Past Events

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Rather than seeing the ever more devious reaction formations of border policing and militarization, migrant detention, immigration enforcement, and deportation by state powers as if these were purely a matter of control, it is instructive to situate this economy of power in relation to the primacy, autonomy, and subjectivity of human mobility on a global (transnational, intercontinental, cross- border, postcolonial) scale. This is true, I contend, as much for refugees as for those who come to be derisively designated to be mere “migrants.” If we start from the human freedom of movement and recognize the various tactics of bordering as reaction formations, then the various tactics of border policing and forms of migration governance can be seen to introduce interruptions that temporarily immobilize and decelerate human cross-border mobilities with the aim of subjecting them to processes of surveillance and adjudication. Indeed, it is this dialectic that reconstitutes these mobilities as something that comes to be apprehensible, alternately, as “migration,” or “asylum-seeking,” or the “forced migration” of “refugees” in flight from persecution or violence – which is to say, as one or another variety of target and object of government. Yet, even under the most restricted circumstances and under considerable constraint, these human mobilities exude a substantial degree of autonomous subjectivity whereby migrants and refugees struggle to appropriate mobility. Even against the considerable forces aligned to immobilize their mobility projects, or to subject them to the stringent and exclusionary rules and constrictions of asylum, the subjective autonomy of human mobility remains an incorrigible force.

Series: Lecture

It is difficult to define the concept of the border with rigour and precision; it is easier to make sense of it as an institution and a practice with the help of associated concepts, such as boundary, frontier, borderlands, etc. The border as a mode to protect and delimit a territory is old.

Series: Lecture

Albena Azmanova’s new book Capitalism on Edge puts precarity at the root of such social pathologies as the rise of populism and the inability of liberal democracies to effectively manage crises. The author observes that, while we have been discussing the crisis of capitalism in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form, “precarity capitalism”, marked by the massification of political, economic and psychological insecurity.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

In recent months, culture and the arts have suffered severely under pandemic-related restrictions. While artists, freelancers, independent projects, and even publicly funded cultural institutions are struggling for economic survival, we easily overlook the fact that—also in “normal times”—the autonomy of culture is increasingly being called into question. With respect to the immediate effects of this political and economic pressure on the arts, there is a major divide between cultural centers and those operating on the periphery. Most heavily affected by the asymmetric consequences of these pressures are not the trend-setter elites in cultural centers, or the publicly funded (non-)artists on the semi-peripheries, but all those who do not move to the cultural capitals. That is, those who decide to uphold cultural projects on the periphery—where they are most direly needed. Within Europe, there is also a significant East-West divide, not only in terms of the distribution of funding, but also in regard to the autonomy of art. This talk dealt with the situation of cultural actors on the periphery, confronted with emigration, poverty, de-/nationalization, walls, borders, ghettos, diseases, regime changes, and a new intra-European colonization.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Faranak Miraftab presented her most recent work in which she relationally theorizes realities of those living in slums and in camps in the era of intensified global displacements.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The lecture briefly presented the circumstances of the massacre committed in the town of Dvor during the Croatian Army’s Operation Storm, which crushed the secessionist Serb Republic of Krajina. In the early afternoon of August 8, 1995, nine (possibly ten) mentally ill and handicapped people were executed in Dvor’s primary school, where they had found shelter. Twenty-five years after the massacre, the killers have still not been prosecuted and it is even unclear to which army they belonged. In the vicinity there were both Croatian and Serbian units, while the Bosnian Army was only a few kilometers away. In addition, the massacre happened in front of Danish UN soldiers, whose base was on the school’s playground a mere 20 meters away from the massacre.

Series: Panels and Discussions

„Niemand ist sicher, bevor wir alle sicher sind“, warnen internationale Organisationen vor dem allerorts aufgekommenen Impfnationalismus. Denn mit den nun verfügbaren Covid-Impfstoffen stellen sich neue drängende Fragen: Wer bestimmt, welche Länder und Bevölkerungsgruppen überhaupt Zugang zu einem Impfstoff erhalten? Brauchen wir eine globale Impfstrategie, um den Wettlauf gegen die Ausbreitung von Mutationen zu gewinnen? Welche Lehren können wir aus früheren Pandemien und der Geschichte von Impfungen ziehen?

Series: Lecture

Im Mittelpunkt des Vortrags steht der widersprüchlich anmutende Begriff des „sanften“ Autoritarismus (soft authoritarianism). Er bezieht sich auf Demokratien, die in vielen Teilen der Welt von zunehmend autoritären Praktiken gekennzeichnet sind. Gegenwärtig werden liberale Werte wie Institutionen mit formalen, rechtstaatlichen Mitteln von durch Wahlen legitimierten Politikern unterminiert, die somit die Grundlagen von Demokratie von innen aushöhlen. Anhand von Beispielen wie voter suppression und gerrymandering in den USA, autocratic legalism in Polen und Ungarn sowie Angriffen auf die Pressefreiheit, auf zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen oder die Universitätsautonomie in der Türkei, wird im Vortrag hinter die „sanften“ Züge dieser neuen Ausprägung von Autoritarismus geblickt. Ferner wirft der Vortrag die dringliche Frage nach den Möglichkeiten sowie Grenzen zivilgesellschaftlichen Widerstands gegen diesen weichgezeichneten Autoritarismus auf.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Social scientists often refer to literary fiction as a source of inspiration, social understanding, and deep insights into the “Zeitgeist” or “episteme”. In passing, they often subsume literature into conceptual frameworks, approaching it as “fictional” data to be translated or converted into “factual” scholarly discourse. This presentation tried to develop an epistemological-theoretical model which treats novels as allies endowed with their own agency – not passive objects to be gutted by sociological theory.

Series: Lecture

Noise can be understood as sonic violence and analysed as a central means of communication during the recurring prison riots in the early 20th-century Habsburg Empire. For both prison administrators and state-appointed public prosecutors, silence was synonymous with discipline and order. This definition gave criminal prisoners an opportunity to bargain silence in exchange for legally slight yet routine-revising changes within the regime of incarceration. Noise wielded such powerful leverage because it spread inmates’ demands from inside the prison to nearby streets – in this case, those of the Habsburg city of Lemberg. Inmates were able to use their prison buildings as a space of resonance – in both physical and symbolic ways.