As part of the workshop “Intermedial Dialogues in the Technocene: Media, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Global South”, supported by the Global Encounters Platform and taking place at the University of Tübingen on June 26th, 2025, we are inviting early career researchers to participate in a panel where they can share their current research projects related to one or more of the topics addressed in the workshop (a full description of the workshop and its main themes can be found above).

The workshop will focus on discussions about “intermediality” trends, particularly within media studies and digital humanities, in the context of the Global South cultures. The workshop will be led by leading international academics, including Jorge Locane (University of Oslo), Geoffrey Kantaris (Cambridge University), Anna Torres-Cacoullos (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Thais Machado Borges (Stockholm University), Daniel Escandell (Salamanca University), and Ignacio Albornoz Fariñas (University of Tübingen), along with early career researchers from the University of Tübingen.

We welcome proposals from the early research community in Germany and abroad, offering them an exceptional opportunity to present their work and engage in meaningful exchanges with scholars in the field. To apply, please send your proposal to Dr. Adriana Rodríguez-Alfonso (adriana.rodriguez-alfonsospam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de) and Luis Fernel Rosero Amaya (luis-fernel.rosero-amayaspam prevention@uni-tuebingen.de) by May 16st, including the following documents:

1. A 150-300 words proposal linked to one of the workshop topics.

2. A short academic biography (max. 300 words).

These materials will be considered for participation in the Early Career Researcher Panel. Although the official language of the workshop will be English, we can provide language support in Spanish, Portuguese, and German if needed.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

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Global Encounters Workshops

“Intermedial Dialogues in Technocene: Media, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Global South”

Organized by Dr. Adriana Rodríguez-Alfonso and Luis Fernel Rosero Amaya

The international workshop “Intermedial Dialogues in Technocene: Media, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Global South” will be held on June 26th, 2025 at the University of Tübingen, and will be an in-person event. It will be organized by the Chair of Hispanic and Portuguese Literary Studies and the Chair of Ibero-American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Romanisches Seminar. One of the primary goals of this interdisciplinary event is to build a solid and engaging network with scholars from various departments at Tübingen University, as well as with other international institutions sharing research interests related to Global South Studies. These research interests can be encapsulated in the following interdisciplinary perspectives: media and film studies, digital humanities, magazine studies, Latin American studies, African studies, cultural studies, decolonial theory, ecocriticism, and genre studies.

In order to highlight the relevance of intermedia practices in addressing contemporary problems in the Technocene, the following thematic panels will explore issues related to media aesthetics and cultures, technological discourses, and digital humanities:

1. Digital Discourses: Critical Southern Approaches in Digital Humanities. This panel examines the development of recent critical perspectives on digital platforms, such as video games, music videos, and documentaries produced in the Global South, as devices for unsettling forms of social and political discrimination. It also includes the use of digital tools to preserve and make visible cultural archives from the Global South, such as indigenous artistic works and cultural magazines, with the aim of facilitating their digitization and conservation.

2. Decoding Bias: Technology, Racism, and Politics. AI development not only has a multidimensional impact on Global North societies, but it also contributes to the reproduction and consolidation of colonial structures and inequalities in the Global South. This is reflected, for instance, in the lack of visibility of technology development imaginaries and discourses from these regions. The goal of this panel is to delve into the power asymmetries in the context of AI and other technological modalities of biopolitical control (algorithmic discrimination, racial profiling, choice systems, and urban surveillance). The analysis will address the broad social and symbolic dimensions of digital and communication technologies as embodied in practices, institutions, infrastructures, politics, and culture.

3. Reframing the Image: Media, Aesthetics, and Politics. Since the early twenty-first century, some audiovisual productions from the Global South have cultivated intermedia strategies to interrogate social and political conflicts in the South. Audiovisual cultural productions use sound and music practices, photographic archival footage, or theatrical performances to trace genealogies of conflict, histories of precarious and subaltern communities, collective traumas, and imaginaries of the future. This hybridity of post-cinematic practices shows how intermedia strategies in experimental documentary forms are deeply linked to problems of representation, politics, and embodied affective practices.

4. Ink to Interface: Redefining Print Culture in the Technological Age. Starting with the fact that the Technocene has radically changed the ways of writing and reading, this panel will discuss new manifestations of print culture and the latest expressions of so-called “digital literature.” From the emergence of intermedia projects to the relationship between visuality, image, and computational code in “algorithmic literature,” this panel will explore authors, works, and practices, as well as potential interrelationships.

5. Pressing Forward: The Evolution of Media in the Global South's Digital Landscape. The current mass media phenomena have transformed newspapers and cultural magazines, revealing strategies of control, obsolescence, and constant renewal. This panel is focused on the alternative modes of circulation of visibility and knowledge promoted by media in the Global South, especially in the southern hemisphere. Additionally, we are interested in new digital and computational forms of digitization and analysis of both recent and older cultural magazines, highlighting the possibilities that new technologies offer to periodical studies.

• Hispanische und portugiesische Literatur (19. und 20. Jahrhundert)

• Digital Humanities

• Intellektuelle Netzwerke

• Materielle Kultur und der Verlagsmarkt

• Kulturelle Zeitschriften

• Ästhetische Philosophie

This research project aims to examine the representations of insanity during the 'fin de siècle,' with a focus on Iberian cultural fields. Using 'close' and 'distant' reading methods that combine literary theory and history, sociology of culture, and medical and science history with digital humanities approaches, the project seeks not only to create datasets on madness imaginaries in Portuguese and Spanish literatures during the turn of the twentieth century but also to trace and analyze the conceptual frameworks in which medical and cultural discourses intersect.

This deeply interdisciplinary and transnational approach is designed to reveal the multitude of ways in which insanity was represented, serving as a 'window' into the broader political, social, and cultural discourses of the nineteenth century. To accomplish this, the project will utilize tools and methods from the emerging field of digital humanities. This will enable comprehensive coverage and examination of a large corpus of cultural documents from that time period, helping to a more systematic, detailed and nuanced understanding of how madness was depicted within the context of the decadent movement (Kao and Poteet, 2007; Jockers, 2013; Piper, 2019; Dobson, 2019).

Methodologically, this project is grounded in a cross-disciplinary perspective that will facilitate a dialogue between health humanities and life science history and cultural studies, highlighting the sometimes-unexpected connections between health humanities and literature. It will also incorporate cutting-edge computational models to create databases of madness imaginaries from the fin de siècle in Portugal and Spain. These databases will be complemented by close readings of literary texts, cultural magazines, and bioscience documents. The research will also involve the use of AI models for analysis and visualization of conceptual frameworks and nineteenth-century literary corpora. These tools will not only benefit future research at the intersection of medicine and culture and within the Iberian nineteenth century but will also enhance didactic approaches by utilizing digital resources in teaching literature and medicine.

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Das Forschungsprojekt zielt darauf ab, die Darstellungen des Wahnsinns während des Fin de Siècle mit einem Schwerpunkt auf den kulturellen Feldern der Iberischen Halbinsel zu untersuchen. Unter Verwendung von Methoden des close und distant readings, welche literaturwissenschaftliche Theorien, Soziologie der Kultur sowie Medizin- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte mit digital-humanistischen Ansätzen kombinieren, beabsichtigt das Projekt nicht nur, Datensätze über Vorstellungen von Wahnsinn in der portugiesischen und spanischen Literatur um die Wende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts zu erstellen, sondern auch die konzeptuellen Rahmenbedingungen zu verfolgen und zu analysieren, in denen medizinische und kulturelle Diskurse aufeinandertreffen und interagieren.

Dieser tiefgreifend interdisziplinäre und transnationale Ansatz soll die Vielzahl der Repräsentationsmöglichkeiten aufzeigen, auf denen der Wahnsinn repräsentiert wurde, und als 'Fenster' für den Zugang in die breiteren politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Diskurse des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts dienen. Um dies zu erreichen, wird das Projekt Werkzeuge und Methoden aus dem aufstrebenden Bereich der digitalen Geisteswissenschaften nutzen. Dies ermöglicht eine umfassende Abdeckung und Untersuchung eines großen Korpus kultureller Dokumente aus dieser Zeit und trägt zu einem systematischeren, detaillierteren und nuancierteren Verständnis davon bei, wie der Wahnsinn im Kontext der dekadenten Bewegung dargestellt wurde (Vgl. Kao und Poteet, 2007; Jockers, 2013; Piper, 2019; Dobson, 2019).

Methodisch ist dieses Projekt in einer interdisziplinären Perspektive verankert, die einen Dialog zwischen Gesundheitswissenschaften, Geschichte der Lebenswissenschaften und Kulturwissenschaften ermöglicht und die manchmal unerwartete Verbindungen zwischen Gesundheitswissenschaften und Literatur hervorhebt. Es werden außerdem modernste Berechnungsmodelle einbezogen, um Datenbanken von Wahnsinnsvorstellungen aus dem Fin de Siècle in Portugal und Spanien zu erstellen. Diese Datenbanken werden durch genaue Lektüre literarischer Texte, kultureller Zeitschriften und biowissenschaftlicher Dokumente ergänzt. Die Forschung wird auch den Einsatz von KI-Modellen zur Analyse und Visualisierung von konzeptuellen Rahmen und literarischen Korpora aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert umfassen. Diese Tools werden nicht nur zukünftige Forschung an der Schnittstelle von Medizin und Kultur und innerhalb des iberischen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts unterstützen, sondern auch didaktische Ansätze durch die Nutzung digitaler Ressourcen im Literatur- und Medizinunterricht verbessern.

Dieses Projekt wurde mit einem Athene Grant 2024/2025 der Universität Tübingen unterstützt.