own poems influenced by Dante. 

This event is part of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI)  series "Decentring Dante" celebrating the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Dante, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden (2021) with a series of lectures that suggest ways of reading Dante’s Divine Comedy from a less central position and with a broader, more critical perspective. How can discussions of race in the Middle Ages and the attentiveness to indigenous forms of knowledge preservation help literary scholars to rethink their understanding of ’canonicity’ and the ’canonical‘? On what basis can canonical authors such as Dante, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan continue to be read today? In what sense and at what cost can Dante inspire other poets? What does he mean, more specifically, to a woman writer and artist in Jamaica? What changes when Dante’s Virgil is read not only as part of the Christian reception of classical authors in the Middle Ages, but also in dialogue with the practices of ancient pedagogy? Does the queer desire informing the Aeneid also flow through Dante’s poem?

Lorna Goodison is a major figure in world literature, she was the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017–2020), and in 2019 she was awarded the 2019 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Goodison has won many other awards for her work, including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry from Yale University, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, the Henry Russel Award and the Shirley Verett award for Exceptional Creative Work from the University of Michigan, and one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007).

This event is co-sponsored by the course "Migration and Exile" led by BCB Professor of Comparative Literature Laura Scuriatti and is part of BCB faculty member Francesco Giusti's course "The Divine Comedy Today". Dr. Scuriatti will also co-moderate the event. 

Register here >>

Other events in the series:

Monday, May 10, 7:30 pm CEST
Suzanne Conklin Akbari – What Ground Do We Read On?

Monday, June 7, 7:00 pm CEST
Gary Cestaro – Dante's Queer Fathers

5:00 - 8:00 pm
What happens to Berlin culture during a year of lockdowns? In this community-facing initiative, students went out to explore what the emerging digital culture of closed theaters, museums, cinemas, and clubs might look like on the ground. They took a series of virtual journeys - sometimes alone, sometimes together -  to places near and far to find out how we can re-connect with each other digitally from our own living-room couch. Whether at the Gorki Theater or the Gropius Bau, or far away in Iceland, Scotland or the US, they were surprised, sometimes critical, and gained a new sense of what cultural life had on offer and how it has adapted to the pandemic.In this exhibition students share some of these experiences both of isolation and reconnection and offer cultural tips on the side. 

Corona safety: 
 Access to the events is limited to the BCB Community. Prior registration is requested.
 Works by: 
Miksa Gáspár
María José Sarmiento Isaac
Naama Simon
Shreya Shukla
Evelyn Weiss
This project is led by BCB faculty Ramona Mosse and funded by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN).

Performing Arts
5:00 - 8:00 pm
THE PERFORMANCE FACTORY presents works from various performing arts courses at the end of each semester. It offers a platform for experimenting with theater and performance formats, topics and performance related ways of engagement. 
This semester's works showcase stagings of post-dramatic playwriting, autobiographical performances, public interventions and engaged performance art. Corona safety:  Access to the events is limited to the BCB Community. Prior registration is requested.

Part III
Performances, Videos and Installations
Critical Acts, Introduction to Performance Studies
Instructor: Nina Teckelnburg
 Bose Sarmiento & Ezgi Karayel:
 Reclaiming NamesThis durational performance aims to create a safe space to counter the violation of women’s lives and bodies. Our experiences echoing from Mexico, Turkey, and Germany fill in the void left by silence and impunity. We embody vulnerability as a form of confrontation and resistance within these voids, and immerse our audience in an experience which does not end on site. As we are weaving space of radical empathy, we bring the names of femicide victims to the surface through sound and blood.
This performance is inspired by Renata Álvarez León’s poem “Sin Miedo, Without Fear'' and the sound piece “Hum” by Hajra Waheed.
Trigger warning: This performance includes the use of needles on the body and excerpts from graphically described incidents of femicides.Langston Stahler:
 Bathroom TalkThis performance is about all one can do in a bathroom, and more. Come explore this strangely social place with me! Trigger Warning: SA, body dysmorphiaNaama Simon:
 Reclaiming Public SpaceA compilation of short videos featuring social interactions between two people and their physical presence set against three locations in Berlin (restaurant, U-bahn, club). The scenes depict a satirical representation of reclaiming public spaces that have entirely transformed over the last year. It is a critical commentary on how our social behavior and physicality have had to adapt to the situation, resulting in a reconceptualization of public space and our relation to it. What happens when our social behavior is stultified and we’re confronted with the desire to retrieve a sense of normality?
Featuring: Naama Simon, Alona Cohen
DOP: Itamar Kerner


Luiza Garcia Zanardi, Wanda Alvesová & Gracie Kuppenbender:

Refr-action
Join us on this exploration of our bodies, where you will experience the physicality of your emotions through different approaches. We will be offering an installation and inviting you to ponder over embodiment, self image and the beauty of our flaws. Please bring your phone and earphones/headphones. 

Trigger warning: Body image, body dysmorphia.  

Student Exhibition
5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
How can we go beyond the failings and fixations of the existing, nation-state based, international institutions regarding the protection of the forcibly displayed? While there is no replacement for them in sight?

This year’s OSUN (Open Society University Network) supported research-creation class “Artistic Approaches to Forced Migration and the Dilemma of the Nation State”, led by BCB faculty Marion Detjen and Dorothea von Hantelmann, combines historical research, artistic practice, and theories of Hannah Arendt,  Achille Mbembe and others, to bear the ambivalences and discover new ways of understanding ourselves, moving in time and in space, as relational creatures. 

Performing Arts
7:00 - 9:15 pm
THE PERFORMANCE FACTORY presents works from various performing arts courses at the end of each semester. It offers a platform for experimenting with theater and performance formats, topics and performance related ways of engagement. 
This semester's works showcase stagings of post-dramatic playwriting, autobiographical performances, public interventions and engaged performance art. Corona safety:  Access to the events is limited to the BCB Community. Prior registration is requested.

Part II:
Scene Studies
Elfriede Jelinek: A Study of the Postdramatic
Playwriting Directing and Acting

Program

Scene Study One 
Forces beyond our control collide in a musical disaster for the ages. Fun for the whole family.

Experimenting with Elfriede Jelinek’s play The Charges 
Performers: Mátyás Endrey and Gracie Kuppenbender 
Director: Dani Wilder 


Scene Study Two 
Internationally known and intergenerationally recognized, Jackie Kennedy Onassis has been an indispensable component of the American myth since the 1950s. She is simultaneously an example of perfect, stylized femininity and a symbol of feminine grief. Through Elfriede Jelinek's play, "Jackie", we explore Jackie's role in her own myth-making. What skill does it take to turn life into legend? What if we were to judge Jackie, not as a victim of the confines of public femininity, but as a master of her craft? What is at stake in the performance of the King's royal body? 

Experimenting with Elfriede Jelinek’s play Jackie
Performer: Fiona French
Director: Ava Simonds 

Scene Study Three 
Playing with the maze of Elfriede Jelinek's language, this scene is a collage of images, bodies, ideas, echoes, thinking thinkers, shadows, things unsaid and unsayable – a mass of text, a mass of people, a mass held at a church unknown. 

Experimenting with the annex of Elfriede Jelinek’s play The Charges
Performers: Gracie Kuppenbender, Fiona French, Dani Wilder, Hannah Scharmer, Maria Jose Sarmiento Isaac
Director: Danny Dubner 
 

Lecture
7:00 pm CEST
In this talk, Dr. Monnica Williams will draw on her extensive research in the field to share information about the impact of racism in academic spaces and how to create supportive and inclusive environments. 

Dr. Monnica Williams is the Canada Research Chair for Mental Health Disparities at the University of Ottawa in the School of Psychology. Her work focuses on ethnic minority mental health and psychopathology research. She completed her undergraduate studies at MIT and UCLA and received her doctoral degree from the University of Virginia. She completed her psychological internship at Montreal General Hospital. Dr. Williams co-founded the International OCD Foundation’s Diversity Advisory Board and serves on the editorial board of several academic journals. She has published over 100 scientific articles, primarily on OCD, trauma, and cultural issues. She has been awarded federal, local, and foundation grants to conduct psychological research.

Moderated by Campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer May Zeidani Yufanyi.

Reading
6:00 pm CEST
In April to celebrate poetry month, the student blog Die Bärliner featured a selection of student poetry. The editors worked alongside student writers, workshopping odes to nature, praises of love, meditations on death and time and justice.

They explored how to create new rhythms, sounds, and meaning. Now, Die Bärliner warmly welcomes you to hear these poets bring their poems to life in a virtual poetry reading. The poets will share their published poems as well as additional works with an opportunity to discuss method, muses, and philosophies of writing a poem. Tune in and be inspired!

With contributions from:Danny DubnerOcéanne FryCharlene BatlleIan CurridenChristin AlhalabiSam ZamrikVala SchrieferNika Kokhodze

Performing Arts
You are cordially invited to attend this semester's online Senior Thesis Presentations, which will be taking place online from April 28 - May 10. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 

The third and final round of presentations will take place on Thursday, May 6, Friday, May 7, and Monday, May 5.


Thursday, May 6

11:00
Kaya Stein - #MeToo / NotYou: Questioning Hegemonic Representations of Sexual Violence Victims in the American Media Coverage of the #MeToo Movement

11:45
Mohamed Ali Nanah - Metamorphosis: Trauma and Becoming-Beast

14:00
Roman Steindler - Politics v. The Supreme Court of the United States: How and Why a Majority-Conservative Supreme Court Defended the Right to Gender Self-Determination

14:45
Mohamed Nafeh Kurdi - Refugees' Impact on the German Economy: An Analysis of the Integration Process in the Labor Market

16:15
Simon Plougholt Kastberg - Arctic Exceptionalism in a Shifting International Order

17:00
Charlene Batlle - Reading Plato's Republic in Cuba

17:45
Andrei Chiva - Corporate Superpowers: Foreign Policy in the Age of Big Tech


Friday, May 7

11:00
Angela Huang - Emotional Well-being of Migrant Care Workers: A Feminist Economic Analysis

11:45
Rebecca Singer - Rhetoric vs Policy in International Trade: the Case of the Trump Administration

12:30
Idil Morsallioglu - A Sudden Overview: Art and Everyday

13:15
Benetta Nayou - A Girl Like Me: The Unspoken Narratives of Former Liberian Refugee Women and Their Journeys From Exile

14:00
Mohamad Hesha Moadamani - Construction of the Syrian Collective Memory Before and After the 2011 Uprising

14:45
Adeeb Hadi - Arab Women Between Screen and Reality

15:30
Melanija Damjanovic - Reality Follows Fiction: How Serbian Film Perpetuates Gender Inequality

16:15
Beltran Arellnes - Neoliberal Capitalism as Conspiracy Theory Intensifier

17:00
Ethan Gutman - The Role of the Gunslinger in Liberal Democracy


Monday, May 10

12:00
Sam Zamrik - The Politics of a Rogue State: An Analysis of Assadist National Occupation

12:45
Elena Rahel Kyra Müller - Safeguards for Settlers? The Protective Efficacy of the World Bank’s Urban Infrastructure Projects between 2002 and 2019

Lecture
12:00 pm CEST
In 2017, when it was announced that the Humboldt Forum would bear a cross atop its cupola, the art historian and founding co-director of the institution, Horst Bredekamp, remarked in an interview: "The cross bears witness to the absence of that for which it stands." "Sounds complicated," the interviewer replied. This talk is inclined to agree. It traces the history of the delicate interplay between spirit and matter, and presence and absence evident in the Humboldt Forum to the German cultural political visions developed during the Napoleonic Wars, a period in which looting and displacement also served transcendent purposes.

Alice Goff is Assistant Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the modern period with a particular focus on the place of art in political thought and practice. In the Spring of 2021 she is the Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. 

This event is moderated by BCB faculty Annette Loeseke and is in cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin.

Seminar
7:30 pm CEST
This Science and Religion Project seminar will focus on the relationship between the ascetic ideal and modern science in Nietzsche's thought through a reading of selections from Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality.

Daniel Doneson studies, writes on and teaches political philosophy at MIT. He was educated at Swarthmore, Harvard, Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and received his PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought.

This event is moderated by BCB faculty member Aaron Tugendhaft and 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.

To take part please contact Dr. Aaron Tugendhaft for the assigned readings.

Lecture
7:00 pm CET
In A Line Made by Walking (2017) the novelist Sara Baume creates a text that interweaves artworks and creaturely life with a narrative of mourning, exploring possibilities that have recently come to the fore again in contemporary literature (autofiction, the juxtaposition of image and word), through a feminist negotiation of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. 
 Elke D'hoker is professor of English literature at the University of Leuven, where she is also co-director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies and of the modern literature research group. 
 This event is introduced by the Ambassador of Ireland to Germany, Dr. Nicholas O'Brien and moderated by Prof. Catherine Toal.

This lecture is sponsored by the German Irish Studies Itinerary.

Performing Arts
5:30 - 7:30 pm CEST
THE PERFORMANCE FACTORY presents works from various performing arts courses at the end of each semester. It offers a platform for experimenting with theater and performance formats, topics and performance related ways of engagement. 
This semester's works showcase stagings of post-dramatic playwriting, autobiographical performances, public interventions and engaged performance art. Corona safety:  Access to the events is limited to the BCB Community. Prior registration is requested.

Part I
Solo and Group Performances
Self-Instructions. Making Autobiographical
Performance with She She Pop

Program
 Custom Gender

by Shahd Katba

Custom Gender is a participatory self-portrait performance based on the idea of the gender as spectrum. It plays with the binary genders’ expressions and the expression of gender transition between the sexes on a spectrum. The audience is involved in the making of the piece as they are allowed to explore the gender spectrum and its limitations through the performer. Shahd takes from their own gender exploration journey as a Trans* nonbinary person. The piece is also  inspired by Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 and She She Pop’s For Everyone.

***My Mother's Messagesby Elena Eßer
instructions by Helene Cunningham

What does it feel like when the nest is empty and all children have finally moved out? A critical assessment of my mother's hopes and wishes for me and what remains unspoken.

***

Peace On Earth

by Dani Wilder

One lady, one guitar, one George Harrison song.


***i wish i could be there
by Helena Cunningham

during the performance i will answer whenever someone calls me. 
i will tell them how sorry i am about missing the performance
then i will tell them what i would have performed had i been there
i will apologize again for not being there
i will thank them for coming 
i will apologize again and tell them about how much i wish i could be there. 
i will bid them farewell.

With inspiration from She She Pop’s “Canon”, and in-class discussions of Antonia Baehr and Jule Flierl’s “Draw My Breath”.
 ***
 How do questions come to birthbyKaitlyn the Ephemeral
Bose the Wonderer
Alice the Bewildered
 How is it that we are always full of questions without answer? Why don't elephants have two trunks? How is it that we are okay with never getting an answer to most of our questions? What will I eat tonight? How private are your questions? Would you like to hear ours?  Do our dreams mean anything? Questions, Humming, and fairy dust are waiting for you!

You are cordially invited to attend this semester's online Senior Thesis Presentations, which will be taking place online from April 28 - May 10. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 

The second round of presentations will take place on Monday, May 3, Tuesday, May 4, and Wednesday, May 5.
 Monday, May 3 12:30Oceanne Fry - Corrupted Credibility and Asylum in the Aegean: The 2020 International Protection Act, Mistrust, and EU Border Mismanagement13:15Schuyler Curriden - Eternal Paradox: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Problems of Democracy14:00Yuanfang Ding - Ideological Construction: The Emperor's New Clothes 14:45Karina Chada - 'Strong Female Lead': Exploring Television Representations of the Empowered Woman15:30Valentino La Villa - A Mad Quest Through Novelistic Space Toward a New Post-capitalist Subjectivity16:15Hannah Scharmer - Art as a Teacher of Resonance17:00River Tabor - In Reaching for God They Found the Gesamtkunstwerk: An Inquiry into Dante's Commedia and Strasbourg Cathedral17:45Claire Uicker - In on the Joke: Political Satire in 1960s-70s American Counterculture, Its Strategies and Legacy18:30Alva Guzzini - Dynamic Threesomes: Beholders facing problematic art(ists) in contemporary controversiesTuesday, May 412:30Sami Gerezghiher - China's Belt and Road Initiative: Between Debt-Trap Diplomacy and Cooperation13:15Roxanne Drewry - Breaking Bread Together: Food and Community in Moments of Crisis14:00Tinca Joyner - Creating Justice: Testimony as Response to Sexual Violence in the DRC14:30Amy Clare Murthy-Putnam - Tactics of Displacement: The Making of Government Center in Postwar Boston14:45Solveig Vanniez -  Decolonizing the North: Colonialism in Sápmi, Norway, and the survival of the yoik16:15Alexandra Huff - “It is not for fun”: Salvation and the Sartorial in Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies17:45Lucari Jordan - Developmental Effects of Major Hydroelectric Infrastructure on Cross Border Fluvial CommunitiesWednesday, May 514:00Ryan Miller - Snow: Lutz Bacher's Dispersal of Subjecthood and Authorship14:45Hyuna Choe - The Tragedy in Oldboy15:30Jessie Kao - Till Death Do us Part: The Arnolfini Portrait in Relation to Faith, Innocence, and Time16:15Caleb Smith - Enlightenment: Objectivity in Crisis17:00Anna Winslow - Polyvocality and the Cyborg Choir: From Bodily Mutilation to Bionic Extension17:45Frances Witherspoon -  Changing Shape: The implications of Western Beauty Ideals on Body Image, Body Dissatisfaction and Instagram.18:15Mary Grace Campbell -  Performing Collectivity: The Case of Grand Union

Lecture Series
12:30 pm CET
In this talk, Amal Eqeiq will review the visual archive of murals of cross-regional solidarity between Latin American and the Middle East, with a special focus on Chiapas and Palestine as global sites of parallel indigenous struggles and decolonization.

Amal Eqeiq is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Her interdisciplinary research includes modern Arab literature, popular culture, Palestine studies, feminism(s), performance studies, translation, indigenous studies in the Americas, the Global South, literary history, hip-­‐hop, critical border studies, and decoloniality. She contributed to the Contemporary Levant Journal, The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, Journal of Palestine Studies, Transmotion: An Online Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies, MadaMasr and Jadaliyya, among others. She is currently working on her manuscript, "Indigenous Affinities: Comparative Study in Mayan and Palestinian Narratives". She received several awards, including a writing residency at Hedgebrook, the Dean’s Medal in Humanities from the University of Washington, and PARC NEH/FPIRI research fellowship. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington (2013). Eqeiq also keeps a Facebook blog called “Diaries of a Hedgehog Feminist.” During 2019/2022, Eqeiq is an affiliated EUME Fellow associated with the Lateinamerika-­‐Institut of Freie Universität Berlin.

This event is moderated by BCB Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Hanan Toukan.

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network
 

Lecture
3:45 pm
This guest talk intersects the fields of computer science, economics, and environmental science.

In the current information age, companies collect quadrillions of data points. From the individual firm’s viewpoint, not sharing data is a rational strategy. However, data unfolds its true value only if it reaches a critical mass, can be put into context and is converted to actionable information. Thus, from a collective viewpoint, not sharing data is an adverse outcome, leaving out huge potential gains for organizations and society as a whole. In this regard, a MIT study has shown that we could save more than 20% of CO2 emissions if data collaboration between organizations would happen. A new technological paradigm is currently moving from research to application, enabling new ways of data sharing. For example, the secure multiparty computing technology allows parties to jointly run an operation using their shared data, while keeping their inputs private.  

Aurel Stezel is a mathematician by training, and also holds an MBA from HHL (Leipzig Graduate School of Management) and currently is a PhD candidate in Information Design at the Economics Department of Kiel University. For many years, he was the COO of Adjust, one of Berlin’s latest unicorns. He recently founded the SINE Foundation - a non-profit organization that enables organizations to share their data for the better.

This event is moderated by BCB Professor of Economics Israel Waichman.

Lecture
7:30 pm CET
Hobbes' Leviathan is justly regarded as a foundational work that seeks to reform political thought and practice by grounding it in modern natural science. Yet a good half of the book consists of Biblical exegesis whose aim is to elaborate a theological justification for the modern state. And so, whereas some consider Hobbes a pioneer of the scientific study of politics, notable others view him as the main political theologian of modernity. Can Hobbes be both?  

In discussing the interplay of science and religion in Hobbes’ work, Professor Ioannis D. Evrigenis will address the following three questions:

- How does one spot an atheist?
- What is the role of science in curbing religious conflict?
- Is science the new religion?
 
Participants are recommended to revisit chapter 12 of the Leviathan.

 Ioannis D. Evrigenis is Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Relations Program at Tufts University.  He is the author of Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in Hobbes's State of Nature, of Fear of Enemies and Collective Action, and of articles on a wide range of issues in political theory, as well as co-editor of Johann Gottfried Herder's Another Philosophy of History & Selected Political Writings.

This event is moderated by BCB Professor of Political Thought Ewa Atanassow and 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.

You are cordially invited to attend this semester's online Senior Thesis Presentations, which will be taking place online from April 28 - May 10. The presentations are an essential step towards graduation for every senior and they are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 

The first round of presentations will take place on Wednesday, April 28, Thursday, April 29, and Friday, April 30.

 Wednesday, April 28
 12:30Jonas Lieb - Supply Chain Risk Management and Human Rights in the Textile Industry
 14:00Michael Torkaman - An Experimental Inquiry Into The Role Of Empathy and Individual Risk Preferences In Decision Making For Others.
 14:45Adrianadayl Porraid Ordonez - Education and Capabilities: How Women's Sexual and Reproductive Well-being Is Impacted By Education In Nicaragua
 15:30Sofya Mayer - The Danse Macabre and Human Attitudes towards Death in the Sixteenth Century
 16:15Danny Dubner - Apokalypsis, the Clock, and its Makers: Remedios Varo's "Revelación"
 17:00 Jelizaveta Ostrovska -The Place of the Human in Relation to Nature in the Drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci
 Thursday, April 29
 15:30Esme Thompson-Turcotte - “Spiritual Marxism”: Mika Rottenberg’s Aesthetic Amalgam of 21st Century Economy
 16:15Aziza Izamova - "The Louvre of the Steppes": The Igor Savitsky Collection in Nukus, Uzbekistan
 17:45Leigh Ronen - Winging the News: How Political Journalists Navigate Their Careers on Twitter
 Friday, April 30
 11:45Maria Jose Sarmiento Isaac - Growing Wings: A Performance Studies Approach to Women's Demonstrations in Mexico City
 12:30Maya Abdulqader - Life Online: The Impacts of Social Media Influencing on Gen Z
 13:15Mohamed Othman - Reconstruction in Syria: Political Actors and Possible Scenarios
 14:00Federica Ianni - Contradicting Desires and the Ambivalent Role of the State and Church in Kleist’s Work: Art, History, Superstition and Fanaticism in “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”
 14:45Christine van den Berg - Disidentification: How Postmigrant Cultural Activism Resists Discourses of Leitkultur and Integration in Germany
 16:30Mátyás György Endrey - Real-estate development in public parks: a case of new-build environmental gentrification


Coming Up:

Part 2

Monday, May 3 

12:30
Oceanne Fry - Corrupted Credibility and Asylum in the Aegean: The 2020 International Protection Act, Mistrust, and EU Border Mismanagement

13:15
Schuyler Curriden - Eternal Paradox: W.E.B. Du Bois on the Problems of Democracy

14:00
Yuanfang Ding - Ideological Construction: The Emperor's New Clothes 

14:45
Karina Chada - 'Strong Female Lead': Exploring Television Representations of the Empowered Woman

15:30
Valentino La Villa - A Mad Quest Through Novelistic Space Toward a New Post-capitalist Subjectivity

16:15
Hannah Scharmer - Art as a Teacher of Resonance

17:00
River Tabor - In Reaching for God They Found the Gesamtkunstwerk: An Inquiry into Dante's Commedia and Strasbourg Cathedral

17:45
Claire Uicker - In on the Joke: Political Satire in 1960s-70s American Counterculture, Its Strategies and Legacy

18:30
Alva Guzzini - Dynamic Threesomes: Beholders facing problematic art(ists) in contemporary controversies

Tuesday, May 4

12:30
Sami Gerezghiher - China's Belt and Road Initiative: Between Debt-Trap Diplomacy and Cooperation

13:15
Roxanne Drewry - Breaking Bread Together: Food and Community in Moments of Crisis

14:00
Tinca Joyner - Creating Justice: Testimony as Response to Sexual Violence in the DRC

14:30
Amy Clare Murthy-Putnam - Tactics of Displacement: The Making of Government Center in Postwar Boston

14:45
Solveig Vanniez -  Decolonizing the North: Colonialism in Sápmi, Norway, and the survival of the yoik

16:15
Alexandra Huff - “It is not for fun”: Salvation and the Sartorial in Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies

17:45
Lucari Jordan - Developmental Effects of Major Hydroelectric Infrastructure on Cross Border Fluvial Communities

Wednesday, May 5

14:00
Ryan Miller - Snow: Lutz Bacher's Dispersal of Subjecthood and Authorship

14:45
Hyuna Choe - The Tragedy in Oldboy

15:30
Jessie Kao - Till Death Do us Part: The Arnolfini Portrait in Relation to Faith, Innocence, and Time

16:15
Caleb Smith - Enlightenment: Objectivity in Crisis

17:00
Anna Winslow - Polyvocality and the Cyborg Choir: From Bodily Mutilation to Bionic Extension

17:45
Frances Witherspoon -  Changing Shape: The implications of Western Beauty Ideals on Body Image, Body Dissatisfaction and Instagram

18:15
Mary Grace Campbell -  Performing Collectivity: The Case of Grand Union

Part 3 

Thursday, May 6

11:00
Kaya Stein - #MeToo / NotYou: Questioning Hegemonic Representations of Sexual Violence Victims in the American Media Coverage of the #MeToo Movement

11:45
Mohamed Ali Nanah - Metamorphosis: Trauma and Becoming-Beast

14:00
Roman Steindler - Politics v. The Supreme Court of the United States: How and Why a Majority-Conservative Supreme Court Defended the Right to Gender Self-Determination

14:45
Mohamed Nafeh Kurdi - Refugees' Impact on the German Economy: An Analysis of the Integration Process in the Labor Market

16:15
Simon Plougholt Kastberg - Arctic Exceptionalism in a Shifting International Order

17:00
Charlene Batlle - Reading Plato's Republic in Cuba

17:45
Andrei Chiva - Corporate Superpowers: Foreign Policy in the Age of Big Tech


Friday, May 7

11:00
Angela Huang - Emotional Well-being of Migrant Care Workers: A Feminist Economic Analysis

11:45
Rebecca Singer - Rhetoric vs Policy in International Trade: the Case of the Trump Administration

12:30
Idil Morsallioglu - A Sudden Overview: Art and Everyday

13:15
Benetta Nayou - A Girl Like Me: The Unspoken Narratives of Former Liberian Refugee Women and Their Journeys From Exile

14:00
Mohamad Hesha Moadamani - Construction of the Syrian Collective Memory Before and After the 2011 Uprising

14:45
Adeeb Hadi - Arab Women Between Screen and Reality

15:30
Melanija Damjanovic - Reality Follows Fiction: How Serbian Film Perpetuates Gender Inequality

16:15
Beltran Arellnes - Neoliberal Capitalism as Conspiracy Theory Intensifier

17:00
Ethan Gutman - The Role of the Gunslinger in Liberal Democracy


Monday, May 10

12:00
Sam Zamrik - The Politics of a Rogue State: An Analysis of Assadist National Occupation

12:45
Elena Rahel Kyra Müller - Safeguards for Settlers? The Protective Efficacy of the World Bank’s Urban Infrastructure Projects between 2002 and 2019

Lecture
7:00 pm CET
A pandemic is raging. So is a war. A revolution has just happened. Set in a hospital ward in 1918, Emma Donoghue's novel The Pull of the Stars, published last year and written before the corona outbreak, explores an until now almost-forgotten episode: the devastating impact of the so-called Spanish flu. Best known as the author of Room (2010), Donoghue uses the devices of drama to create a searing focus on the bodies of those forgotten by, while in the midst of, history. 

Speaking about the novel will be Marisol Morales-Ladrón.  Morales-Ladrón is Professor of English and Irish Literature at the University of Alcalá. Trained in the fields of English Philology, Hispanic Philology, and Psychology, her research focuses on questions of gender and on literature written by women. 

Moderated by Prof. Catherine Toal.

This lecture is supported by the German Irish Studies Itinerary.
 

Lecture Series
10:45 am CET
This talk offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis that is Brexit.  It does so by charting a longer story of working-class and anti-racist defeat through the 1970s and into the early twenty first century. By tracing the racialization of migration over the longue dureé and the politicization of Englishness, the talk identifies the present moment as an emergency, and suggests some possible resources of hope. 

Brendan McGeever received his PhD from Glasgow University in 2015 and is Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Psychosocial Studies and the Pears Institute at Birkbeck College, London. Specialized in the study of racism and anti-racism he is particularly interested in their relationship and in exploring how both can be addressed within the wider sociology of racism and ethnicity studies. His book  Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for History, and an 'Honourable Mention' for the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize. In 2019, Brendan was selected as a 'New Generation Thinker' by the BBC and AHRC.

This event is moderated by BCB faculty Frank Wolff

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network
 

Seminar
7:30 pm CET
The Science and Religion Project workshop series hosts Ross Shields:

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant criticizes the tendency of reason to transcend the limits of human knowledge. Dissatisfied with the finite state of empirical experience, reason leads us to invent three speculative ideas that extend this experience to infinity: the idea of the soul (qua unity of all representations), the idea of the world (qua totality of the sequence of causes and effects) and the idea of God (qua systematic interconnection of everything in general). According to Kant, we cannot say anything meaningful about these ideas—and this failing leads us to philosophical debates that can never be resolved: the so-called transcendental dialectic. However, while Kant criticizes the transcendent use of the three rational ideas (soul, world, and God) he simultaneously approves of their immanent use as regulative principles of scientific investigation—a notion that Goethe adopts in his own scientific pursuit.
 
Dr. Ross Shields is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, and also teaches at Bard College Berlin. He received his PhD in German Studies and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2019. His research interests include literary modernism, aesthetics, pictorial and musical theories of form, literary theory, the philosophy of language, and the history of science.

This seminar is open to BCB Students only. Participants are required to read the “appendix to the transcendental dialectic” in advance. Participants will discuss, among other things, the survival of Kant’s idea(s) in the scientific search for a theory of everything.  If you are interested in taking part, please contact Dr.  Aaron Tugendhaft.

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.

Lecture
7:00 pm CET
This talk concerns the controversial debate on prenatal genetic testing, covering recent technical and legal developments that have had an influence on gynecological practice and medical advice. The technologies, their industry advocates and the legal frameworks surrounding them are leading to the marginalization of disabled communities and increasing decision-making burdens for pregnant people. Taleo Stüwe will look critically at the situation from anti-ableist rights and (queer*)feminist perspectives.

Taleo Stüwe works for the Gen-Ethisches Netzwerk, a group of scientists and activists providing the public with a critical picture of science, aimed at balancing science's self-representation through academia, industry and polity. Taleo engages particularly with reproductive technologies. They are currently writing their PhD about developments in prenatal testing and their influence on gynaecological practice at the University of Cologne.

This talk is part of BCB faculty Ian Lawson's Bioethics and Biosciences class. 

Image: Dr. Wolfgang Moroder

Film Screening
2:45 pm CET
A white couple living in the German Democratic Republic, tells their Black child that its skin color is
purely by chance and has no meaning. This is what happened to a girl in East Berlin in the 1960s,
not far from the BCB campus in Pankow.

The child is filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. The film, more than seven years in the making, tracks
Ines as she pieces together the secrets surrounding her childhood, her mother’s affair and her
experiences of growing up as a Black child of white parents in the 1960s GDR.

This event is funded by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN).

Entrance from: 2.45 pm onward
Film starts at 3.00 pm sharp

Lecture Series
5:30 pm CET
A major concern of postcolonial criticism since the 1990s has been how writers from the former British empire have transformed the culture of the metropolis and its literary traditions. This lecture will revisit this narrative of transformation, focusing on the variegated, complex, and contradictory ways that migrant writers imagined England and repositioned their own relation to Englishness across several generations.  Beginning with the post-Windrush moment (1950s) and ending with Brexit (2016), the lecture will map out the migrant writer's changing relationship with the country and the city and the inscription of new spaces of the imagination caught between the metropole and its former colonies.  The lecture will conclude with some reflections on the differences and similarities between the literature of Caribbean and African migrants to Britain. 

Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor and Chair of English at Princeton University, before that he was Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and the director of the Program in Comparative Literature. Gikandi was elected the president of the Modern Language Association in 2019. 

Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Gikandi earned his BA in literature, with first-class honors from the University of Nairobi. As a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, he graduated with an MLitt in English studies. He has a PhD in English from Northwestern University.

Gikandi's major fields of research and teaching are Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; literary and critical theory; the black Atlantic and the African diaspora; and the English novel. His current research projects are on slavery and modernity, African philology, and cultures of the novel.

Moderated by BCB Professor for Comparative Literature Laura Scuriatti.

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network

Lecture Series
2:00 pm CET
This lecture reflects on the temporalization and territorialization of Africa in response to Europe’s ‘migration crisis.’ Reawakened fears of the African other and its own divisive internal politics have presented Europe’s leaders with a dilemma: how to contain African ambitions to move while remaining true to their self-professed commitment to individual freedom, universal rights, and global progress. To solve it, Europe has updated longstanding colonial narratives and identities by constructing a timespace trap. This trap justifies exclusion as readying Africa for an elusive global future. Employing temporal forms of socio-spatial governance, the Europeans dangle a global and mobile future to Africans willing to mold themselves into externally defined parameters of moral respectability. Adherence to immigration regulations authored and often imposed by Europe, together with a demonstrated commitment to family, community, and country mark one’s suitability to enter a global future. But meeting these legal and moral standards effectively means building a sedentary life dedicated to ‘development at home’. Together with allies across sectors and continents, they are realizing their ambitions through frameworks that morally justify intercepting and pre-empting movement as means of empowering and perfecting Africans. Doing so effectively excludes Africans from a shared, global humanity while discursively shielding Europe’s liberal commitments.
 
Dr. Loren B Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford, Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society, and co-director of the Wits-Oxford ‘Migration Governance Lab’. He has previously held visiting and faculty positions at Princeton, Georgetown, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. His interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance, and the transformation of socio-political community across the global south.  He has consulted with the European Union, the World Bank, UNDP, UNHCR, UNECA, the Cities Alliance, and others. As chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa  (2004-2012) he served on the South African Immigration Advisory Board and is now a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley).

Moderated by BCB Faculty member Marion Detjen

This lecture is part of the OSUN Research Creation on Migration Class and the Global Histories of Migration lecture series. 

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network

Lecture 
2:00 pm CET
This talk will deal with the current state of academic work and employment. Specific attention will be paid to the tension between neoliberal labor casualization and the traditional academic work culture based on passion and intrinsic motivation. The impact of the decrease in job security and the rise of temporary employment practices will be discussed from the perspective of both the future of higher education and the well-being of early-career researchers. The main aim is to illuminate how sector-specific factors can be conducive to neoliberal exploitation mechanisms, especially in creative/intellectual sectors. Ultimately this talk seeks to stimulate critical reflection on possible means to overcome voluntary self-exploitation in the creative sectors.

Dr. Aslı Vatansever (PhD University of Hamburg, 2010) is a sociologist of work and social stratification with a focus on precarious academic labor. Currently, she is a Philipp-Schwartz-Fellow at Bard College Berlin and works on a project titled “Varieties of Academic Labor Activism in Europe”. Her books include: "Ursprünge des Islamismus im Osmanischen Reich. Eine weltsystemanalytische Perspektive" (Hamburg: Dr. Kovač, 2010), "Ne Ders Olsa Veririz. Akademisyenin Vasıfsız İşçiye Dönüşümü" (Ready to Teach Anything. The Transformation of the Academic into Unskilled Worker, Istanbul: İletişim, 2015 – co-authored with Meral Gezici-Yalçın), and "At the Margins of Academia. Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity" (Brill: 2020).

Panel
4:00 pm CET
Bard College Berlin is joining more than 100 universities world wide who will be focusing on the critical question of how we can best utilize our collective resources to tackle climate change by 2030.

From April 6 onwards, participating institutions from 50 countries will be hosting online events discussing regional level and local solutions. At BCB Professor of Economics Israel Waichman will be hosting the panel: “How can Behavioral and Experimental Economics contribute to solving Climate Change?”

Guests panelists will be:   Johannes Diederich, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Economics, University of Heidelberg. Aurel Stezel, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman SINE Foundation, PhD candidate, University of Kiel Bodo Steiner, Professor of Food Economics and Business Management, Helsinki University
Solve Climate by 2030 is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College, NY. The project is co-led by Dr. Eban Goodstein and Dr. David Blockstein.
 

Lecture Series
7:00 pm CET
In this talk, Michael Rothberg will introduce his book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, which has just been translated into German. The translation appears in a moment of intensive debate in the German public sphere about colonial legacies, postcolonial studies, the relation between antisemitism and racism, and the place of the Holocaust in Germany’s memorial landscape. In addition to providing an overview of the book’s central arguments, Rothberg will reflect on how the concept of multidirectional memory can help illuminate and address the current controversies. 

Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), published by Stanford University Press. His book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford UP, 2009) has just appeared in German as Multidirektionale Erinnerung (Metropol Verlag, 2021). He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minnesota UP, 2000) and co-editor with Neil Levi of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (UBC Press, 2003). With Yasemin Yildiz, he is completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance. 

Following the talk, Michael Rothberg will engage in a conversation with BCB faculty member Frank Wolff and a discussion with the audience. 

Watch the discussion live on Facebook >>


Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network

Lecture Series
6:30 pm CET
This talk sketches out the possibility of an artistic, decolonial practice in which the artist's work does not simply add an artistic flair to a campaign, but rather theory and research, action and aesthetics, debriefing and analysis — this entire dialectical process — is the art practice.
 
Amin Husain has a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, a J.D. from Indiana University School of Law, and an LL.M. from Columbia Law School. He practiced law for five years before transitioning to art, studying at the School of the International Center of Photography and Whitney Independent Study Program.  Amin Husain with Nitasha Dhillon are MTL, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, organizing and action in practice. Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain are co-founders of Anemones and Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, both movement-generated theory magazines; Global Ultra Luxury Faction, known as the direct-action wing of Gulf Labor Coalition; Direct Action Front for Palestine; and, most recently, Decolonize This Place, an action-oriented movement and decolonial formation in New York City and beyond. Currently, they are directing and producing Unsettling, an experimental documentary film about land, life, and liberation in occupied Palestine.

Moderated by BCB Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Hanan Toukan. 


Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen
April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network







 

Lecture
10:45 am CET
Sam Selvon's Lonely Londoners (1956) is a seminal novel in many ways. Politically, it charts the woes, hopes and sometimes joys of migration, explores the deliberate construction of difference and conflict which gained momentum in the fifties and exposes the homelessness and the fragility of communities. But Selvon also narrates the human and aesthetic treasures of creolization and hyphenization and the virtues of cultural ‘contamination’. The talk will concentrate on three different - but interrelated - aspects of the novel: Remapping London, in a funny mimicry of the maps once drawn by European colonizers when they ‘discovered’ the New world. A verbal feast? How is the English language appropriated, manipulated and ultimately re-created? Calypso aesthetics, music and orality.
Caroline Patey studied English and Comparative literature in Paris (Paris III), Dublin UCD and the Università degli Studi, Milan, where she was chair professor of  English literature until 2018. Her interests and fields of research include Renaissance literature, late Victorian culture and modernism with a special focus on intermediality, the intersection between museum and literature and the cross-border circulation of cultures and aesthetic forms.

This event is moderated by BCB Professor for Comparative Literature Laura Scuriatti.  

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 


The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network
 

Seminar
7:30 pm CET
In this Science and Religion Project seminar Judith Kaplan will be exploring the following questions:
  What makes a source “scientific” (or not), and why? How do we deal with incommensurable meanings, that is, concepts that do not translate well across different ways of knowing? How might technology—in this case, audio recording—relate to scientific or religious ways of engaging with the world?
Dr. Judith Kaplan is a cultural and intellectual historian of the human sciences with a special interest in the history of linguistic research. She holds a doctorate in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Penn Humanities Forum and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She currently teaches History and Sociology of Science in the Integrated Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Participants will be required to read an assigned text in advance. If you are interested in taking part please contact Dr. Aaron Tugendhaft. 
 

Artist Talk
12:30pm
The colonial archive, which Denmark removed from the US Virgin Islands in 1919, two years after Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States, has been an agent of entanglement between histories (connecting the colonial experience across USVI, Ghana, Greenland, India, and Denmark-Norway), while at the same time it also disconnected the communities affected by colonialism and produced a radical cut between these communities and their creative expression. This talk will examine how the birth of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark, was deeply entangled with the colonial matrix of power, and how artists and cultural workers today engage in reparative critical practices in response to situations that are “beyond repair”. 

Dr. Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld is a visual artist and independent researcher. Working with video installation, performance, and text, Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s artistic practice is socially engaged with diverse communities to explore and develop “reparative critical practices”. Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s work explore the reparative critical practice as a communal, dense exploration of fragments, from (broken) histories into new assemblages, through the artistic and collective engagement with memory, affect and time. Dirckinck-Holmfeld was head of the Institute for Art, Writing and Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts until November 2020. 

This event is moderated by BCB Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Hanan Toukan.

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network
 

Lecture Series
6:00 pm CET
Over the past decade Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon has been documenting the stories of forced displacement and other forms of migration. In this lecture he will reflect on both the practice and politics of writing about migration and displacement within affective landscapes and cityscapes. Wilhelm-Solomon draws on Berberich, Campbell and Hudson’s (2013) notion of the ‘affective landscape’ to propose a relational approach to writing the journeys of displaced persons and migrants which attends to how their affects are enmeshed in the landscape or cityscape’s materiality. In this lecture Wilhelm- Solomon will present narratives drawn from his research on HIV/AIDS and displacement in northern Uganda as well as religion and unlawful occupation in Johannesburg. He will reflect on the some of the dilemmas which arose in producing these narratives and share methods and writing processes that have been helpful to him.

Dr. Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon is a researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg. His research focuses on themes of unlawful occupation, eviction, social movements, migration, health access, and religion in Johannesburg. He is also an associate researcher of the Migration and Health Project Southern Africa.

This event is moderated by BCB Faculty member Marion Detjen. 

This lecture is part of the OSUN Research Creation on Migration Class and the Global Histories of Migration lecture series. 

Further events in the series:

March 2, 7:00 pm CET:
Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor – The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen
April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

The event series takes place  within the framework of and is funded by the Mellon Cluster of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

* Funded by the Open Society University Network
 

Lecture Series
7:30 pm CET
with Prof. Ingo Reulecke (Hochschul Zentrum für Tanz and Ernst-Busch-Hochschule) 
From the perspective of someone working in the field, how do we reach the non-mover, and where are we going? Projects in Iran and experiences in a Berlin vocational school guide the discussion and practice. 

Community Dance projects have impacted people and their communities in projects from Peru to Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Romania, Palestine, migrants in Vienna, refugee homes in Berlin, inner city schools in London, British prisons. The number of projects is growing, some have existed and evolved over decades.  

What is Community Dance? Long a part of European culture, it’s hardly known in the US. How does a community, often with hundreds of participants, who might never have heard of modern dance put up a professional modern dance production? What was the rationale for government funding of Berlin school system’s Community Dance project with one million Euros annually? 

The documentation of one Community Dance project, Rhythm is It, (with the Berlin Philharmonic) is a good introduction to the  ‘Everyone Can Dance’ movement. Here Royston Maldoom's motto, ‘You can change your life in a dance class,’ shows outcomes that impact entire communities and extend well beyond the dance.

This Bard Berlin lecture series program is funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. It will discuss the history and practices of Community Dance, show examples from various contexts and continents, and discuss the wide-ranging outcomes. Two important practitioners, Royston Maldoom and Prof. Ingo Reulecke will give examples of their work in the field, take questions, and do workshop demonstrations. Jacalyn Carley introduces and curates the series.

RSVP on Facebook

Other events in the series:

An Overview: Dancing through the History of Utopias with Jacalyn Carley (Sarah Lawrence College; author, Community Dance Handbook, Henschel Verlag), Tuesday, February 23, 2021.

What Community Dance can Achieve: Life and Work of Royston Maldoom, Thursday, March 4, 2021.

Seminar
7:30 pm CET
In this Science and Religion Project seminar Aviva Rothman will be exploring the following questions:
  What kind of discipline was astronomy understood to be in the sixteenth century?  What was it for, and on what principles did it depend Why do Rheticus and Copernicus consider heliocentric theory persuasive?  Why should a sixteenth-century reader prefer it over the geocentric alternative?  (And why might they not?) What is the relationship between these authors' understanding of the cosmos and their understanding of its Creator?
Dr. Aviva Rothman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Case Western Reserve University. Her first book, The Pursuit of Harmony: Kepler on Cosmos, Confession, and Community (University of Chicago Press, 2017) focused on German astronomer Johannes Kepler and the connections he saw between the harmony of the heavens and the harmony of church and state. She has two book manuscripts in progress: an anthology of texts on the Copernican Revolution for the Penguin Classics series, and a monograph on the relationship between science and myth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This Seminar is open to BCB Students only, participants will be required to read an assigned text in advance. If you are interested in taking part please contact Dr.  Aaron Tugendhaft.
 

Lecture Series
7:30 pm CET
A  pioneer in the field, Royston Maldoom's projects across the globe and his years as mentor have guided the field of Community Dance.

Community Dance projects have impacted people and their communities in projects from Peru to Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Romania, Palestine, migrants in Vienna, refugee homes in Berlin, inner city schools in London, British prisons. The number of projects is growing, some have existed and evolved over decades.  

What is Community Dance? Long a part of European culture, it’s hardly known in the US. How does a community, often with hundreds of participants, who might never have heard of modern dance put up a professional modern dance production? What was the rationale for government funding of Berlin school system’s Community Dance project with one million Euros annually? 

The documentation of one Community Dance project, Rhythm is It, (with the Berlin Philharmonic) is a good introduction to the  ‘Everyone Can Dance’ movement. Here Royston Maldoom's motto, ‘You can change your life in a dance class,’ shows outcomes that impact entire communities and extend well beyond the dance.

This Bard Berlin lecture series program is funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. It will discuss the history and practices of Community Dance, show examples from various contexts and continents, and discuss the wide-ranging outcomes. Two important practitioners, Royston Maldoom and Prof. Ingo Reulecke will give examples of their work in the field, take questions, and do workshop demonstrations. Jacalyn Carley introduces and curates the series.

Other events in the series:
An Overview: Dancing through the History of Utopias with Jacalyn Carley (Sarah Lawrence College; author, Community Dance Handbook, Henschel Verlag), Tuesday, February 23, 2021.

Hands On: Community Dance Practice with Prof. Ingo Reulecke (Hochschul Zentrum für Tanz and Ernst-Busch-Hochschule), Wednesday, March,10, 2021.

 

Book Talk
7:00 pm CET
In this talk Dr. Sa’ed Atshan and Dr. Katharina Galor  will be discussing their recent book: The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis and Palestinians.

Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia.

Dr. Atshan and Dr. Galor explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse and the private sphere.

Speakers:
Dr. Sa’ed Atshan is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Swarthmore College. He is spending the 2020-2021 academic year as a Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Visiting Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Associate Professor in Judaic Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University. She specializes in the visual and material culture of Israel/Palestine.

Moderated by BCB Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Hanan Toukan.

Further events in the series:

March 11, 6:00 pm CET:
Matthew Wilhelm Solomon  – Writing Migration, Displacement and Affective Landscapes*
Moderated by Marion Detjen

March 18, 12:30 pm CET:
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld – Entangled Archives: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Colonial Histories
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

March 24, 10:45 am CET:
Caroline Patey – Sam Selvon: Creole London and the Relocation of Culture and Language
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

March 25, 6:30 pm CET:
Amin Husain – Decolonize this place. "Training in the practice of freedom. The artist-as-organizer"
Moderated by Hanan Toukan

April 7, 7:00 pm CET:
Michael Rothberg – Multidirectional Memory and Postcolonial Studies in Contemporary Germany
Moderated by Marion Detjen

April 12, 2:00 pm CET:
Loren Landau – Visibilising Responsibility: Containment, Chronoscopy and Migrant Immoralities*
Moderated by Marion Detjen
April 14, 6:30 pm CET:
Simon Gikandi  – On Caribbean Modernism (Title TBC)
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

April 26, 10:45 am 
Brendan McGeever – Crisis Britain: Race, Class and Migration after Brexit
Moderated by Frank Wolff

April 29, 12:30 pm
Amal Eqeiq – Of Borders and Limits in Latin America and the Middle East
Moderated by Hanan Toukan 

This talk is part of the Global Histories of Migration Annual Lecture Series and funded by the Mellon Consortium of Forced Migration and Displacement.
RSVP on Facebook >>
 

Lecture Series
7:30 pm CET
with Jacalyn Carley (Sarah Lawrence College; author, Community Dance Handbook, Henschel Verlag) 

Community Dance projects have impacted people and their communities in projects from Peru to Ethiopia, Northern Ireland, Romania, Palestine, migrants in Vienna, refugee homes in Berlin, inner city schools in London, British prisons. The number of projects is growing, some have existed and evolved over decades.  

What is Community Dance? Long a part of European culture, it’s hardly known in the US. How does a community, often with hundreds of participants, who might never have heard of modern dance put up a professional modern dance production? What was the rationale for government funding of Berlin school system’s Community Dance project with one million Euros annually? 

The documentation of one Community Dance project, Rhythm is It, (with the Berlin Philharmonic) is a good introduction to the  ‘Everyone Can Dance’ movement. Here Royston Maldoom's motto, ‘You can change your life in a dance class,’ shows outcomes that impact entire communities and extend well beyond the dance.

This Bard Berlin lecture series program is funded by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education. It will discuss the history and practices of Community Dance, show examples from various contexts and continents, and discuss the wide-ranging outcomes. Two important practitioners, Royston Maldoom and Prof. Ingo Reulecke will give examples of their work in the field, take questions, and do workshop demonstrations. Jacalyn Carley introduces and curates the series.

RSVP on Facebook

Other events in the series:

What Community Dance can Achieve: Life and Work of Royston Maldoom, Thursday, March 4, 2021.

Hands On: Community Dance Practice with Prof. Ingo Reulecke (Hochschul Zentrum für Tanz and Ernst-Busch-Hochschule), Wednesday, March, 10, 2021.

Lecture
7:00 pm CET
This talk is based on a recent book Michael Thomas Taylor published together with three coauthors, Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories, accompanying the exhibition “TransTrans,” which was shown at the University of Calgary (2016) and the Schwules Museum in Berlin (2019—2020) and is slated to travel to the Amerikahaus in Munich in 2021. It traces a network of transgender individuals who shaped transgender history by sharing photos of themselves, in public and private, and examines how we tell these histories and present them today.

Michael Thomas Taylor works as a translator and editor in Berlin. Before coming to Berlin, he taught at the University of Calgary and at Reed College as an assistant, then associate professor of German and humanities. At Bard College Berlin, he teaches a course on the German public sphere. His scholarship has focused on gender and sexuality, including co-authored and edited volumes on the history of marriage in Germany and popular discourses of sexuality during the early twentieth century, along with two co-curated exhibitions bringing together art and scholarship and aimed at audiences beyond academia.

www.michaeltaylor.de 

Workshop
3:45 pm CET
In a highly interactive session, participants will play a negotiation game together to see what can be learned for application in the real world. 

How do we get to a win-win solution that satisfies all parties?  How do we gain and build trust?  How do we negotiate well with multiple parties?  And when should we be satisfied with our result?

Mark Young is an independent consultant, trainer, writer and lecturer in the field of mediation and negotiation skills training and analysis; his company, Rational Games, Inc, serves a variety of clients in the public and private sectors in the US, UK and Germany. Mark is also a social entrepreneur. His firm is registered as a nonprofit in the US and Germany and makes small grants to organizations with innovative ideas for using games and play to resolve conflict.

To take part please contact Prof. Israel Waichman for further details. 

Online Workshop
7:30 pm CET
As part of the Science & Religion Project Workshop Series Hannah Erlwein will be speaking on al-Ash’ari’s A Vindication of the Science of Kalam. 
  What are, according to Ash'ari's account, the reasons put forward by those who oppose the science of kalam ("speculative theology") for their position? Why does Ash'ari think their reasoning is flawed? That is, how does he go about defending the validity of the science of kalam? What are some of the problems classical Islamic theologians discussed? That is, what was the science of kalam concerned with?
Hannah Erlwein obtained her PhD in Islamic Intellectual History from SOAS University of London in 2016 with a dissertation entitled Arguments for the Existence of God in Classical Islamic Thought: A Reappraisal of Perspectives and Discourses (De Gruyter, 2019). From October 2017 to September 2019, she was a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Peter Adamson at LMU Munich, being part of the DFG-funded research project “Natur in politischen Ordnungsentwürfen.” Her research focused on Avicenna's conception of the function of the law of the ideal state. In 2019, Hannah joined Prof. Katja Krause’s research group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul & Body, ca. 800–1650” at the MPIWG Berlin. Her current research focuses on the role of experience in premodern Islamic science, and in particular on the use of analogies between experienceable phenomena and phenomena beyond sense experience. Hannah currently teaches a course on "Islam and Science" at TU Berlin.

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.

Expert Talk
7:00 pm CET
The Civic Engagement Office at BCB is inviting you to an expert talk: The Mobile Counsel against Right-wing Extremism (MBR) and [moskito] will cooperate on an event about their work against right-wing extremism in Berlin and Pankow.

The talk will concentrate on the areas of expertise of the organizations: Explanation of the history, existing structures and current situation around right-wing extremism in Pankow Introduction of available ways of monitoring, documentation and reporting of incidents Accounts of ongoing activism against right-wing structures, local civil society actors and community action in the district
The Mobile Counsel against Right-wing Extremism (MBR) offers advice and support for those engaged against right-wing extremism, against racist, anti-Semitic or other inhuman forms of discrimination, and for fostering democracy in Berlin.

[moskito] Network against Right-wing Extremism and for Democracy and Diversity
Pankow-based organization for counseling and networking for all engaging against discrimination and right-wing extremism and for an open community in solidarity.

Workshop
4:00 pm CET
Interactive experiments in class offer a simple way to introduce experiential learning both in the online and the offline classroom. While these experiments have been mostly conducted with pen-and-paper, Bard College Berlin Professor of Economics, Marcus Giamattei, has developed a tool to run experiments, surveys and quizzes online or via mobile phones. The tool is called classEx and allows instructors to run ready-made games or their own surveys in class. It allows introducing simple interactive situations in the F2F classroom, in a synchronous zoom meeting or bridging both worlds in a hybrid setting so that offline and online participants can interact with each other.

Workshop
4:00 pm CET
Interactive experiments in class offer a simple way to introduce experiential learning both in the online and the offline classroom. While these experiments have been mostly conducted with pen-and-paper, Bard College Berlin Professor of Economics, Marcus Giamattei, has developed a tool to run experiments, surveys and quizzes online or via mobile phones. The tool is called classEx and allows instructors to run ready-made games or their own surveys in class. It allows introducing simple interactive situations in the F2F classroom, in a synchronous zoom meeting or bridging both worlds in a hybrid setting so that offline and online participants can interact with each other.