Past Events

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

In the shadow of population decline some Central European states have turned their attention to curtailing women’s access to abortion and in the case of Poland, effectively outlawing it. These policy moves are not only the work of illiberal governments. They are also heavily linked to religious institutions who for decades have labelled women’s reproductive rights as enemy number one on the battlefield of moral values. Calling for a “return to traditional family values” is not the path to economic and social prosperity. Yet it is a clarion call sounded from Warsaw to Budapest. Furthermore, these moves are indicative of the Church’s desire to maintain its political as well as religious influence as a growing number of people in the region chose a more secular life.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

This presentation was an exploration of forced migration studies seen from the lens of de-colonial theory and invited us to consider shifting the geographies of reason habitually marking the field. Starting with a foundational critique of moralism and privilege marking canonized understandings of migration, precarity, displacement and dispossession, it unpacked the complexity of an existential political commitment to redefining forced migration not from the core/recipient states and societies but from borderlands. This work thus contributed to a long and rich—yet also troubled and deeply contested—conversation between postcolonial studies and forced migration studies.

Series: Lecture

Bronislaw Malinowski has shown with his ethnological studies that a supposedly primitive society can be of astonishing complexity, as well as why the structure of this order remains obscure to its members. Obviously, modern societies also suffer from system blindness – why else is digitization said to have chiliastic, diabolic, magical powers?  In a continuation to his cultural-theoretical investigations on the genealogy and philosophy of the machine, Martin Burckhardt explores the question of how the self-enchantment of rationality can occur, and to what extent the operating system of the attention economy can be read as an outsourced unconscious. This, in turn, leads back to the point of departure: what perspective must a contemporary social anthropologist take in order to read the present?

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Based on a 16-month ethnographic fieldwork in north Cyprus, Ezgi Özdemir's doctoral dissertation studies water infrastructure in the Turkish-occupied territories of Cyprus, enduring patronage relations between the Turkish state and the de-facto Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), and emergent political subjectivities and collective identificatory practices of peoples in north Cyprus, which are contingent upon notions of exceptionality, non-recognition, and infrastructural and political dependence. For this, she looks specifically at the Turkish state-funded water pipeline from Turkey to north Cyprus—a megaproject that has since been privatized along with the transferred water and the local water resources of the north.

Series: Panels and Discussions

The Covid-19-pandemic and the economic crisis it triggered is not only upsetting fiscal and social policies in most industrialized countries, but also the debate among economists about the role of the state, the future of work and the balance between necessary economic growth and the needs to fight global warming. How many of these new ideas will persist once the pandemic is over? Has the time for a new approach to economics finally arrived?

Series: Lecture

Ungarn in den 1980er-Jahren: Der Balaton, oder Plattensee, ist ein beliebtes Urlaubsziel. Hier liegen Menschen von beiden Seiten des „Eisernen Vorhangs“ einträchtig nebeneinander am Strand, durch den Mauerbau getrennte Familien machen gemeinsam Ferien. 

Series: Lecture

Mittlerweile gibt es viele AutorInnen, für die Englisch nicht die Muttersprache oder eine Muttersprache unter mehreren, sondern die Zweit-, oder Drittsprache ist. Ihre globalen Biografien und Lebensbrüche spiegeln sich nicht nur in ihren Themen wider. Sie schmuggeln ungewohnte Sprachbilder, Metaphern, Idiome in die englische Sprache – eine wunderbare Bereicherung und eine enorme Translationsherausforderung.

Series: Lecture

Die Lieblinge der Justiz, das sind Verbrechen und Verbrecher, echte und vermeintliche: Bohdan Staschynskyj zum Beispiel, ein KGB-Agent und Auftragskiller. Oder Mario, der Kolonialwarenhändler aus Kolomea im östlichen Hinterland der k. und k. Monarchie. Juri Andruchowytsch entfaltet in seinem neuen Buch »Die Lieblinge der Justiz. Parahistorischer Roman in achteinhalb Kapiteln« ein die Jahrhunderte umspannendes Panorama von Mord, Liebe und Verrat, von der Monstrosität des Verbrechens und der Justiz.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The essay Yuri Andrukhovych currently works on is an attempt at a consistent recollection and a fairly objective reconstruction of several significant cultural events that fundamentally influenced Ukrainian society nearly three decades ago. The final years of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the first years of independent Ukraine came together into what was essentially an uninterrupted festival of artistic events that were new for their time, or at the very least a clear alternative to the ossified official culture. A radical renewal of cultural discourses and values through poetry, rock music, visual and performance art became an ineluctable part of sociopolitical changes at that break of eras. How did it begin in Ukraine, and why did it end? What has been preserved in memory? What has been swallowed up by oblivion? Was the “festival age” a continuation of, or a supplement to, the East European velvet alternatives?

Series: Panels and Discussions

We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanović explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: How did capitalism become the dominant system in all parts of the world? And what needs to change for capitalism to deliver a more equitable future?