Talks
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Workspace #16 – Das Schiff und das Unheimliche. Spektralität und gesellschaftliche Umbrüche in französischen und spanischen Kurzerzählungen um 1900 | Guest Lecture & Discussion
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Workspace #18 – Polarization and the Paradoxes of Politics’s Self-Observation | Guest Lecture & DiscussionA spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of polarization. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy hunt against this spectre. Where is the opposition party that has not been decried as polarizing by its governing opponents? Where the opposition party that has not hurled back the branding charge of polarization — against both its more progressive counterparts in opposition and its reactionary adversaries? And yet we must note: empirical social research rarely finds the polarization presumed to be everywhere. This tension is the starting point of the talk: What if polarization is seen everywhere because it structures the very way in which politics observes itself? And what follows from this insight for the political present? Polarization, the core thesis holds, is an expression of how modern politics processes its own contradictions. The politically explosive question is therefore not so much whether society is polarized, but above all along which axes.
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Workspace #20 – Imagining Infrastructure: Agency, Artefact, and the Rise of the Neo-human Subject | Guest Lecture & Discussion
The field of infrastructure studies lies at a critical juncture marked by novel kinds of logistical interfaces, new configurations of agency, and enduring neo-Foucauldian concerns with the shifting contours of the human subject. In this presentation I develop a conceptual synthesis between four analytical perspectives: an emphasis on infrastructure as a set of cultural and material artefacts marked by diverse modes of enquiry; the co-evolutionary dynamics of infrastructure networks in relation to the corporeal vulnerabilities of urban space; the emergence of successive socio-technical imaginaries that connect with the metonymic or ideological significance of urban infrastructure; and the significance of infrastructure as an epistemological vantage point for embodied encounters with urban space. I show how the question of infrastructure intersects with a series of wider debates over agency, subjectivity, and the rise of algorithmic governmentalities. I emphasize the value of creative practice as a vibrant alternative to creeping forms of analytical modularity and neo-positivist epistemological elision.
Past Events
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The Environmental Impact of LiteratureIs contemporary literature—and storytelling in general—helping to address the accelerating climate and nature crisis, or adding fuel to the fire? Tens of thousands of articles in literary and cultural criticism have approached this question primarily through close readings of environmentally focused novels and films, but […]
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Masculinities: Diaspora, Racialization, and Right-Wing RadicalizationRadicalization is class-related and racialized. Using the example of the Grey Wolves, the event explores how notions of masculinity are politicized in diasporic realities. The focus is on the interrelationships between masculinity politics, right-wing authoritarian patterns of radicalization, racializing structures, and prevention approaches.
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Recognizing and preventing radicalization based on masculine ideology – but how? Talk and WorkshopWe are once again witnessing an intense authoritarian and far-right radicalization. It exhibits pronounced masculinity-ideological dimensions, through which authoritarian and fascist models of masculinity are normalized or even promoted as ideals. In this event, Markus Theunert offers both theoretical and practical insights into the factors driving masculinity-ideological radicalization: How can it be recognized? Most importantly, how can it be prevented?
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We are Memory and Earth and Freedom and Hope. Performance LectureWith a commitment to the black body, the woman body, the queer or non-conforming body, the fugitive body, the errant body, the sick or uniquely abled body, the decolonial body, the collective body, and how it is seen, felt, loved, and cared for, Phoebe Boswell will […]
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Recht auf Widersprechen: Art. 37, 47 EU-Grundrechtecharta als Eigenrechte der natürlichen UmweltLecture at the 8th Conference on Environment and Law (ProKUR) for doctoral candidates in public law with an environmental focus in Cologne.
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Meditations on the Sea and its African Subjects, and the Complexities of European Nationalism
In this presentation, I engage with the African body that lands on European beaches via the Mediterranean sea, dead by exhaustion from crossing the ocean or dead as a consequence of boarding a vessel, which has capsized because it was not equipped to carry the embodied subject identities of Africans leaving the continent to seek refuge on the European continent: the continent of the European coloniser who had usurped African land and people, kidnapped African labour starting in the fifteenth century whilst simultaneously exploiting and extracting raw materials to develop its wealth in an ailing, starving, and disease infested Europe.
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Trans*, Gender, Bodies and Sexhormones in Material-Discursive EntanglementsThe accessibility to health insurance-funded gender-affirming hormone therapy in Germany is of central importance to many trans* people for their health, safety, and life trajectories. However, the decision about whether they can take hormones through the regular care-system is not in their hands but rather depends on various actors and institutions in the medical, psychotherapeutic, and political sectors.
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Between Inclusion and Exclusion. Czechoslovak Migration in Austria between Anti-Communism and Eastern EuropeanismThe lecture will take place as part of the panel “Migration Debates in Central Europe” at the ASN World Convention.
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Visual Arts as cultural Symbiosis: A talk with Agnes Essonti LuqueAs part of the block seminar “Afropolitanism and Afropean: belonging to Europe and The world”, the multifaceted, interdisciplinary, world-renowned Afrospanish artist Agnes Essonti Luque will participate in a discussion on her work and her understanding of the concepts of Afropolitan and Afropean. This talk is […]
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Public vs. Private: From Marx Through Dewey to Arendt and Backcanceled