“The Elementary Structures of Violence” 

June, 30 2026 | 6:15 p.m. | Alte Aula, Münzgasse 30

In this public lecture, Rita Segato analyses gender-based violence and the fundamental structures of violence based on her own anthropological research on rape and femicide and theoretical perspectives from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. Her thinking on gender-based violence stands out because she brings gender analysis to the center of the contemporary political scene avoiding the usual ghettoization of the subject and transforming patriarchy into the platform replicated in all other strata of oppression and exaction of surplus value. “The Elementary Structures of Violence” is a groundbreaking analysis of the colonial influence on contemporary gender relations. The title of her lecture presented in Tübingen is also the title of one her most important books that is going to be published in German by July.

The lecture is organized by the RTG 3105 “Figurations of the Precarious in the Global South”, in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies and the College of Fellows.

About Rita Segato:
Rita Segato, born in 1951 in Buenos Aires, is a renowned Argentinean anthropologist and feminist activist, professor em. of the Department of Anthropology at Universidad de Brasilia, holder of the Chair for Discomforting Thinking (Cátedra Rita Segato de Pensamiento Incómodo) at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina and of the Chair for Thinking in Conversation (Cátedra Rita Segato "Pensar en conversación") at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. She has received, in recent years, numerous degrees honoris causa from European and Latin American universities as well as several other important awards. She is one of the most influential contemporary political thinkers in the field of decolonial feminism from Latin America who explores the structures of patriarchal oppression on a global dimension and approaches the phenomena through their often invisible or hidden structural groundwork.

"Language-based vs. language-free components of cognition: A comparative perspective on how language shapes thinking"

June 24, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/ Villa Köstlin)

With a Keynote Lecture by Prof. Günther Knoblich: “Action Coordination and Teaching in Great Apes”

Workshop Abstract:
In this informal workshop, we will explore perspectives on the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition in the mind. A central question is whether certain cognitive functions may include both language-bound and language-independent components. Here, we adopt a comparative perspective, focusing on animal cognition and developmental changes in human cognition. Our aim is to create an open and friendly atmosphere that encourages discussion and idea sharing. Rather than showcasing completed research programs, the workshop will feature talks that present novel or developing ideas. Through this exchange, we hope to identify useful starting points for a meaningful distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition.
 

Please find the workshop program and all information here. 
The Workshop is organized by Dr Karin Bausenhart, Professor David Dignath and Professor Barbara Kaup. 

"Religion and Religions: The Potential for Islamic Contributions to the Theory of Religion"

June 24, 2026 | 6:30 pm | College of Fellows (Rümelinstraße 27/ Villa Köstlin)

In recent decades, the academic discipline of religious studies has faced significant self-criticism as scholars increasingly recognize the extent to which distinctively Western historical experiences of religion, largely formed in and after the Enlightenment, have problematically shaped the discipline. Long before this debate, and indeed long before the Enlightenment, Muslim scholars thought deeply about the meaning of religion itself, and some prominent figures even engaged in a form of comparative religion, rooted in a shared understanding not only of their religion, but of religion itself as a universal category, as articulated in the Qur’an and the broader Islamic tradition. In this lecture, I examine some aspects of what I would tentatively call an Islamic “theory of religion” and the potential that a study of the Muslim understanding of religion as a universal but variegated category holds for broadening the concept of religion in religious studies discourse: challenging or nuancing some of the structural binaries found in Western religious studies, such as sacred/secular, faith/practice, natural/supernatural; de-centering or redefining some of the key structural elements in its conception of religion, including myth, ritual, and symbol; and helping to move the discipline toward a more inclusive understanding of the human religious experience.

Professor Maria Massi Dakake is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where she also serves as the director of the undergraduate Islamic Studies program.
As a New Horizons Fellow currently hosted by the Center for Islamic Theology in Tübingen, Prof. Dakake significantly advances the fields of Islamic intellectual history, Qur’anic studies, and comparative theology. This is perfectly exemplified by her current research project Islamic Contributions to the Theory and Comparative Study of Religion.

“The European Textile Industry and the ‘Invention’ of Clothing Cultures in West-Central Africa: Cultural Transformations and Transfer in Colonial Postcolonial Context” 

  June 10, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstraße 27/ Villa Köstlin), Seminar Room 

Abstract:

Fashion, clothing and textiles are areas in which cultural transformations and transfers can best be observed. We can attempt to understand these cultural changes through the prism of imagination, creativity and adaptation in the context of globalization and the rapid circulation of goods. But we can also analyze them from the point of view of the “invention” of new clothing cultures in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This study emphasizes the mechanisms of production and dissemination of an ‘African’ clothing culture by the European textile industry in the context of the slave trade, but especially from the 19th century onwards during the intensive phase of colonization in Africa. The invention and production of textiles, tastes and clothing fashions for Africa did not only have disastrous consequences for local textile production and related forms of knowledge but also attest to the production of new knowledge and the invention of new cultural traditions and practices, the effects of which are still visible in African societies today. The influence and impact of the introduction of Dutch wax in West Africa as transfer from the Indonesian batik is well known. This study will focus on the cases of the Austrian textile brand Getzner and the German brand Damino, both specializing in the production of brocade/damask, to examine their meaning and impact on the transformation of fashion and clothing culture in Central and West Africa. But this presentation intends also to analyze forms of resistance to this European-imposed clothing and fashion culture as well as forms and transformations of local/indigenous knowledge and cultural practices related to textiles. 

Roundtable Discussion: Study of Religion & Global Ethical Challenges

with Prof. Maria Dakake and Prof. Muhammad Faruque

June 9, 2026 | Zentrum für Islamische Theologie (ZIth) and via Zoom (hybrid)

Guilt, Liberalism and the Extreme Right

June 9, 2026 | Alte Aula, Münzgasse 30 | Moderated by Prof. Dr. Friederike Lorenz-Sinai (IRex)

Emotions play a decisive role in shaping the political culture of democracy. Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz has explored how fear, resentment, anxiety, disgust, and love emerge from social conditions and influence democracy in widely discussed works, including The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy and Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel. In her lecture “Guilt, liberalism and the extreme right”, she revisits this subject with a focus on guilt, exploring the ways in which guilt has been made central to the liberal democratic cultures after World War II, and examining how the extreme right has interpreted and utilized the motive of guilt in its political agenda.

Bio: Eva Illouz, born in 1961 in Fes, Morocco, is a renowned French-Israeli professor em. of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Directrice d’Etudes at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (CSE-EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the sociology of emotions, consumer society, media culture, and capitalism. She has received numerous fellowships and awards for her work, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Annaliese Meier International Award for Excellence in Research and the E.M.E.T Award for Social Sciences, the highest scientific distinction in Israel, as well as the 2024 Frank Schirrmacher Prize and the 2024 Aby Warburg Prize. In 2022, Academic Influence listed her among the Influential Women in Sociology From the Last 10 Years (#8). Her numerous books have been translated into numerous languages. 

Latest book publications: The Emotional Life of Populism. How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy (Polity Press, 2023), Der 8. Oktober. Über die Ursprünge des neuen Antisemitismus (in German, Suhrkamp, 2025), and Explosive Emotions. How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel (Princeton University Press, 2026).

„Bildungsgerechtigkeit – Ein Auftrag. Chancen, Herausforderungen und Perspektiven"

May 21, 2026 | Hans-Küng Gemeinschaftsschule | Program

Educational success in Germany continues to depend heavily on socioeconomic factors such as social
background, income, and the level of education in the home. These inequalities do not arise
by chance, but are structurally entrenched. Against this backdrop, the Interkulturelles Netzwerk Elternbildung Tübingen (INET) and the University of Tübingen invite you to the panel discussion “Bildungsgerechtigkeit – Ein Auftrag. Chancen, Herausforderungen und Perspektiven“. Further information on the event can be found here.

I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT WITH A TREE 

Film screening and discussion with director Benjamin Delattre

May 12, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/ Villa Köstlin)

Mélisande films - Sophie Faudel

2024 |  VOSTEN | 77 min

I had heard of a Chilean painter, author of a thousand paintings, who had disappeared long ago. I had been given an address on the banks of the Loire, at number 640 of a road that no longer existed. No one had been here for decades. Everything had remained there, as if someone had fled.

 “At the beginning of his research, Eudaldo is reduced to a name that has been erased from almost all memories. The few witnesses we met only spoke of their lack of memories. The filmmaker then records the traces of an absence, giving rise to some beautiful Durassian shots of gutted houses and torn cobwebs. The image feeds off the melancholy of the vault and picks out the traces of a man's disappearance. But as his investigation deepens, Eudaldo's life takes shape. The paintings found at the bottom of a warehouse show the way in which Eudaldo's painting is in dialogue with Klee, Botero and Miró. This less funereal side, whose tones are reminiscent of Patrick Modiano's novels, strives instead to restore a being's existence and flesh. Delattre seeks to reconcile two profoundly contradictory gestures: recording the trace just before it vanishes forever, and reconstituting an entire existence from a few objects. It is undoubtedly the filmmaker's utopia not to choose between the ghost and matter, oblivion and memory, between almost nothing and almost everything”. (Cahiers du cinéma, September 2024 - Jean-Marie Samocki)

Bio

Benjamin Delattre shot his first films in 2010, doing odd jobs while studying literature and history. In 2022, he wrote and directed "Tahiti the days of the return", the story of a French soldier who searches for Manutahi, a former Polynesian voluntary who disappeared in the jungle of Tahiti with Maria. It was released on September 11, 2024. In 2023, he finishes "I have a date with a tree", which he wrote and directed. The film tells the dream of Eudaldo, a young Chilean who arrived in France by boat on July 6, 1924 by boat on July 6, 1949, guided by the joy of painting, who loved painting more than anything else and sacrificed than anything else and sacrificed everything for it. He was in "La Lucarne" on Arte in the fall of 2024. In 2024 he finished a film of music, entitled "A few notes on freedom", with Michel Portal.

On Natures and Pluriversalities

May 6, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/ Villa Köstlin) 

This presentation situates “nature” within the urgent conversation on peace with nature, arguing that dominant environmental governance frameworks — rooted in anthropocentrism and Eurocentric epistemologies — are structurally insufficient to address contemporary ecological crises. Moving beyond the idea of peace as a managerial balance between humans and a passive environment, the paper advances a pluriversal approach grounded in relational ontologies, where multiple worlds and forms of life co-constitute what “nature” is. It proposes pluriversality as methodology to open knowledge production toward epistemic and ontological plurality, and develops the concept of cosmopraxis to foreground embodied, more-than-human practices of relating and knowing. Engaging with socioenvironmental conflicts as inherently ontological, the research is based on the argument that  peace with nature is not a universal goal but a situated and ongoing practice, expressed through pluriversal diplomacies that challenge state-centrism and incorporate Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and everyday practices. Ultimately, achieving peace with nature requires a reorientation toward relational ethics, where the plurality of natures is engaged through coexistence rather than reduced to unity.

Bio

Prof. Amaya Querejazu is a Professor at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. As a Global Encounters guest and member of the Focus Group "Making Peace with Nature" at the College of Fellows, she brings a distinctive perspective to the ongoing conversation on human-nature relations. An exceptional scholar, her work in the fields of decolonial thought and relational ontologies has gained well-deserved recognition in leading academic forums.

Making Peace with Nature 

April 29, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/Villa Köstlin) | Program

At the heart of the Global Encounters kick-off workshop are in-depth insights into the fellows’ current research projects, innovative approaches to thinking, and an open exchange of methods, questions, and perspectives. The workshop provides space to further develop ideas, highlight synergies, and initiate new collaborations. With this format, the Global Encounters platform creates an inspiring framework in which knowledge is not only shared, but also collectively advanced and reflected upon.

Contemporary Philosophy – Chinese and European Perspectives 

April 21-22, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/Villa Köstlin) | Program

Universal Grammar and Linguistic Diversity 

March 30-31, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/Villa Köstlin) | Program

The idea of Universal Grammar has dominated the field of linguistics in the last decades, while at the same time having undergone various reformulations, particularly in the writings of Chomsky. Chomsky’s idea of Universal Grammar has been developed in the framework of generative linguistics and entails the concept of an innate and universal faculty of language which allows infants to grasp the universal principles and patterns that structure phrases of any possible human language. Despite the prominence of this idea in the field of contemporary linguistics, it has been abundantly criticised and is still a bone of contention in linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy. Read more here. 

Philosophy of Technology from Intercultural Perspectives

March 28-29, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/Villa Köstlin) | Program 

This workshop explores the concept of “technology”—often understood as a distinctly Western construct—from an intercultural perspective. Heidegger argued that modern technology arises from the consequence of Western metaphysics, and that it has expanded far beyond its European origins. At the same time, its global dominance exposes the limits of Western modern thought. Against this backdrop, the workshop aims to reconsider technology interculturally and to examine possibilities for a “post-European” philosophy.
To deepen this inquiry, we welcome Prof. Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam) as our keynote speaker. Through his concept of “cosmotechnics”—which investigates the correlation between technology and the cosmologies that ground it—Prof. Hui has developed a distinctive intercultural approach to the philosophy of technology. Building on his framework, this workshop invites participants to reexamine the concept of technology from diverse cultural and philosophical perspectives. 

Joint Action and the Common Ground

26-27 March, 2026 | Hörsaal 4329, Psychologisches Institut, Schleichstr. 4, Tübingen

Workshop with New Horizons Fellow Günther Knoblich and Mercator Fellows Bart Geurts, Manfred Krifka, and Gabriella Vigliocco, in cooperation with the SFB Common Ground. Cognition – Grammar – Communication. 

Please find the SFB Common Ground homepage here: https://uni-tuebingen.de/de/282342 

The Dark Sides of Rights of Nature

12-13 February, 2026 | College of Fellows (Rümelinstr. 27/Villa Köstlin)

This workshop is part of the Global Encounters Workshop Series “Bridging Knowledges. Thinking with/ Learning from the Global South”. Hosted by Riccarda Flemmer (Institute of Political Science, UT), Matthias Kramm (Ethics, Philosophy and History of the Life Sciences, UT), and Léonie de Jonge (Institute for Research on Far Right Extremism (IRex), UT). 

This international workshop explores the often-overlooked “dark sides” of Rights of Nature (RoN), bringing critical perspectives from the Global South and North into dialogue. While RoN are frequently celebrated for their transformative potential, the workshop foregrounds growing skepticism about their political, legal, and ideological implications. Key sessions address Nature, Rights, and the Far-Right in Germany and Rights of Nature, Human Rights, and Far-Right Ecologism, examining how legal innovations around nature intersect with nationalist, exclusionary, and authoritarian discourses. Contributions further explore the coloniality of (inter)national law, the racialization of nature, Indigenous critiques, and the appropriation of RoN by states, corporations, and political movements. Under the guiding question Back to nature?, the program also investigates far-right lifestyles, environmental activism, land-use conflicts, and everyday practices in Germany and Europe. Case studies from Latin America and Europe address ecofascism, Indigenous (land) rights , tensions between human and non-human rights, and the academic hype surrounding RoN. The workshop brings together scholars, practitioners, activists, and journalists to critically reassess Rights of Nature within contemporary power relations.

Language-based vs. Language-free Components of Cognition: How Does Language Shape Thinking?

February 10, 2026 Villa Köstlin Program
In this informal workshop, we will explore perspectives on the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition in the human mind. A central question is whether certain cognitive functions may include both language-bound and language-independent components. A second question is how language may shape thinking. Our aim is to create an open and friendly atmosphere that encourages discussion and idea sharing. Rather than showcasing completed research programs, the workshop will feature talks that present novel or developing ideas. Through this exchange, we hope to identify useful starting points for a meaningful distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition.

Politics of Division: Legal and Knowledge Regimes 

February 5-6, 2026 | Villa Köstlin 

The politics of division is increasingly taking hold in our societies, both in established and relatively new democracies. It exploits existing and newly created social divisions and cleavages, deploying them to consolidate power and maintain the status quo. Examples include changing varieties of ethnonationalism based on exclusive citizenship. Likewise, gender and sexuality politics have become sites of hostility, everyday policing, and legal repression. The politics of division is further intensified by overlapping crises like climate change, migration, the intrusive state, neoliberalism, and right-wing populism. The two-day conference “Global Encounters: Politics of Division” at the University of Tübingen, hosted by the College of Fellows and the Global Encounters Platform on February 5–6, 2026, brings together academics, researchers, policymakers, activists, and professionals to explore interdisciplinary approaches to the politics of division. Paper presentations interrogate the interplay between law, policy, and knowledge, examining how norms are institutionalized, authorized, and legitimized through legal and knowledge regimes. The conference explores how differences are reinforced by regimes through laws and histories, how anti-democracy gains appeal through rhetoric, and how resistance and restorative justice can be effective responses.

Rooted and Uprooted: Suffering and Agency in the Story of the Nation 

February 5, 2026 | 6:30 pm   Alte Aula 

Nationalism derives its emotive power from its embodiment. Almost everything depends on the arbitrary process of natural reproduction in a particular body, in a particular national territory. Without the birthright to a privileged nation, one has to cross borders and survive incredible hardship and discrimination to attain those privileges. In this talk, I want to address the rooted national body first and then go on to discuss the uprooted body of the outsider, the refugee and the rebel. Both the rooted and the uprooted body are sites of suffering. First, the national body. The nation is sovereign in its territory that has to be defended at all costs, including warfare. The nation’s biography is largely a series of territorial events that have either threatened its sovereignty or established it. The constant re-working of this narrative (with its cast of villains and victims) acquires an almost collective Freudian dimension. Those who win are rooted; those who lose are uprooted. Many of the losing party leave the country and become refugees. The fiction of national borders and the rootedness of those who belong to it creates the related fiction of the uprootedness and ultimate non-belonging of those who have fled. This dual fantasy is constantly reworked and elaborated as a cause of suffering for both those who belong and those who do not.

More info on Prof. Dr. Peter van der Veer you can find here. 

February 4, 2026 | 6-8 pm   Villa Köstlin (and online) 

This reading group explores texts from the feminist philosophy tradition, considering their significance for issues of social justice as well as for broader philosophical questions.

Systemic Harm and Collective (Un)Awareness.
Forms of Agency and the Diffusion of Responsibility in Structural Violence.
Insights from Phenomenology, Violence Studies, and Liberation Philosophy

January 29-30, 2026 Villa Köstlin | Rümelinstraße 27 Program

Abstract

Systemic harm often transcends the boundaries of deliberate action, unfolding instead through bureaucratic and structural dynamics that elude traditional notions of responsibility and individual accountability. From social injustice (e.g. housing discrimination, gender inequality, racialized policing, etc.) to predatory economics to environmental devastation, structural harm often arises without clearly identifiable agents directly causing it (or directly seeing themselves as the cause of it)— and yet it remains deeply entangled with social practices, group habits, and institutions whose preservation, transformation, or abolition presupposes multiple forms of agency: free and forced, habitual and deliberative, individual and collective. 
Ever since the Norwegian sociologist and peace researcher Johan Galtung coined the term “structural violence” in the late 1960s, it has been common to assume that such violence is characterized by an absence of intentionality. Recent sociological and philosophical studies have challenged this assumption, sometimes suggesting that the concept of structural violence has been poorly theorized, is essentially flawed, and should be dismissed. From a phenomenological perspective, however, while the idea of violence ‘without subject’ must be questioned, the need for conceptual tools to describe forms of systemic harm caused by collective human agency remains essential. 
This workshop invites critical reflection on the ambiguous spaces between shared responsibility, individual accountability, and different forms of collective agency in cases of harm caused in systemic ways. How can we make sense of accountability and complicity when violence is embedded in the very structures that shape social life? Can resistance and liberation emerge from within these same structures? And what resources do phenomenology, liberation philosophy, and violence studies offer for rethinking ethical response in contexts where agency is obscured or indirect? Can subjects be complicit of their own (or others’) oppression without being accountable—or accountable without full-blooded agency? In what ways does interdisciplinary violence research provide conceptual resources for rethinking these tensions? 

Active Vocabulary 

16. Januar 2026 | 18:30 Uhr Villa Köstlin

Yulia Lokshinas Film “Active Vocabulary” wurde im Oktober 2025 bei der DOK Leipzig, einem Dokumentarfilm-Festival, mit der Goldenen Taube als bester Film im Deutschen Wettbewerb ausgezeichnet. 28. Oktober führte “Deutschlandfunk Kultur” ein Interview mit Yulia Lokshina, das  hier zu finden ist 

Abstract

Balancing through archival material, found footage, 3D animations and a documentary reenactment, film approaches the institution of school as a vehicle for the expansion of the Russian state, both militarily on the outside and ideologically on the inside. Teachers and pupils start observing each other, secret audio recordings of conversations emerge online. Shortly after the invasion, a young Russian teacher speaks out against the war. She is secretly recorded and denounced by a pupil. She flees to Berlin, where a German school class re-enacts her case and tries to understand how this betrayal came about. The film follows these events to reflect on processes of political overwhelming and the conditions of resistance. 

Bio

Yulia Lokshina was born 16.07.86 in Moscow, Russia, moved to Germany in 1999. Lives and works between Berlin and Munich. In her work, she deals with communities, the organization of social coexistence, non-fictional narrative forms, migrations, ideologies, social and political dependencies. Her films and video works have been shown and awarded at various national and international festivals and art venues. She works in the border area of film and research, in filmmaking, writing and teaching, as well as in open formations with artist friends.

“Welcome to Triassic Park: Old Brazilian Fossils, New Stories”

14. Januar 2026 | 18:30 Uhr Villa Köstlin

Researchers at the Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil (Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa Paleontológica) have recently unveiled remarkable discoveries of Triassic vertebrates from southern Brazil. These fossils, including early relatives of mammals and reptiles, shed new light on the evolution of ancient ecosystems that thrived between 240 and 225 million years ago. By combining fieldwork with cutting-edge digital imaging and 3D reconstruction, CAPPA researchers are revealing new species and anatomical details that are reshaping our understanding of the Triassic world.

Bio

Leonardo Kerber is a vertebrate paleontologist at the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM), Brazil. He studies fossil vertebrates, using CT scanning and 3D analysis to investigate the anatomy, evolution, and paleobiology of non-mammaliaform cynodonts and other Triassic animals.

"Hölderlin und der heilige Fluss" with the director Dr. Fabien Jégoudez 

December 16, 2025 | 6.30 pm   Villa Köstlin | Common Room

„Hölderlin und der heilige Fluss“ ist ein poetischer Dokumentarfilm. Der Film bietet eine Galerie von Impressionen der schwäbischen Landschaft, der Hölderlin besonders innig verbunden war. Wir nähern uns dem, was Hölderlin gesehen haben dürfte und woraus seine schöpferische Leidenschaft entsprang. Narratives Biopic, poetische Texte und philosophische Überlegungen begleiten uns entlang der drei bedeutendsten Lebensorte des Dichters an den Ufern des Neckars. Die Ergriffenheit angesichts der Natur ist in jedem Moment spürbar. Wir wandeln auf den Spuren Hölderlins, indem wir dem Fluss in Richtung seiner Quelle folgen und werfen dabei einen tiefen Blick ins Herz des Lebens und des Werkes des Dichters. Bedeutende Kenner seines Werks erhellen uns über das Verhältnis zum Fluss, zur Natur, sowie das Leben und das Denken und Dichten Hölderlins. 
Mit: Eva Ehrenfeld, Johann Kreuzer, Florian Mittelhammer, Daniela Übelhör, Klaus-Peter Waldenberger, Melina Wießler. Stimmen: Jochen Hägele, Elke Angelika Wachendorff.

Im Anschluss an die Vorführung des 80-minütigen Films besteht Gelegenheit zur Diskussion mit dem Regisseur des Films, dem Philosophen Dr. Fabien Jégoudez (assoziierter Forscher am CNRS, Paris). 

December 12–13, 2025 | Villa Köstlin (Rümelinstr. 27), Seminar Room | Zoom

Organized by New Horizons Fellow Prof. Naomi Thurston

About
This workshop seeks to bring together and discuss diverse current and emerging approaches in the study of Chinese Christianities employed by scholars based in different parts of the world and working in various disciplines, whether in historical, theological, literary, sociological, or religious studies. The Workshop is jointly organized by the CoF, the Faculty of Protestant Theology; University of Tübingen, the Divinity School of Chung Chi College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK); the Center for Christian Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK; and the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, Hong Kong; and promoted by the China Christianity Studies Group (CCSG). 

You are cordially invited to join in presence or online:

To help us with our planning, please register at infospam prevention@cof.uni-tuebingen.de  (you can also request the Zoom link at this address) – thank you!

Please find more information here.

“Non-Linguistic vs. Linguistic Cognition Within the Architecture of the Mind” with Prof. Günther Knoblich 

December 10, 2025 | 9 am - 4 pm   Villa Köstlin 

About: In this informal workshop, we will explore perspectives on how we can meaningfully distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition. A central question is whether certain cognitive functions may include both language-bound and language-independent components. Our aim is to create an open and friendly atmosphere that encourages discussion and idea sharing. Rather than showcasing completed research programs, the workshop will feature talks that present novel or developing ideas. Through this exchange, we hope to identify useful starting points for thinking about the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic cognition

Please find the schedule here.

As Part of the Academic Memorial Event for Prof. Jürgen Moltmann 

 December 4 | 8.15 pm   Theologicum | Lecture Hall 

Moltmann in China — Reception and Dialogue (forthcoming from Routledge)

The book explores the reception of the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024) in the context of Chinese academic theology. The author introduces the reception of Moltmann’s theology in Chinese contexts as a dialogic process of intercultural learning and theological meaning-making, encompassing readings of Western intellectual history, Marxist dialogue, political philosophy, and comparative studies. By thus presenting Moltmann studies in Chinese scholarship as an interactive, interdisciplinary conversation between contemporary Chinese intellectuals and Western Christianity, the present theological reception history argues for the full inclusion and deeper appreciation of Chinese scholarly voices and perspectives in the transmission, reconstruction, and reimagining of contemporary Western theology in Chinese contexts. Featuring a representative array of academic texts on Moltmann in the Chinese academy over the past four decades, the book highlights the unique critical potential of these crosscultural, interdisciplinary exchanges. The book will appeal to academics, postgraduate students, and theologians interested in world Christianity, contextual theology, Jürgen Moltmann, and intercultural dialogue.

About the author

Naomi Thurston is a scholar of contemporary Chinese Christianity based at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her research focuses on the contributions of Chinese intellectuals to issues in contextual and academic theology and Christian studies. She has translated the writings of contemporary Chinese scholars in the fields of art criticism and Christian thought and currently serves as director of the China Christianity Studies Group and as Associate Editor of Ching Feng: A Journal on Christianity and Chinese Religion and Culture.

Cultural and Creative Product Design in Museums 

December 3, 2025 | 6.30 pm Villa Köstlin 

This lecture will explore the design strategies behind successful museum cultural and creative products, focusing on the transformation of heritage into compelling modern goods. It will cover core philosophies and practical methodologies—such as narrative-driven design and cultural element deconstruction—and illustrate their application through an analysis of leading international case studies, demonstrating how effective design bridges museum collections with contemporary audiences.

November 12, 2025 |  7pm   Alte Aula 

with Prof. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Prof. Tori Ekstrand, Prof. Karin Amos 

Around the world, academic freedom is increasingly coming under pressure -- from political, ideological, and institutional forces alike. Recently, even from the United States we receive daily reports of restrictions. In Germany, too, it has been the subject of a highly debated and politically contested field in recent years. Central to these discussions are questions on whether science should remain separate  from politics, or whether – particularly in the fostering of democracy – the two are inextricably connected.

The College of Fellows is organizing a panel discussion titled “Academic Freedom Under Pressure: Global Challenges and Transatlantic Perspectives”. Participants are Prof. Victoria "Tori" Smith Ekstrand (UNC, Hussman School of Journalism and Media, media law and free expression, Fulbright-Schuman scholar in Tübingen in 2025-26), Prof. Cynthia Miller-Idriss (American University, Washinton, DC, School of Public Affairs and School of Education; Justice, Law & Criminology, New Horizons Fellow in Tübingen in 2025-26) and Prof. Karin Amos (University of Tübingen, Educational Science, General Pedagogy, international comparative education research and intercultural pedagogy, human rights). 

The panel will address the state of academic freedom in the United States and Germany, and will take an in-depth look at the many forms and dimensions of threats to academic freedom and how they manifest themselves across different disciplines, as well as historical developments, legal aspects, and political influence in a climate in which far-right governments and movements are on the rise in many parts of the world.
With this event, the College will launch a new scholarship program for postdoctoral researchers from the United States. Funded by the Ministry of Science, Institutes for Advanced Studies at the Universities of Freiburg, Konstanz, and Tübingen will create 14 positions for visiting researchers whose research has come under pressure. 

November 12, 2025 | 4 pm 

Psychlogisches Institut (Schleichstr. 4) | Lecture Hall

Keynote-Vortrag by New Horizons Fellow Professor Günther Knoblich: 

Is Joint Action Prioritized in the Human Mind?

Abstract:
People perform joint actions because acting together allows them to achieve outcomes that they could not achieve alone, such as moving a heavy piece of furniture. They may also choose to act together simply because it is more enjoyable, such as cooking together. In this talk, I will present recent research from our lab examining whether joint action is prioritized over individual action. First, we asked when people decide to perform an action individually versus jointly. We examined whether joint action is experienced as rewarding compared to individual action, and thus preferred. Second, we asked how joint actions are represented in the mind. We investigated whether representations of the joint action as a whole, or representations of the individual contributions, are prioritized in action control. Third, we explored whether joint action can facilitate thinking, particularly creative problem solving. Here, we tested whether difficult problems are solved more effectively together than alone.

Bio: Günther Knoblich is Professor of Cognitive Science at Central European University (CEU), Vienna. His main research interests include joint action, sense of agency, social cognition, communication, and problem solving. He has coordinated several large interdisciplinary research projects, among them the ERC Synergy project Coordination, Communication, and Cultural Transmission (2015–2022), the EuroCores project EuroUnderstanding (2011–2014), and the ZiF Research Year Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines (2005–2006, with Ipke Wachsmuth). He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg in 1997 and held research and faculty positions at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Rutgers University, the University of Birmingham, and the Donders Institute at Radboud University Nijmegen.

November 5, 2025 | 6:30 pm   Villa Köstlin

"Theologian, Critic, Classicist: The Conservative Turn in Sino-Christian Theology"

In the 1980s, a cohort of unconventional intellectuals at Chinese universities began to integrate European theological concepts into Chinese academic discourse, literature, and some newly established journals and book series. This initiative took shape against the backdrop of the post-Maoist "cultural fever" that characterized the era. Famous among this generation of China’s “Cultural Christians” was the young academic Liu Xiaofeng (1956-), known in the 1990s for pioneering a new theological movement among scholars in the humanities. Liu, who later turned to cultural and political conservatism, would eventually distance himself from “Sino-Christian theology” to promote the works of such thinkers as Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in Chinese translation. This lecture traces the development of Sino-Christian theology and its sister discourse, Sino-Christian studies; introduces the controversial figure of Liu Xiaofeng; and explores the recent bifurcation of academic theology in China into conservative theology coupled with liberal ideas and contemporary conservatism.

Bio

Naomi Thurston is a scholar of contemporary Chinese Christianity based at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her research focuses on the contributions of Chinese intellectuals to issues in contextual and academic theology and Christian studies. She has translated the writings of contemporary Chinese scholars in the fields of art criticism and Christian thought and currently serves as director of the China Christianity Studies Group and as Associate Editor of Ching Feng: A Journal on Christianity and Chinese Religion and Culture.

30. October 2025 | 20 Uhr

Villa Köstlin | Common Room

Filmscreening mit Priscilla Brasil: “No More History Without Us” (2024)

In a world oversaturated with greenwashing, a filmmaker from the Amazon region picks up her camera to tell the rainforest’s true story. This manifesto-film dismantles colonial narratives that have shaped the Amazon as a land of abundance, exposing the violence and prejudice tied to its exploitation. From Munich to Belém, it delves into how the concept of a “demographic void” and the portrayal of a primitive territory have fueled racism and inequality.
Through this exploration, the film amplifies the voices of Amazonian peoples and interrogates pressing ecological challenges. With a bold narrative and striking cinematography, it stands as part of a new wave of postcolonial cinema — clear-eyed and essential.

Winner of the 2024 Environmental Film Festival (FICA) in Brazil for Best Feature Film and the 2024 Bali International Film Festival (Balinale) for Best Documentary Film.

Director’s notes:
 “The Amazon is more than a backdrop for environmental debates; it is a vibrant society, producing complex knowledge. This film is a manifesto that calls for new spaces, rooted in the explanation of what has happened to us over the past centuries. Its goal is to challenge the world to understand us as part of history — not just as part of natural history — and to rise up against the profound silencing we, urban and traditional Amazonian peoples, face. No More History Without Us is not just a documentary; it is a call to action to reopen all the paths that close when Amazonians attempt to think and speak for themselves.”
- Priscilla Brasil

October 30, 2025
College of Fellows | Villa Köstlin

Program
Round table/Panel I (3.30–5 p.m. – Seminar Room): Infrastructures of the Future and Ruins of the Present: Art, Extractivism and Memory in Latin America
FERNANDO RESENDE, KRISTELL PECH OXTE, FREDERICO TAVARES, CARLOS SANHUEZA | moderated by RICCARDA FLEMMER
Break
Round table/Panel II (5.15–6.45 p.m. – Common Room): Infrastructures of the Future and Ruins of the Present: Art, Extractivism and Memory in Latin America
NELSON ARELLANO, LOUISE GANZ, ARMANDO VELAZQUEZ, MARIA GABRIELA LUGONES | moderated by DOROTHEE KIMMICH

Final workshop of the Tübingen Research Takeoff (TRT) project Images of the invisible territories: Transects of the Bioceanic Corridor Brazil/Chile
Coordinated by Dorothee Kimmich and Fernando Resende in cooperation with the Baden-Württemberg Centre for Brazil and Latin America
Organized by Fernando Resende and Nelson Arellano in the framework of the opening of the International Forum of the ICGSS
Opening of the International Forum: 3 p.m. (online)
More Information on the International Forum of the ICGSS at internationalforumtuebingenspam prevention@gmail.com 

DFH / UFA CDFA /DFGK WORKSHOP “NEW CRITICAL THEORIES AND DECENTRALISED EPISTEMOLOGIES”
Research Colloquium, Tübingen 2025
29–30 October 2025 | Universität tübingen | Villa Köstlin | Zoom

The DFH College Tübingen–Toulouse “New Critical Theory and Decentralized Epistemologies” (2022–2026) is organized in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Dorothee Kimmich from the German Department. It promotes exchange among doctoral students in the fields of cultural theory, philosophy, cultural studies, literary studies, history, and related disciplines by funding research stays at the partner university. Double degrees (cotutelle) are also possible by arrangement.

Further information can be found here.

October 24, 2025 | 4 pm   Fürstenzimmer, Hohentübingen Castle

Semester Opening Event with Prof. Megan Fieser zum Thema “Strategies to Address the Circularity of Plastics”

Plastics have transformed modern life. They have provided inexpensive options for sterile medical supplies, packaging for food preservation and light materials to improve the efficiency of transportation. However, dependence on disposable plastic items to maintain busy lifestyles, particularly in packaging, have caused a pollution crisis. Once considered the great benefit of plastics, the long lifetime and chemical stability of these materials make them persistent pollutants in the environment. While global efforts are present to combat this challenge, projections still suggest that productive solutions are needed. Notably, there is no single solution to address all plastic waste. The Fieser Group at the University of Southern California researches ways to improve plastic sustainability through both the synthesis of more degradable plastics to replace existing, problematic materials, and the repurposing of plastic waste at the end of its life into a useful product. Advances in these research thrusts, in context with the global plastics problem, will be discussed.

Bio 

Megan Fieser received a B.A. in chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, working with Prof. Bill Evans. She then moved to pursue postdoctoral studies with Prof. Bill Tolman at the University of Minnesota within the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymers. Megan started as a Gabilan Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California in 2018. 

24 September 2025 | 6.30 pm    Villa Köstlin 

Geheimnis des „Mooses“ im „Steingarten“ – eine interkulturell phänomenologische Betrachtung

(1) Interkultureller Überblick über den japanischen Garten
In der europäischen Kunsttheorie war die Gartengestaltung bis zur Neuzeit kein Thema. Ein Hintergrund dafür ist die seit Aristoteles tradierte teleologische Ontologie, der zufolge Steine und Erde in der ontologischen Hierarchie ganz unten stehen. Der aus Steinen und Erde angelegte Garten, konnte deshalb in der Kunst nur einen niedrigen Rang erhalten, was bis zur Hegelschen Ästhetik der Fall blieb. In Japan hingegen taucht bereits im 12. Jahrhundert eine Schrift über die Gartengestaltung auf.

(2) „Steine“ und „Moos“ im japanischen Garten
Die älteste Abhandlung über die Gartengestaltung in Japan, „Sakutei-ki“ (作庭記), befasst sich mit der Anordnungsweise von Steinen. Dabei handelt es sich um „Natursteine“, die weder im französischen noch im englischen Garten einen Platz finden. Jedoch selbst in diesem „Sakutei-ki“ gibt es ein Ding, das nicht erwähnt wird: das „Moos“. Diese Pflanze ist zwar in Japan seit alters her vertraut. Aber gerade deshalb entstand das „Paradoxon des Selbstverständlichen“: Der Sinn seines Seins wird vergessen. Das Moos ist als dieses Paradoxon des Verborgenseins das „Geheimnis“ des Steingartens.

(3) Das Moos im Trockengarten des Ryōan-ji
Der Trockengarten des Ryōan-ji besteht nur aus Steinen und Sand. Kein Baum steht dort, so dass das organische Leben verdorrt ist. Die einzige Ausnahme bildet das Moos, das um die Steine herum in einer unauffälligen Weise wächst. Das Moos selbst bleibt unscheinbar, aber als das Unscheinbare lässt es seinerseits die Steine eigens als Steine aufgehen.

(4) Zur „Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren“
Heraklit sagte: „Die Natur (physis) liebt es, sich zu verbergen.“ Heidegger sah in diesem Wort den Sinn der „Wahrheit“ als der „Un-Verborgenheit“. Der Zen-Meister Dōgen schrieb: „Erbarmen, dass Stimme und Farbe des Berges und Flusses sich verbergen. Aber erfreulich, dass sie doch zum Vorschein kommen.“ Für Zeami, den Gründer des Nô-Spiels, gilt: „Das Sich-verbergen zeigt die Schönheit der Blume.“ Im Moos als dem Geheimnis des Trockengartens lässt sich das so Gesagte konkret sehen.
 

23 July 2025 | 6:30 pm   University of Tübingen | Alte Aula 

Examining Life in the Great Acceleration. Some Thoughts on Human Longevity 

Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose work has critically reshaped understandings of global modernity and the Anthropocene, will reflect on the temporal and ethical implications of life extension in the context of climate crisis and posthumanist thought. As part of the College of Fellows Lecture Series, this event offers a rare opportunity to engage with one of the foremost voices in contemporary historical theory.

22 - 24 July 2025   Villa Köstlin

Masterclass with Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty: “One Planet – Many Worlds. Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”

"lndeed, what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and postimperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the postwar scenario of decolonization and globalization." 

This is how Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the challenge of climate change to our conception of history. Chakrabarty's work offers a profound reflection on the intersection of human history and climate change. As one of the leading scholars in South Asian history, Chakrabarty's earlier work on the "provincialization of Europe" (Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000)) paved the way for a revision of historiography that moves beyond Eurocentric narratives. Chakrabarty's work urges us to recognize and understand the historical, social, and geoscientific dimensions of climate change to grasp the consequences of human actions on our planet. "The crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above their disciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions." His call for a reimagining of modernity and for a "planetary" rather than "human-centered" perspective, have sparked engaged debates about the question of the role of history and social sciences in the age of climate change. His discussion about the intertwining of human history with geological processes raises vital questions: How does Chakrabarty's argument challenge traditional historical narratives? What are the implications of framing history as a "planetary age"? How do we reconcile the human impact on the Earth with the geological processes that have shaped the planet lang before humanity's rise? What responsibilities do scholars in the humanities and social sciences have in addressing the climate crisis? How can social scientists contribute to the understanding of climate change without oversimplifying its causes or consequences? The Masterclass seeks to explore these and other implications of Chakrabarty's works.

Organization
In reflecting on the writings of Dipesh Chakrabarty, particularly The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023), the masterclass will enable interdisciplinary discussions with Chakrabarty about his contributions to History and Subaltern Studies. lt will be of interest to participants from various disciplines, including history, sociology, philosophy, and environmental studies. There will be an opening session on day one. Day one and two will consist of an impulse paper by Dipesh Chakrabarty, followed by participant contributions and discussions. Day three will consist of a workshop with Tübingen based scholars; participants are invited to attend this workshop and a public lecture by Dipesh Chakrabarty on Wednesday, 23 July. Participants must present a 15-minute paper that critically discusses one of the themes and/or questions of the masterclass. Engagement with current research questions and issues are particularly welcome, and connections with the applicants' PhD projects should explicitly be drawn.

18. July 2025 | 12 pm Villa Köstlin 

Is Internet a 'Shameless' Space?: On Manifestations and Uses of Shame in Digital Interactions

In my short talk, I would like to reflect on the presence of shame in online interactions and its role in digital truth-making. As argued within the sociology of emotions, shame is a pervasive social emotion that serves as a powerful tool for interpersonal regulation. Shaming—an interactional application of shame—can be employed to dismiss performances and viewpoints that deviate from what is considered as “the normative.” Digital interactions, however, are often described as liberated from the interactional and emotional constraints that operate offline, creating spaces where individuals no longer feel ashamed when expressing previously taboo opinions or emotions.
Drawing from my empirical research on various digital localizations, I offer an alternative account of shame in the digital realm: as serving as a key emotion that permeates digital interactions and enables collective meaning-making within these interactions. I will argue that collaborative shame work and mutual regulation that harness shame are both essential components of truth-making in digital spaces.

Bio
Dr. Maja Sawicka is an Assistant Professor at the Chair of Digital Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of Warsaw. In her research she focuses on digital interactions and investigates emotional mechanisms underpinning the emergence of local digital (sub)cultures of emotions. She specializes in qualitative research methods. She has authored and co-authored articles published in journals such as Symbolic Interaction, Cultural Sociology, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, Criminology and Criminal Justice, and others.

15 July | 6:30 pm    Villa Köstlin | Common Room

Saint Mary (1997), directed by Shahriar Bahrani and written by Saeid Bahmanpour (IMDb 6.8/10),  presents a Quranic perspective on the birth of Jesus and has been frequently aired on Iranian national television during Christian-related events.
 

11 July 2025, 6 pm    Villa Köstlin | Common Room

Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking
Talk and Book Presentation

Luke Fischer will discuss, and read from, his new book that explores the intersection between philosophy and poetry, Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking: Romanticism and the Living Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2024). The presentation will be followed by an open conversation relating to themes of the book.

About the book:
Like poetry, fragments condense insights into few words, employ striking metaphors that draw intuitive connections, and make space for creative interpretation. Contrasting with the logical linearity of much philosophy, fragments disclose rather than prove, intimate more than argue, suggest a whole without elaborating a system, and emphasize the intuitive act of thinking. Fischer readjusts our understanding of philosophical ideas as they originate in moments of illumination, and reveals the fragment as philosophy in process. In a collection of original fragments and an exploratory essay, Fischer sheds light on the relation between poetry and philosophy, aesthetics and society, art and the environment, and discusses seminal practitioners of the fragmentary form, including Novalis, F. Schlegel, Nietzsche and Heraclitus. Philosophical Fragments as the Poetry of Thinking makes an engaging, nonlinear case for the possibility and significance of a poetic transmutation of philosophy.

Luke Fischer is a philosopher and poet. His various books include The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the ‘New Poems’ (Bloomsbury, 2015), three books of poetry––most recently A Gamble for my Daughter (Vagabond Press, 2022)––and the co-edited volumes The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2021) and Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019). He holds a PhD from the University of Sydney where he is also an Honorary Associate in Philosophy. For more information, visit: www.lukefischer.net

July 2, 2025 6:30 pm    Villa Köstlin | Seminarraum 

Towards an Aesthetics of Sociality. An Experiment in Subverting the Coloniality of European Aesthetics 

In the first part of my lecture, I reconstruct the close connection between the emergence of philosophical aesthetics in the 18th century, on the one hand, and colonial capitalism on the other. In doing so, my focus is on the mode of subjectification through ‘civilizing’ aesthetic experiences, which is at the heart of the aesthetic theories that emerged at that time; a mode of subjectification that promises a superior subject position to a few bourgeois subjects, while completely or partially excluding other people as ‘subhumans’ from the allegedly civilizing processes of subjectification and thus also from being persons in the full sense.

Against the backdrop of my claim that the concept of the subject thus inaugurated continues to function as a norm to this day, I will explore some approaches to aesthetics of sociality in the second part of my lecture. By this I mean aesthetic practices and theories that are not content with re-thinking the subject of aesthetic civilization in less exclusive terms than is the case, e. g., with Hume and Kant; much rather, aesthetics of sociality reject the norm of the civilized and, at the same time, self-determined, autonomous subject entirely. Fred Moten’s theoretical praxis of the ensemble and Walther Benjamin’s engagement with aesthetic practices in post-revolutionary Russia play a central role here.

Women Philosophers on Nature 

1 Juli 2025, 6 pm   Villa Köstlin | Seminar Room

Program:

- Dalia Nassar (University of Sydney): "Our Moral Relation to Nature: Germaine de Staël and Karoline von Günderrode’s Environmental Ethics"

- Veronica Cibotaru (University of Tübingen): "Hedwig Conrad-Martius, The Soul of Plants"

 

“Sustaining Human Rights Against Far-Right Threats to Democracy”

19 - 20 June 2025   University of Tübingen | Alte Aula 

PUBLIC PANEL: Leonie de Jonge & Helen Battaly, moderated by Rolf Frankenberger 

Organizers: Lynne Tirrell (UConn, Philosophy, HRTS), Niels Weidtmann (U. Tübingen, College of Fellows), Sara Bangert (U. Tübingen, College of Fellows), Rolf Frankenberger (U.
Tübingen, Institute for Research on Far-Right Extremism)

In light of the growing threat to democracies, the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024 and the German parliamentary early elections 2025 were of particular importance for the future of international human rights policy. The rise in Xenophobia, Anti-Semitism, misogyny, hatred of LGBTQI+ and other exclusionary forms of far-right ideology is an ever growing common pattern in liberal democracies all over the world in recent years. Accordingly, we can observe an increasing social and political polarization, which is accompanied by the poisoning and erosion of social cohesion in society and a decline in democratic quality.

These social and political shifts threaten Human Rights while undermining democratic institutions. Landmark elections were held in the USA in November 2024, and Germany also faced a difficult situation with the early elections in February 2025: The collapse of the German government, which came just hours after the re-election of US President Donald Trump, has shaken the whole of Europe. The trends described above therefore threaten to continue in both countries. Thus, nothing less is at stake than the preservation of liberal democracy. Replacing liberal democracies with autocratic regimes both in the USA and various European countries and playing the game of far right parties deal major blows to human rights. In September 2024, a first workshop on this topic took place at the University of Connecticut, which the event builds on: The aim is to bring together analyses of far-right mobilisation in a transatlantic discussion and to address possible counter-strategies to make democracies more resistant to authoritarian politics.

This event of the focus group “Far Right Threats to Democracy” is based upon a cooperation between the College of Fellows, the Institute for Research on Far-Right Extremism (IRex), and the Human Rights Research Consortium (Connecticut-Baden Württemberg).

 17 - 18 June 2025     Villa Köstlin

On the occasion of the Schelling anniversary 2025 organized by Fernando Wirtz, Norihito Nakamura, and Niels Weidtmann.

You can find the program here.

“Charles S. Peirce’s Neglected Argument for the Reality of God. Contemporary Perspectives”

 9 - 11 June 2025    Theologicum

Charles S. Peirce's article "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" represents the most extended treatmentof a religious topic that he produced during a half-century of philosophizing. Published in 1908, it has continued to remain somewhat neglected, drawing the interest over the years of only a handfulof scholars specializing in the study of Peirce's thought. The rationale for this conference is the conviction that it deserves much more serious attention from contemporary philosophers and theologians. It embodies not only the outline of a pragmatic philosophical theology, but also one of the most mature articulations of Peirce's theory of inquiry. The twelve presentations included in this conference are dedicated to the careful interpretation of selected features of Peirce's argument, as well as comparisons with other thinkers and points of view. Learn more about the conference by downloading its program. 

“Decolonization and Internal Violence. A Phenomenological Approach”

 15-16 May     Villa Köstlin | Rümelinstraße 27 

The history of the world is deeply rooted in narratives of difference and violence. By this, we mean that nations have either been perpetrators or victims of various kinds of violence through negative constructions of difference. Increasingly, in the ‘global south’, there is a strong commitment to critiquing debris of neo-colonial and systemic structures of violence in post-colonial African societies. It is important to note that colonialism constitutes physical violence, social, and epistemological oppression of Africans in particular and the global south in general. There is a strong push back against the various ways colonialism, structural, and epistemic oppression are sustained in postcolonial Africa. In view of this ideological disposition that is aimed at undoing structures of colonial imperialism, there have been numerous scholarly accounts addressing various themes on the topic, and the main approaches have been informed by theories of decolonisation. Contemporary forms of resistance and push backs are not only directed toward historical injustice, marginalisation, oppression and exclusion, but also to blatant hostile conditions of systemic violence and epistemic marginalisation in the various forms they remain endemic and are valorised across the world. However, there has been no sufficient commitment to ‘internal violence’ as a plausible decolonial response. Please find more information on the workshop in its program. 

Experience. Phenomenological, Pragmatist, and Intercultural Perspectives

8-9 May 2025    Villa Köstlin, Rümelinstraße 27 

The detailed program of the conference is available for download here. 

“The Liminal Early Modern Across Cultural Devides: On How the Islamic World Became Modern”

07 May 2025 | 6:30 pm             Villa Köstlin, Rümelinstraße 27

Abstract

The comparative method, Renaud Gagné writes, must be revisited because it is framed teleologically as the apex of a long trajectory, and restricted to the observation of juxtaposed analogies and differences that overstress the contours of each distinctive case and reify the categories at play. Instead, Grafton argues for a regime of comparatism, an umbrella etic notion, a heuristic coinage for conceiving the relevant epistemic space. 

 Considering the above, this paper argues that a comparatist frame allows for a clearer understanding of the transition from medieval to modern in the Islamic world. Emphasis on the early modern not so much as a facet of periodization but as a conceptual paradigm, shifts the focus from the synchronized rise of empires—the credo of the standard comparative narrative—to religious change as the harbinger of a new world to come. Crucially, it avoids the reductive impact of the fixation on the colonial encounter that has dominated modern scholarly accounts of that historical transformation.

BIO 

Neguin Yavari’s Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam (2014), is a comparative study of mirrors for princes from the European and Islamic worlds. Representations of power in medieval secular biographies frame her 2018 study titled “The Future of Iran’s Past: Nizam al-Mulk Remembered”(2018). The focus in her current research is on the purchase of a global approach to early modern configurations of religion and politics in the Islamic world.

The Notion of Japanese Philosophy | Dr. Veronica Cibotaru

5 May | 12-2 pm   Online 

We have witnessed in the last years and months a global upsurge of violent conflicts that jettison every form of respect of international law, human rights and principles of justice, despite the decades-long existence of international juridic and peace-keeping instances, such as the United Nations, or of political projects that are built on the idea of universal human rights and rule of law, such as Europe. The aim of these workshops is to reflect on the causes which made possible this global critical situation but also and above all on future perspectives which could replace this situation. If it is commonly admitted that violence and war are opposed to or amount to absence of peace, how should we conceive this notion and which possibilities can philosophy offer in this respect? Should we think peace as a mere absence of violence and war, or should we concede to peace an ontological primacy and positive consistency, as does Levinas? Is peace opposed to every form of conflict or can it be on the contrary built only on the basis of conflicts which lead to mutual recognition (Ricœur) or radical democracy (Mouffe)? Does peace necessarily entail a specific global political and juridical form of organization, such as the Kantian idea of a world republic, with all the ambiguities that it entails? What kind of living together (Dewey) and thinking together (Arendt) does it presuppose? These questions will not be analysed only from a general perspective, but also grounding in a reflection on concrete forms of violence and peace. Ultimately this initiative aims at developing a philosophical vocabulary of peace, which would be embedded in different philosophical traditions but at the same time also attuned to the challenges of the contemporary world. Please find more information on the workshop in its program.  

Speakers

Masumi Nagasaka (Waseda University): Tanabe and Levinas on Meontology: The Autonomy of Self-Criticism qua the Heteronomy of the Ethics of the Other

Motomu Ishikawa (Tokyo Metropolitan University): “Punishment Aims to Eliminate Itself” – Human Rule as Rule by Virtue

Makoto Katsumori (Akita University): Takahashi’s Critique of Kōyama’s Philosophy of World History

Workshop Rethinking Peace | Dr. Veronica Cibotaru

28 March | 6-8 pm    Online 

We have witnessed in the last years and months a global upsurge of violent conflicts that jettison every form of respect of international law, human rights and principles of justice, despite the decades-long existence of international juridic and peace-keeping instances, such as the United Nations, or of political projects that are built on the idea of universal human rights and rule of law, such as Europe. The aim of these workshops is to reflect on the causes which made possible this global critical situation but also and above all on future perspectives which could replace this situation. If it is commonly admitted that violence and war are opposed to or amount to absence of peace, how should we conceive this notion and which possibilities can philosophy offer in this respect? Should we think peace as a mere absence of violence and war, or should we concede to peace an ontological primacy and positive consistency, as does Levinas? Is peace opposed to every form of conflict or can it be on the contrary built only on the basis of conflicts which lead to mutual recognition (Ricœur) or radical democracy (Mouffe)? Does peace necessarily entail a specific global political and juridical form of organization, such as the Kantian idea of a world republic, with all the ambiguities that it entails? What kind of living together (Dewey) and thinking together (Arendt) does it presuppose? These questions will not be analysed only from a general perspective, but also grounding in a reflection on concrete forms of violence and peace. Ultimately this initiative aims at developing a philosophical vocabulary of peace, which would be embedded in different philosophical traditions but at the same time also attuned to the challenges of the contemporary world. Please find more information on the workshop in its program. 

Dr. Manuel Cojocaru | Mundanity, Everydayness and God(s).  Philosophical and Intercultural Perspectives

3 - 4  March | 9am - 7pm   Villa Köstlin, Rümelinstraße 27

Philosophy of religion was historically framed by debates over the existence of God, the nature of the soul, immortality and the problem of evil. All of these topics work within philosophical and cultural frameworks that distinguish between a realm of the ‘sacred’ and a realm of the ‘profane’. It was the historian of religions Mircea Eliade who wrote extensively on this topic. In Sacred and Profane, he underlined the fact that a sacred stone is after all just a stone for the one who had no experience of a hierophany, which is an event that phenomenologically restructures one’s understanding of not just the profane object as a sacred object, but of the whole cosmos. Hence, it can be argued that the sacred quality of an object or a place is not given by the properties of the thing itself, but rather by a shift in one’s apprehension of that particular thing, caused by a phenomenological-religious conversion. Since its inception, phenomenology has explored this idea that a shift in outlook can change the way in which one perceives or understands a thing, or the world as a whole. From Husserl’s description of the ‘natural attitude’, to Heidegger’s ‘das Man’ and Jaspers’ comments regarding the mundane way of being, phenomenology has always entertained the possibility of a shift from an ‘everyday’ mode of being, to a privileged attitude towards phenomena. Yet, since we are social beings, we operate within a mundane framework, which contains in itself the very possibility of transcending it. Thus, in pursuing to understand the sacred, one ought to ask oneself how does the seen and the unseen interact with each other; whether the unseen can be conceived as immanence, or whether the unseen is to be thought of as absolute Transcendence. Read more on the workshop and its program. 

Trump and the Bolsonaro Radical Right Populist Projects of Race  

Großer Senat, 6.30 pm

This talk compares Trump’s racial project that aims to get rid of illegal immigrants that are mostly nonwhite, with Bolsonaro’s project of reinstating Brazilian racial democracy. Whereas Trump aims to recreate an imaginary white nation as it allegedly existed before the movements of the 1960s, Bolsonaro wanted to bring back a model of race relations that was allegedly free from racism and is in the process of obliteration by imported models of affirmative action and special privileges to indigenous people. Their projects of race making reflect distinct historical patterns of race making. Whereas in the US racial mixing was feared and punished because it would lead to the degeneration of the white race, in Brazil race mixing would progressively whiten the population.

Bio

Carlos de la Torre is a professor of Political Science of the UF Center for Latin American Studies. He has a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. He was a fellow at the Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. His most recent books are The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, (Routlege, 2019); Populisms a Quick Immersion, (Tibidabo Editions, 2019), De Velasco a Correa: Insurreciones, populismo y elecciones en Ecuador, (Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2015), The Promise and Perils of Populism, (The University Press of Kentucky, 2015), Latin American Populism of the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Cynthia Arnson, (The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013), and Populist Seduction in Latin America, (Ohio University Press, second edition 2010).

 Touch and the Self: An Interdisciplinary Workshop – Program 

10.30 - 11.30 am Patrick Haggard (Neuroscience, UCL)
‘Disentangling touch from proprioception... and then reintegrating them’
11.30 am - 12.30 pm  Esther Kuehn (Neuroscience, Hertie/DZNE)
‘Touch and the Aging Self - From Aging Microstructure to Aging Cognition’

12.30 - 1.30 pm Lunch
1.30 - 2.30 pm Katherine J. Kuchenbecker (Robotics, MPI Intelligent Systems)
‘Technicalities: Sensing and Actuating Touch’
2.30 - 3.30 pm Krisztina Orban (Philosophy/Cogsci, CIN/Philosophy)
‘Touch and Self-directed Actions’
3.30 - 4.00 pm Coffee
4.00 - 5.00 pm Cornelius Schwarz (Neuroscience, CIN)
'Different functional neuronal systems modulate the brain’s own tactile input'

5.00 - 6.00 Hong Yu Wong (Philosophy/Cogsci, CIN/Philosophy)
'The Sense of Embodiment'

Belonging to the In-Between

At first glance, the concept of "belonging" appears to imply connection to a clearly defined entity—be it a family, group, nation, or culture. Within this framework, the idea of belonging to the "in-between" may seem paradoxical or even contradictory. Yet, given the profound challenges that traditional notions of belonging have posed for humanity—particularly in shaping modern identities and mediating human interactions in an increasingly interconnected world—it becomes imperative to rethink and expand our understanding of belonging. Read more on the wokshop or download the program.

“Philosophical Pragmatism and the Ethics of Attention”

Großer Senat (Neue Aula), 6.30 pm

Our behavior is most readily subject to ethical evaluation when it is deliberate behavior, that is, in instances when we are paying careful attention to what we are doing. Moreover, paying attention is itself a kind of doing, something that we can do poorly or well, or fail to do altogether. Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch made this last claim the centerpiece of their philosophy, the foundational insight that grounds an “ethics of attention.” The goal of this lecture is to explore the potential relationship between classical American philosophical pragmatism and an ethics of attention. The thought of pragmatists like William James, Charles Peirce, and Josiah Royce is portrayed as supplying valuable resources for the development of such an ethic. Since meditation can be understood as the practice of paying attention, the lecture also includes a brief  attempt to assess the philosophical and moral relevance of certain spiritual exercises. 

In winter 2024/25, Sudeh Mishra is visiting the University of Tübingen as a New Horizons Fellow. Sudesh Mishra is not only a scholar – namely, Professor of Literature at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji –, but also a writer, more precisely a poet, playwright and short story writer.

We would like to welcome Sudesh not only as a scholar to the city of Tübingen, but also – against the backdrop of the efforts to build research relationships in the field of artistic research and the Hölderlinturm for creative education – to introduce him and his poetry to a German audience.  With this in mind, the College of Fellows is organising a reading of his poetry in collaboration with the Hölderlinturm, the ‘Critical Proximities’ cluster initiative and the SLT on 22 January at 7 pm. All interested parties are cordially invited, admission is free; the event will be held in English. Sudesh has a new poem on Hölderlin-Celan he has promised to share. 

Poetry 

Rahu (Vision, 1987)

Tandava (Meanjin Press, 1992) ISBN 0-9592528-1-9

Memoirs of a Reluctant Traveller (Wakefield Press, 1994) ISBN 1-86254-315-1

Diaspora and the difficult art of dying (University of Otago, 2002) ISBN 1-877276-18-9

The Lives of Coat Hangers (University of Otago, 2016)

Bio

Sudesh Mishra wurde 1962 in Suva geboren und in Fidschi und Australien ausgebildet. Er promotierte an der Flinders University und wurde mit einem ARC-Postdoktorandenstipendium, dem Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry (für sein erstes Buch) und einem Asialink-Aufenthalt an der Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, ausgezeichnet. Darüber hinaus erhielt er das Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara Fellowship an der Otago University, Dunedin, und das Erskine Fellowship an der Canterbury University in Christchurch. Seine Werke wurden in vielen Anthologien veröffentlicht, darunter The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, Lines Review: Twelve Modern Young Indian Poets, Contemporary Australian Poetry, Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English und Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980. Er hat fünf Gedichtbände veröffentlicht, darunter The Lives of Coat Hangers (2016) und Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying (2002), beide bei Otago University Press erschienen.

“The Leonidas Fijians: A Minor History”

In Fiji’s Indian Migrants, K.L. Gillion remarks en passant on five Fijians who travelled with the first batch of Indian coolies from Calcutta to Fiji in 1879. The men were recruited to work as topazes, or menials answerable to the ship’s surgeon, aboard the ship Leonidas, in exchange for a passage home. While Gillion fails to dwell on the presence in Calcutta of these Islanders from the South Seas, his provocative aside troubles the popular view of Fijians as sedentary subjects of a colonial policy that discouraged the disruption of traditional life-worlds. It also calls into question the general perception that girmit or‘indentured service’ was an exclusively Indian affair. Although they were not indentured to colonial plantations, the Islanders shared with the coolies the micropolitical spaces of the depot, the ship and the quarantine station. They participated in the regimes and regulations of the indenture system. These Fijians unsettle two distinct accounts of history by not conforming to either. They furnish another instance of Islander mobility in the time of modernity. 

Key words: minor history, indentured labour, mobile Fijians, colonial policy

“Poor Work, Insecurity and Citizenship: Thinking With and Against Migration”
Poor and insecure work is a growing problem, even in the rich world. ‘Precarious work’ as it is sometimes called, is often particularly visible in the case of migrant workers.  Certain groups of migrants are vulnerable to extreme exploitation and trafficking and can be the focus of considerable concern about ‘modern slavery’ for example. However, emphasising the problems of migrants risks overlooking important connections with the problems of citizens, creating hierarchies of victimhood rather than uncovering shared interest. It also can mean that we fail to consider how precarity and vulnerability are produced, for migrants and citizens alike. In her presentation Bridget Anderson thought with and against migration. She considerd how immigration controls function, and how a combination of nationality and skills puts certain kinds of people in certain kinds of jobs and affects access to the welfare state. Immigration controls also give employers important mechanisms of control over migrants once they are in those jobs. In this way she thought WITH migration in relation to precarity and then turned to thinking AGAINST migration and arguing that nationality and skills are connected to race and class but at the same time are used to separate global populations and workers. 

The talk was  followed by a reception by the College of Fellows and the platform Global Encounters at Kleiner Senat offering the opportunity for further exchange and networking.

Bridget Anderson’s Vorlesung bildete das Eröffnungsevent des Tübingen Forum on Social Resonances of Societal Crises (TüFoRCe) und wurde veranstaltet von der Plattform Global Encounte

Screening and discussion with the director Hermilío Santos of the documentary film ‘Lifeworld: The sociology of Alfred Schütz’

Abstract: For several years, Hermílio Santos, Professor of Sociology at PUCRS (Porto Alegre, Brazil), has been making documentary films alongside his research work. His aim is to use these films to discuss and disseminate research findings. The documentary film ‘Lifeworld: The sociology of Alfred Schütz’ (Director: Hermílio Santos, 56 ’, 2018) deals with the sociology of Alfred Schütz and presents interviews on various aspects of the work of the Austrian-American sociologist. The film is divided into four parts that deal with some aspects of his biography, the theoretical influences on his work, the main concepts of his sociological theory and the question of how the sociology of Alfred Schütz is currently used in theoretical and empirical studies. The interviews were conducted and filmed in Vienna, New York, Tokyo, Porto Alegre and Buenos Aires. After the screening, the film's director discussed some of the topics explored in the film and the process of using documentary film in sociological research. The original languages are English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, French and Portuguese and was screened with English subtitles.

About: Hermílio Santos is Professor of Sociology at PUCRS (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Porto Alegre) and Professor of the Graduate Programme in Social Sciences at the School of Humanities. Santos has been President of the Research Committee ‘Biography and Society’ of the International Sociological Association since 2018 and is President of the Section ‘Biography and Society’ of the International Sociological Association (ISA). In 2022 he worked as a visiting researcher at the Centre for Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge. In 2023, he is the first visiting professor of the Tübingen CAPES Chair Programme, which is based on a partnership between the Brazilian funding organisation CAPES and the University of Tübingen; the Baden-Württemberg Brazil and Latin America Centre and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies (ICGSS) at the University of Tübingen are also involved. Santos presents his academic work and film productions in various formats, in which he deals with topics such as violence, adolescence, borders, slavery and gas and oil production platforms.

Deep Chand (Global Encounters Fellow): “How Does Protest Shape Neighbourhood Cohesion? A Case Study of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi”

Datum und Uhrzeit: Fr, 29. November 2024, 12 Uhr
Ort: Villa Köstlin, Seminarraum (Rümelinstr. 27, 72070 Tübingen)

Abstract: Shaheen Bagh is a residential neighbourhood inhabited by Muslim working-class families in southeast Delhi. The neighbourhood drew national and international attention when Muslim women started protesting against the police brutality on students of Jamia Millia Islamia University, a central university located in Delhi. These student protests were directed against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA), which the Indian government passed in December 2019 with the aim of granting citizenship to illegal migrants from six non-Muslim communities from three neighbouring countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan). 

Protesters demanded the revocation of the Act, which they said discriminates against Muslims based on their religion and hence excludes them from citizenship eligibility criteria. This violates the principle of secularism enshrined in the Indian constitution.

Using in-depth interviews and mass media analysis, this lecture aims to understand how the Shaheen Bagh protests shape neighbourhood cohesion. It will analyse this through concepts of solidarity and ethics of care.

"To save a stranger, first love your home": a special screening of the indie documentary The Volunteers – im d.a.i. Tübingen

Join American documentary filmmaker, scholar of American studies, and emeritus professor of constitutional law Mark S. Weiner as he screens and answers questions about his new feature-length indie documentary essay The Volunteers: Mountain Rescue Brings Us Home (Hidden Cabinet Films, 105 minutes). The film explores big philosophical and political issues through an unlikely subject: mountain rescue—specifically in the connection between two mountain rescue organizations, one in Seattle, Washington, the other in Tyrol, Austria. This connection ultimately runs through World War II, and Nazism, and their lessons for civic life today. Weiner's underlying premise is that mountain rescue offers a positive, inspiring way of thinking about civic life, especially the relation between local attachment to place and universal human solidarity, that can help transcend political differences.

Short Bio: Mark S. Weiner (A.B., American Studies, Stanford University; Ph.D., American Studies, Yale University; J.D., Yale Law School) is professor emeritus at Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey. A scholar of the public humanities, he co-curated "Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection" for the Grolier Club in New York, whose catalogue was awarded the Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award from the American Association of Law Libraries. He has been a Fulbright Scholar to Akureyri, Iceland and Salzburg, Austria, and he served as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Uppsala, Sweden.

Intercultural Encounters Beyond Racist Politics
Event in the context of Tübingen's Science & Innovation Days 2024 on the topic: „Besser Streiten. Gemeinsam arbeiten wir dran.“ | #SIDays24 | www.sidays.com

This event is part of our Focus Group “FarRight Threats to Democracy”

Date: Saturday, November 16, 2024, 14:00–15:30 pm
Location: Alte Aula

Keynote speech by Prof. Andreas Zick, University of Bielefeld, followed by a panel discussion with Q&A session.

Who decides on who belongs to our society? How can we ensure that origin is not framed as a source of potential conflict, but is valued as a feature of diversity? Among other things, the panel will examine experiences of everyday racism, the perception of intercultural conflicts and demands for integration. In a discussion (in English) with Prof. Andreas Zick and international research fellows, we will talk about the enrichment that societies experience through living together with people from different cultures.
 

Guest Lecture by Dr Noam Leshem

Do, 17. Oktober 2024, 19:00 Uhr
Alte Aula, Tübingen (Münzgasse 30)

The College of Fellows invited all international fellows, university staff and students to the opening of the semester. Dr Noam Leshem (Durham University) gave a lecture on the topic of his new book, Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land. The lecture was followed by a reception. The evening provided an opportunity to socialise and network and to learn more about the College of Fellows and its projects and services for international fellows.

Abstract
This lecture interrogated no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. It documented the short history of Rukban, a camp on the border of Syria and Jordan, and how it sheds light on our contemporary political moment of abandonment. The lecture grappled with the possibility that Rukban may not be an exception, but a harbinger of more concerning political futures.

About
Dr. Noam Leshem ist Associate Professor im Department of Geography und am Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Er forscht zu Colonial & Settler Colonial Space, Cultural and Political History, War and Violent Conflict, Cultural heritage, State violence, Middle East/North Africa History, Politics and Culture. Zu seinen Publikationen gehören u.a. Life After Ruin, “A Rough and Charmless Place: Other Spaces of History in Tel Aviv”, “Memory Activism: reclaiming spatial histories in Israel”, “Re-inhabiting no-man's land: genealogies, political life and critical agendas”. Besondere Projekte sind die Expedition „No Man’s Land“ und die immersive Online-Karte „Portraits of No Man’s Land“ (s. auch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ScgFIleyM). 

"Action, Body, and Space"
With a keynote by New Horizons Fellow Professor Patrick Haggard: "Is Space Motoric?"

Wednesday, 16 October 2024, 09:30 am.– 5pm.
Villa Köstlin (Rümelinstr. 27, Tübingen)

The programme can be found here.

We have witnessed in the last years and months a global upsurge of violent conflicts that jettison every form of respect of international law, human rights and principles of justice, despite the decades-long existence of international juridic and peace-keeping instances, such as the United Nations, or of political projects that are built on the idea of universal human rights and rule of law, such as Europe. The aim of these workshops was to reflect on the causes which made possible this global critical situation but also and above all on future perspectives which could replace this situation. 
If it is commonly admitted that violence and war is opposed to or amounts to absence of peace, how should we conceive this notion and which possibilities can philosophy offer in this respect? Should we think peace as a mere absence of violence and war, or should we concede to peace an ontological primacy and positive consistency, as does Levinas? Is peace opposed to every form of conflict or can it be on the contrary built only on the basis of conflicts which lead to mutual recognition (Ricœur) or radical democracy (Mouffe)? Does peace necessarily entail a specific global political and juridical form of organization, such as the Kantian idea of a world republic, with all the ambiguities that it entails? What kind of living together (Dewey) and thinking together (Arendt) does it presuppose? These questions were not analysed only from a general perspective, but also grounding in a reflection on concrete forms of violence and peace. Ultimately this initiative aimed at developing a philosophical vocabulary of peace, which would be embedded in different philosophical traditions but at the same time also attuned to the challenges of the contemporary world. The workshop was organized by Veronica Cibotaru. 

Speakers: 

• Michael Onyebuchi Eze (California State University): Peace Narratives and the Limits of Justice: A Decolonial Perspective
• Nicolas de Warren (Pennsylvania State University): Peace and justice in Rosenzweig and Levinas
• Henny Blomme (Université Libre de Bruxelles): Kant’s juridical program for peace
• Stephan Parmentier (KU Leuven)

From 8 to 10 October the College of Fellows hosted the Conference Rombachs Denken und die ostasiatische Philosophie. Find more information here. 

Under the title "Mirroring Society in Neuroscience", the College of Fellows organised an interdisciplinary panel discussion on 9 July between Vittorio Gallese and Andreas Heinz, Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Charité Berlin, in which they discussed the mirroring relationships between society and neuroscience from different perspectives and addressed the following questions, among others:

Where is my mind? What influence does the paradigm of embodied cognition, which does not localise it (solely) in the head, have on the understanding of human development and social interactions? How do neuroscientific paradigms or pathologising psychiatric diagnoses reflect social beliefs?

About the Panel Discussion
In this interdisciplinary panel discussion, Professor Vittorio Gallese and Professor Andreas Heinz, two researchers who seek to pose appropriately complex questions about brain functions as well as mental health and illness, discussed the mirroring relationships between society and neuroscience from different perspectives. This is because the functioning of the brain cannot be described if its continuous interactions with the body and the social environment are disregarded. Medical and psychiatric diagnoses are also always in the context of social discourses on mental illness or health, for example.

Gallese and Heinz each gave a short keynote speech followed by a moderated discussion; both are not only leading experts in their respective disciplines, but also experienced advocates of interdisciplinary dialogue. 
The discussion was moderated by Dr Niels Weidtmann (College of Fellows) and Professor Andreas Bartels (Neurosciences/ Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience).

About the Focus Group "Neuroscience and Society"
The event took place as one of the activities of the Focus Group "Neuroscience and Society" at the College of Fellows.
The Neuroscience and Society Focus Group works on interdisciplinary issues at the interface of neuroscience and the humanities. It investigates the extent to which neuroscientific research is relevant to the humanities and social sciences - and vice versa. The fact that human behaviour and actions are increasingly being attributed to neuronal processes poses challenges for the humanities and social sciences, whose areas of expertise have so far included such questions, but also offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary research work. Crossing disciplinary boundaries opens up unexpected perspectives here, so that subject-specific questions can be given a new perspective and answers can be found together. 

The Focus Group aims to promote an exchange between neurosciences and cognitive sciences, psychiatry and the humanities and social sciences such as philosophy and literary studies and thus stands in the tradition of the "CIN Dialogues at the Interface of the Neurosciences and the Arts and Humanities" co-organised by the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neurosciences and the College of Fellows. It offers a place for interdisciplinary dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Tübingen, where internationally renowned neurosciences meet strong humanities and social sciences.The Focus Group organises its activities in the summer semester 2024 around the stay and research work of Professor Vittorio Gallese.

Professor Vittorio Gallese (Neurophysiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind/University of Parma/Unit of Neuroscience, Dept. of Medicine and Surgery, University of Parma, Italy/Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York, USA), Professor of Psychobiology at the Università degli Studi di Parma since 2006, is recognised as one of the world's leading experts in the field of social neuroscience. He was Professor of Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London (2016-2018), Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (2016-2020), KOSMOS Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2013-2014) and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA (2002). Gallese is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind and one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. In his research, he seeks to understand the functional organisation of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, such as empathy and sympathy, language, and aesthetic experience. His interdisciplinary work incorporates findings and approaches from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Professor Andreas Heinz (since 2002 Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy CCM, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin), studied medicine, philosophy and anthropology. He qualified for professorship (Habilitation) in psychiatry and psychotherapy in 1998 and obtained a PhD on the concept of mental health in philosophy in 2013. Since 2012, he has been the vice chair of the Aktion für Psychisch Kranke. 2010-2014, he was the president of the German Society for Biological Psychiatry (DGBP). 2008-2011, he was the spokesperson of the Conference of University Chairs of Psychiatry in Germany. Since 2009, he has been a member of the board of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology. His research interests include neurourbanism, the effects of migration and social exclusion on mental health, the consequences of poverty in the social neighbourhood context and the effects of urban risk factors on the manifestation of psychotic and addictive disorders. Heinz is a proponent of a person-centred approach and open wards in psychiatry. In 2011, he was elected to the Leibnitz chair at the Leibnitz-Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg, in recognition of outstanding research in Neuroscience. 

Dr Flavia Guerra Cavalcanti
"Ocean Thinking as a challenge to the modern territorial imagination in International Relations "
Abstract
This research explores the critical potential of "more-than-wet ontology" (Steinberg, Peters, 2015) to comprehend contemporary articulations between land and sea in International Relations Theorizing. We start from the assumption, already studied by other scholars, that the principal tenets of the discipline of International Relations rely on a myriad of dichotomies such as order/anarchy, inside/outside, domestic/international, and Land/Sea. However, compared to others, the opposition land/sea still needs more theory in international relations. Thinking about the Ocean does not demand an epistemological change in international relations since it is the rational subject that observes nature and tries to tame the supposedly irrational attributes historically associated with the Sea. On the contrary, thinking with the Sea invites us to consider the productiveness of the Ocean. The Ocean's liquid materiality, motion, and temporality allow for new ways of thinking that are impossible when only thinking with the Land (Peters & Steinberg, 2015).

On 20 and 21 June the Intercultural Studies workshop "Landscape and Imaginary: Philophy, Arts, Literature" organized by Dr Lorena Grigoletto und Dr Niels Weidtmann took place in the Builing of the Neue Aula.

You can take a look at the flyer here. 

Abstract
The proliferation of terms derived from the word “landscape” (cityscape, seascape, soundscape, inscape, etc.), as well as the association of a second term specifying its typology (cultural landscape, digital landscape, etc.), testifies to the richness and current fortune of this concept. A semantic extension that nevertheless needs to be discussed, in particular due to the ambiguous proximity of the term “landscape” with other words sometimes understood synonymically (atmosphere, scenery, setting). Indeed, since the first reflections on landscape in the philosophical sphere (Simmel), the term has certainly gained a new phase in its already complex evolution. The contrast between the unity of the term “nature” and the multiplicity inherent in the word “landscape” signals a fundamental change of direction in the sphere of thought, first and foremost linked to the critique of dualism and the attempt to rearticulate and overcome various dichotomies (nature-culture, object-subject, I-other). Landscape, in fact, understood as the peculiar physiognomy of a territory determined by its physical, anthropic, biological and ethnic characteristics, is inseparable from the observer and the way in which it is perceived and experienced. The notion of landscape, therefore, represents a challenge in the intercultural sphere because it forces us to question the presence or absence of a similar term in different languages, as well as a set of formal elements that characterise its representation in art or literature. The predilection for the term “landscape”, therefore, supports and even stimulates the need to explore different epistemological perspectives. The debate on the existence or non-existence of “landscape” in different cultures, as well as its “birth”, according to certain art historiography, during the Renaissance, is also part of this. The history of landscape as a pictorial genre, the area in which the term initially consolidated, is thus increasingly joined by landscape as a dimension of existence and as a specific way of relating to the territory, capable of sanctioning the assumption of different paradigms and introducing new aesthetic, ethical and political practices. Its belonging to the realm of the visible as much as to that of the invisible also makes it a “place” of reflection par excellence in the sphere of studies on the imaginary. The term “imaginary”, which is also controversial, refers here to a certain tradition of thought (Bachelard, Durand) according to which it is not opposed to reality. Instead, it is understood as a totality composed of a linguistic dimension (metaphors, symbols, narratives) and an iconic dimension (paintings, photographs) capable of forming coherent and dynamic ensembles. In this perspective, the aim of this workshop is to reflect jointly on these two concepts, landscape and imaginary, in their widest possible semantic scope. In order to explore the relationship between landscape and the imaginary in philosophy, the arts and literature, we will focus on the following thematic axes: the relationship between landscape, perception and representation; the link between landscape and identity in an intercultural and/or postcolonial perspective; the link between landscape and ecology. Finally, the scientific-academic research will be flanked by a moment of transdisciplinary reflection by artists defined as “process-creation window”. The metaphor of the window, so important for the foundation of the pictorial genre of landscape, will therefore be the occasion for a focus on the landscape as it appears and is implicated in the processes of art.  

The exhibition “On se prend la main” aimed at making heard queer voices from different cultural contexts and portrays personal stories of LGBTQAI+ experiences in form of narratives, poems, and images collected from students and fellows.

The exhibition could be seen at Tübingen's Brauwerk Freistil throughout June 2024.
It was organised as part of Pride Month in cooperation with our fellows, students of the Master's programme "Cultures of the Global South", and the Center for Gender and Diversity Research. 

Dr Weiao Xing
"The French Jesuit Relations as Theology and Travel Literature in Charles II’s Library"

Abstract
Two volumes of the Jesuit Relations, bound in burgundy leather, had entered the English royal collection by the late seventeenth century. The Relations were a series of missionary reports written by French Jesuits in New France. From 1632 to 1673, most of these reports were annually published in Paris, under the title Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France (Relation of What Occurred in New France) […]. In seventeenth-century England, despite prevailing anti-Catholicism, volumes of the Relations were owned by book collectors, including John Morris, before being acquired by Charles II. Building upon material approaches in the history of books, this talk further zooms in on royal library catalogues from seventeenth-century England to explain how Charles II’s librarians perceived two copies of the Relations, now preserved at the British Library, as theology and travel writing. By examining surviving book copies alongside catalogues, further research will shed new light on early modern books by uncovering the motivations of librarians, who acted as book managers, keepers, and readers.

About Weiao Xing
Weiao Xing (PhD in History, Cambridge, 2023) is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Global Encounters Platform and the Institute of Modern History, University of Tübingen. He previously consulted primary sources as a short-term fellow at the British Library, Huntington Library, and Massachusetts Historical Society. Weiao’s thesis research focuses on languages, translation, and encounters in the 17th-century North Atlantic world, which will underpin his first book project. Weiao has been working on journal articles and book chapters about language learning, historical narratives, and drama in English-Indigenous and French-Indigenous encounters. He is currently examining the French Jesuit Relations and the Algonquian Bible, incorporating approaches in cultural history and the history of books.

Organized by Niels Weidtmann and Abbed Kanoor

9–11 May 2024
University of Tübingen, online (via Zoom)
The conference will be held in English

Keynotes: Augustin Berque, Edward Casey, Nathalie Depraz, Tao DuFour, Workineh Kelbessa Golga, Anke Graness, Tim Ingold, Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu, Kwok-ying Lau, Rita Segato, Jaroslava Vydrová

Theme: The study and intercultural comparison of topoi, places and spaces are of great importance for intercultural philosophy: (i) intercultural thinking itself can be described as topographical, building on the stronger turn to space in philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. (ii) Differently designed places and spaces can open up new and non-textual accesses to other cultural life-worlds.

Read more about the conference here or download the detailed program here. The conference will take place in-person at Tübingen University. However, online participation via ZOOM will be possible as well. Please register for free via infospam prevention@cof.uni-tuebingen.de. You will receive the invitation link a few days prior to the conference. The link allows you to participate in all sessions. 

Mit Prof. Dr. Melissa Frazier (Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY)
Di, 7. Mai 2023, 14:30 Uhr 
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Tübingen, d.a.i.-Saal (d.a.i., Karlstr. 3)

African-Americans have long identified with Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) both as a great poet and as a poet of partly African descent.  Join us for a combined screening and discussion that will focus on the work of two Black artists in particular. 

Melissa Frazier is a professor of Russian Language and Russian and Comparative Literature. Current projects include Dostoevsky and the detective novel and the intersections of Russian and African American literature. Frazier is a DAAD visiting professor at the Slavic Department in Tübingen during the summer semester 2024. 

Lesen Sie die detaillierten Informationen zum Workshop hier, oder auf der Homepage des d.a.i.

In Kooperation mit dem d.a.i., dem Slavischen Seminar der Universität Tübingen und dem Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienst (DAAD). 

Laden Sie hier das gesamte Sommerprogramm des d.a.i. herunter. 

With a Lecture by Professor Vittorio Gallese (Professor of Psychobiology at the Università degli Studi di Parma): "Embodying neural representations: Neural reuse and embodied simulation"

Abstract
In the last decades technological advancements providing new tools to study the brain in humans and non-human animals boosted the enormous progress of Neuroscience. This progress brought along a diversity of approaches, levels of description and the focusing on different granularities, so that a unified theory of brain function and its relationship to behavior is currently not available. Thus, the notion of neural representation is a topic of ongoing debate and controversy within the field of cognitive neuroscience. The relevant literature includes very diverse theoretical approaches, ranging from the neo-phrenological approach, assigning to specific brain modules specific cognitive functions, to dynamic system theory-inspired approaches, holding that brain neural activity emerges from the interactions among interconnected neurons, rather than being solely determined by fixed neural representations.

In my lecture the notion of neural representation will be addressed from an embodied perspective, discussing embodied simulation theory within the framework of neural reuse. It will be argued that being, feeling, acting, and knowing describe different modalities of our relations to the world, all sharing a constitutive underpinning bodily root that maps into dynamic ways of functioning of the brain-body. Brain architecture does not respect the boundaries of standard mental terms and categories. Mental terms and categories are the loose and imprecise verbal descriptions of a variety of complex cognitive behaviors that we are not yet able to fully explain in terms of their underlying neural and bodily mechanisms.

Bio
Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Psychobiology at the Università degli Studi di Parma since 2006, is recognised as one of the world's leading experts in the field of social neuroscience. He was Professor of Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London (2016-2018), Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (2016-2020), KOSMOS Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2013-2014) and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA (2002). Gallese is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind and one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. In his research, he seeks to understand the functional organisation of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, such as empathy and sympathy, language, and aesthetic experience. His interdisciplinary work incorporates findings and approaches from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Workshop "Kenosis and Its Ethics in a Contemporary and Intercultural Perspective"
7.– 8. February 2024, University of Tübingen
Organisation: Dr. Norihito Nakamura, PD Dr. Niels Weidtmann

Thema:
Today, we humans are living in excesses: Information, population, production, and consumption surpass any previous point in our long human history and the global movement of people, goods, and money still continues to escalate. Since the 19th century, each nation state has devoted itself to increasing its own wealth in imperialistic competition, and educated people to conform to that nationalistic discipline. However, suffering from multiple crises, our global society seeks for a new life-form completely different from our previous one, which could be grounded not in growth and triumph, but in reducing and discarding. In other words, we need an alternative “weak” image of the human being capable of humility and negation, rather than a “strong” image of the human being oriented toward growth and overcoming.
What, then, is this “weak” ethical way of life? In this workshop, we aim to explore this ideal through the concept of “kenosis.” Kenosis is derived from the words of the Bible in the Letter to the Philippians, and refers to the act of humility in which Jesus renounced his immortality and eternity, and dared to die in the form of a slave. In the field of theology, since Luther, this has been variously considered as an important motif underlying the “theology of the cross,” which emphasizes the finitude of God rather than the “theology of glory,” which emphasizes the omnipotence of God.

Since the late 20th century, when we became more aware of the environmental crisis, the threat of nuclear war, the negative consequences of colonialism, and gender inequality throughout human history, this concept of kenosis has been widely considered in relation to contemporary issues beyond the narrow confines of Christian theology. (I) For example, within theology or religious studies, Salie McFague (1933-2019) focused on kenosis as an ethical way of life to critique contemporary consumerism and proposed the kenotic Christianity as the new figure of religion in climate change. (II) In the field of contemporary philosophy, Gianni Vattimo (1936- ) placed kenosis at the center of “weak thought,” his own project to criticize metaphysics. Emmanuel Levinas and Hans Jonas also observed the possibility of a dialogue between Christianity and Judaism within the concept of kenosis. (III) From an intercultural perspective, Japanese philosophy of the latter half of the 20th century can also serve as a point of inquiry. For example, Kazoh Kitamori (1919-98), one of the leading theologians of postwar Japan, seriously reflected on the catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and thoroughly criticized conventional Christianity from the standpoint of “theology of the cross.” Kitamori drew inspiration from the Kyoto School, particularly his teachers Keiji Nishitani and Hajime Tanabe. His influential work, The Pain of God (1946), is said to have influenced Jürgen Moltmann, credited with sparking the contemporary renaissance of kenosis. This narrative reveals the practice of a philosophical dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism, as well as between the West and the East. 

What kenosis teaches us is that, to survive this crisis, we must learn to give up, abandon, be unable, rather than to gain, triumph or overcome. Such a message is not only actual but also traditional. In this workshop, conducted in collaboration with scholars from diverse fields and nations, we strive to investigate contemporary challenges from a foundational vantage point, employing the dialectic of orthodoxy and innovation. Consequently, might not the ideals of kenosis empower us to illuminate the essence of past philosophies and religions in a novel light, contextualized within the milieu of the contemporary crisis? Moreover, could this novel interpretation not also unite philosophers hailing from diverse cultural spheres and disciplines within the same hermeneutic horizon, thereby catalyzing the conceptualization of an alternative and ethical mode of existence?

Das vollständige Programm gibt es hier. 

Dr Stefano Floris (Institute of Biblical Archaeology)
"History of a Punic city, seen from its Tophet: a Sardinian perspective"

Abstract
Child incineration sanctuaries, conventionally known as “Tophet”, are typical of some of the most important central Mediterranean Phoenician colonies. Due to the varied nature of the sources available for their study (e.g., literary, epigraphic, archaeological, bioarchaeological), such sanctuaries constitute a fascinating topic, ideal for the implementation of an interdisciplinary research method aimed at reconstructing the complex ritual actions performed at these sites.
Central to the present talk was the "city" value of the Tophet. These religious institutions played a fundamental role in the lives of the cities where they were placed. As a rule, the activity of the Tophet is centuries old and knows no interruption, from the city's foundation until its end, usually coinciding with the gradual integration of the Punic community within the Roman system.
Thus, the Tophet archaeological contexts are a privileged and fundamental source for the study not only of religious beliefs and practices but also of the history of their Punic cities.

Bionote
After studying Archaeology at the University of Bologna, Stefano Floris earned his doctorate at Ca' Foscari University, Venice, with a thesis on Tharros’ Tophet. He participated in archaeological missions in Sardinia, Armenia, Tunisia, and Lebanon and he is co-director of the “Tophet of Bithia Archaeological Project” led by Ca' Foscari University, Venice. Since June 2022 he has been a Humboldt postdoc fellow at the University of Tübingen. His research focuses on Phoenician burial customs between the Levant and the central Mediterranean.

Dr Riccardo Marin (Tübingen AI Center)
"Connecting the (Digital) Dots: Studying relations in 3D geometries for human virtualization"

Abstract 
Geometry surrounds our lives, and we recognize ourselves as part of the 3D world. While we intuitively interact with it, the study of geometry has tickled scholars since the dawn of civilization. The advent of computers opened dramatic opportunities like the simulation of surgeons, assisted architecture design, or navigating imaginary limitless universes. It’s not surprising that, as human beings, we reserve to ourselves an important spot in geometry studies. Modern technologies can acquire, digitize, and imitate human appearance at a stage that is indistinguishable from reality. The industry has a substantial bet on this: embodying ourselves in a blended experience between real and digital worlds promises to change our perceptions and how we relate to each other. To this end, tools to establish analogies between geometrical data (and hence human bodies) are crucial: deciding what is similar, what is different, or, namely, what is in correspondence are fundamental research questions to complete our understanding.

Bionote
Riccardo Marin has obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Verona. He has been a Post Doctoral researcher at Sapienza University of Rome, and now at the AI Center of the University of Tübingen in the Real Virtual Humans Group. He is a Member of the ELLIS Society, a Humboldt Fellow, and is now funded by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. His research focuses on 3D Shape Analysis, Geometric Deep Learning, and Virtual Humans.

Junior-Professor Dr Jacky Kosgei 
"Decanonisation Research Methodologies: Working with Oral, Non-Europhone Texts"

Abstract
Ngugi wa Thiong’o argued that the lower esteem with which oral material was historically treated became ‘the basis for expelling some cultures from history and complex thoughts, consigning them to a place in hell’. Moving beyond this much discussed albeit inconclusive debate on the tension between orality and literacy, this talk took a more productive path, asking, what happens to theories of community formation when previously hidden, ignored, and suppressed oral knowledge is unearthed? Taking as a case in point the history of Fort Jesus in Mombasa, Jacky Kosgei thought about the implications of such a project, showing the theoretical and narrative possibilities that reside in an attempt to re-figure the colonial archive. The aim was to make manifest the constellation of ideas, truths, and realities that emerge when new perspectives are brought to light. 

Bionote
Jacky Kosgei is a junior professor of Global Epistemologies at University of Tübingen in Germany. Her interdisciplinary research which is located at the intersection of Atlantic & Indian Ocean literary, cultural, historical and anthropological studies, explores African and Afrodiasporic connections from the 15th century to the present. 

Dr Hyunjin Kim
"Acetate to Protein: Conversion of Simple Chemicals to Feeding the World"

Abstract
Edible microbial biomass, known as single-cell protein (SCP), is a promising alternative to conventional food sources. However, most commercially available products use plant-derived sugars as a substrate to produce SCP, which does not circumvent traditional agriculture. Using the simple organic compound acetate to cultivate SCP is a promising alternative. Some technologies recently emerged for converting carbon dioxide and renewable power via hydrogen gas into acetate, supporting the circular economy. In a recent proof-of-concept study, the two-stage power-to-protein (P2P) process, our lab could show microbial protein production from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae with biologically converted acetate as a sole carbon source. This study focuses on increasing the applicability of SCP production from acetate by optimizing the second stage process by growing yeast with high protein content and good nutritional profiles that are harmless for human consumption.

Bio
Hyunjin Kim ist working as a postdoc in the Environmental Biotechnology Group at the University of Tübingen with a Humboldt fellowship. Her research topic is developing processes for making valuable products (such as fuels, chemicals, and protein) from waste materials. She received her Ph.D. from Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea, working on the chain elongation process for producing caproic acid from useless biomass. She is currently researching protein production from acetate that is produced by fixing carbon dioxide with renewable energy.

Marika Pulkkinen:
"Slut-Shaming – Ancient and Modern: Sexual Slander, Shame, and Honor in the Biblical Texts"

Abstract
Shame and honor dynamics is sometimes attached to the societies which are not viewed as cherishing equal rights to all genders. Moreover, there is a tendency to label crimes occurring in certain ethnic and religious contexts in which women are victims of their conjugal partners or family members stemming from honor and shame dynamics. In this vein, they are labelled as “crimes of honor,” whereas the domestic violence occurring in the context of religious and ethnic majority in Western societies is more often labelled as “crimes of passion.” In this presentation, I will problematize the distinction between the “crimes of honor” and the “crimes of passion” by comparing the biblical texts depicting legal sanctions for women suspected of illicit sexual acts to contemporary legal studies in which women are victims of conjugal and family violence. In addition, I will compare the ancient textual material to contemporary examples in which hate speech using sex vocabulary (so-called slut-shaming) is utilized to belittle and marginalize the others.

Bio
Marika Pulkkinen holds a PhD in Theology in the field of Biblical Studies (June 2020, University of Helsinki). Her current project Evoking Shame, Honor, Desire, and Disgust through Vocabulary of Sex Work in the Ancient Jewish Sources and in the New Testament applies perspectives of emotion studies to examine the affect-laden vocabulary of sex work in the biblical texts. In Tübingen, as a visiting scholar, she works as an associate member of the ERC-project QaSLA and as a Fellow of the Center for Religion, Culture and Society.

Dr Eva Falaschi
"Natural Histories in a Global Perspective. Pliny, Oviedo and America: An Ancient Encyclopaedia as a Model to Transfer and Transmit Knowledge"

Abstract
When the Europeans reached America in 1492, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (c. AD 70) was, in Europe, the model for describing nature. How did it influence the first descriptions of the nature of America published in Europe? I will investigate the dynamics of transferring knowledge from the American to the European continent, by focusing on the works by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1476- 1557), who was one of the first Europeans who went to America and wrote about it. In particular, I will ask to what extent characteristic Plinian methods of acquiring and transmitting knowledge (including autopsy, use of local sources, anecdotal narrations, selection and organization of information, aesthetic and religious values of nature, concepts of wonder and otherness) shaped the standards, structures, concepts, and methods that made the knowledge of the nature of America accessible to the European, Latin-influenced culture in the early modern period.

Bio
Eva Falaschi holds a diploma and Ph.D. in archaeology from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and a Master of Arts in Classics from the University of Pisa. From 2014 to 2020, she was a research fellow at the Scuola Normale, working on the reception of Greek art in Roman Imperial literature and, in particular, in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. Between 2021 and 2022, her project on art treatises and artists’ biographies in ancient times was funded by the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University), the James Loeb Gesellschaft / Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (München), and the Getty Research Institute. Her Global Encounters research aims at a historical analysis of global knowledge formation. It examines the impact of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia (c. AD 70) on the understanding and global transmission of America’s natural history in the 16th century. 

Dr Asia Kalinichenko (Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry)
"Food safety and quality assessment using gas sensors and chemometrics: the edible oils case"

Abstract
This lecture was dedicated to the project on the development of alternative sensor-based methods for analyzing food quality and safety, with a focus on the case of edible oils. 
The production of vegetable oils and fats is the one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the global food market. The contemporary speeds and production volumes necessitate a reconsideration of traditional analytical chemistry approaches to perform more effective monitoring of edible oil quality and safety at all stages of the entire food supply chain. The implementation of new sensor-based methods will facilitate fast and efficient analyses without the need for chemical reagents and solvents. In addition, deep machine learning algorithms, incorporating elements of artificial intelligence, combined with SMOX sensors featuring various operation modes, can process data sources to suggest optimized sensor array for targeted gas analytes, as well as enhance the sensitivity and selectivity of methods based on cross-selective sensors. 
The simplicity and affordability of these innovative methods, based on micro gas sensors, make them suitable for application in various settings, including small enterprises, large mills, and regulatory authority labs.

Bionote
Currently, Asia Kalinichenko is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry of Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, supported by a fellowship from Philipp Schwartz-Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Additionally, she holds the position of associate professor at the Department of Foodstuff Expertise at the National University of Food Technology (NUFT) in Kyiv, Ukraine.  
In 2011 she received a B.Eng. degree at the Faculty of Chemistry at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, Ukraine, followed by an M.Tech. degree from NUFT in 2012. In 2021, she defended her Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry. Her research interest focuses on gas sensors and their application for food analysis, food chemistry, data mining and deep machine learning in chemistry. 

Dr Smith Babiaka (Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine)
"Natural Product-Based Discovery of Novel Lead Compounds From Terrestrial and Marine Ecosystems"

Abstract
Natural products (NPs) are known to be a rich source of novel drug leads with unique mechanisms of action. The African continent with Cameroon inclusive has a rich biodiversity with a long history of the use of medicinal plants in the treatment of diseases. Plants and marine sponges have been extracted and analyzed for centuries for medicinal purposes. Several interesting NPs have been isolated from these living organisms and screened against a series of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) which burdens the population. This lecture will focus on the valorisation of NPs from African medicinal plants, isolation, structure elucidation, and bioactivity testing of compounds against a series of NTDs. He also intends to use molecular modelling to explain the structure-activity relationship of some potent compounds isolated from plant species. Next, he would conclude by using molecular networking with GNPS to identify natural products from marine sponges collected off the west coast of Africa.

Bionote
Smith B. Babiaka is a Lecturer at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Buea where he was awarded a PhD in Chemistry in March 2019. Since June 2022, he is a Georg Forster Alexander von Humboldt and Georg Forster-Bayer Research Fellow. He is working in the research group of Prof. Dr. Heike Brötz-Oesterhelt and Dr. Chambers C. Hughes at the University of Tübingen. He has been awarded the ARISE Intra-ACP mobility grant, AGNES junior research grant, MINESUP research grant, ACS best poster ward among others. His previous research has been focused on natural product drug discovery of novel lead compounds from nature. He is a member of ACS, RSC, EFMS-YSN & INPST and others. He is a reviewer of manuscripts from Phytochemistry, Frontiers in Natural Products, ChemBioChem, and Natural Product Research and others. He has about thirty-two peer-reviewed journal publications. 

Guest Lecture by Dr Noam Leshem

Thu, 17 October 2024, 7.00 PM 
Alte Aula, Tübingen (Münzgasse 30)

The College of Fellows cordially invited all international fellows, university members and students to its semester opening event with a Lecture by Dr Noam Leshem. Dr Noam Leshem (Universität Durham) held a lecture about the topics of his newest book Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man’s Land. The lecture was followed by a reception. The evening offered the opportunity to meet and network with both international and Tübingen based scholars and guests, and to learn about the College of Fellows programme and offers for international fellows currently based in Tübingen.

Abstract
This lecture interrogated no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. It documented the short history of Rukban, a camp on the border of Syria and Jordan, and how it sheds light on our contemporary political moment of abandonment. The lecture grappled with the possibility that Rukban may not be an exception, but a harbinger of more concerning political futures.

About
Dr. Noam Leshem ist Associate Professor im Department of Geography und am Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Er forscht zu Colonial & Settler Colonial Space, Cultural and Political History, War and Violent Conflict, Cultural heritage, State violence, Middle East/North Africa History, Politics and Culture. Zu seinen Publikationen gehören u.a. Life After Ruin, “A Rough and Charmless Place: Other Spaces of History in Tel Aviv”, “Memory Activism: reclaiming spatial histories in Israel”, “Re-inhabiting no-man's land: genealogies, political life and critical agendas”. Besondere Projekte sind die Expedition „No Man’s Land“ und die immersive Online-Karte „Portraits of No Man’s Land“ (s. auch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6ScgFIleyM). 

Workshop "Eco-phenomenology: Exploring Eco-phenomenological Concepts and Theories from and for Africa’s Ecological Lifeworld"

Organisation: Dr Abiodun Afolabi, Dr Niels Weidtmann

Theme:
The specific concern of phenomenology is to redirect our consciousness towards what is there in experience. It seeks to understand the fundamental structures of subjective experience in the world. However, its pioneers only make scanty theorizations of human’s experience in, and with, the natural environment. Only recently have scholars begun to apply the classical phenomenological thoughts of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas to address environmental issues like climate change that our world is facing (see Brown and Toadvine 2003; Peeters et al., 2015; Edelglass, 2020; Booth, 2021). The result is the beginning of a new discipline: Eco-phenomenology. 
The engagement of human’s experience in, and with, the natural environment and how the natural world (including its constituent species) shows up for them is central to eco-phenomenology. David Wood, one of the foremost eco-phenomenologists posits that eco-phenomenology can be thought of as a hybridization of phenomenological ecology and ecological phenomenology (Wood, 2019: 14). The sense here is that eco-phenomenology adopts the methods and insights of phenomenology and, at the same time, uses these methods, concepts, and insights for studying the interrelationship between organism and the world in its metaphysical and axiological dimensions.   
Despite the recent wave of eco-phenomenology, there is a surprising need for abundant eco-phenomenological perspectives from the African continent whose situated experiences are often connected to the flora and fauna of the natural environment. Of course, it is not the case that African philosophers do not adopt phenomenology as a method in their research. Many African scholars have used phenomenological approaches to reflect on the lived experiences of Africans to examine how such lived experiences can promote better awareness of their challenges and aid a meaningful response to these challenges (John Sanni, 2019: 2). However, such attempts have been common to theorizing socio-political realities (see Olivier 2023) but very sparse in addressing Africa’s socio-ecological experience (Rootaan, 2019) even now when human ecological consciousness needs to be taken seriously.
Although many African Scholars have reflected on Africa’s ecological crisis from ethical and socio-political standpoint (see Munrove 2009; Behrens 2014; Metz 2015; Kelbessa 2018; Fayemi 2016; Chimakonam 2017; Etieyibo 2017 and 2023; Chemhuru 2019; Ogude and Mushonga 2023; Samuel 2023), a vacuum is yet to be filled by applying phenomenology to the environmental crisis in Africa. This overlooked intellectual space is the focus of this workshop. It is expected at this workshop that both classical and contemporary phenomenological theories will be interpreted and engaged without eschewing analysis of the African social, political, and historical structures which imbue ecological experiences with intersubjective meaning-complexes that are necessary for philosophical understanding. This workshop aims to use eco-phenomenology to analyze African environment or nature-related problems in a bid to contribute important insights that would direct and infuse the habits of thought and action in the everyday lives of African people towards a transformative eco-consciousness.

The Workshop speakers explored, among others, the following questions:
•    In what ways has the African environmental lived experiences provoke or promote attitudes of eco-dissonance, eco-disjunction, and eco-affectivity?
•    Are there peculiar emotional and felt significance of our relations with the more-than-human world in Africa?
•    How can we phenomenologically reconstruct the African environmental relations using eco-relational concepts that are co-adaptively engaging as well as attentive to Africa’s socio-ecological contexts?
•    How does the African experience of a particular place reveal essential experiential qualities of environmental relations?
•    Are there phenomenological theories from Africa that can help promote human-animal relational awareness?
•    What are the normative implications of adopting eco-phenomenology for addressing African environmental crisis with reference to environmental justice and environmental sustainability?

View a detailed program here.  

The lectures were held in German.

Dr Tetjana Midjana (Institut für allgemeine Rhetorik)
"Die Kriegsrhetorik von Wolodymyr Selenskyj und Wladimir Putin und ihre besonderen Merkmale"

Abstract
Der aktuelle Krieg gegen die Ukraine ist nicht nur ein Vernichtungs- sondern auch ein Informationskrieg. Um gegen den russischen Propagandaterror Widerstand zu leisten, wendet sich der ukrainische Präsident Wolodymyr Selenskyj mit täglichen Videoansprachen an sein Volk sowie an die Parlamente und Menschen verschiedener Länder, um den Zusammenhalt der Welt gegen den Aggressor zu stärken. Selenskyjs Reden in Kriegszeiten scheinen sich durch einen hohen persuasiven Charakter auszuzeichnen, denn sie zeigen große mediale Wirkung. Hier lautet die rhetorikanalytische Frage: Was macht diese Reden so wirksam? Das gleiche öffentliche und wissenschaftliche Interesse gilt den Kriegsreden von Russlands Präsidenten Putin, weil es sich um die Reden des Aggressors handelt. Die Textsortenkategorie „Rede“, als Beratungs-, Gerichts- und Lobrede, kommt aus der Rhetorik. Diese in Europa nur in Tübingen mit einem Universitätsinstitut vertretene Wissenschaft bietet das beste Instrumentarium für die Analyse der Kriegsreden, deren Besonderheit darin besteht, jede Kriegsrede als Handlungsinstrument zu untersuchen. Unter rhetoriktheoretischer Perspektive ist die Realisierung von persuasiven Strategien der beiden Protagonisten zentral.

Bionote
Tetiana Midjana studied German language and literature at the University of Lviv (Ukraine). From 1999 to 2004 she was a PhD student with Professor Joachim Knape at the Institute for Rhetoric at the University of Tübingen and completed her doctorate on the topic of "Periphrase". Since 2005 she has been a lecturer at the Department of German Philology at the University of Lviv. Since 1 April 2022, she has been a research associate at the Institute for Rhetoric. The project is funded by the University of Tübingen and the Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Prof. Raluca Rădulescu (Deutsches Seminar)
"Koloniale Seefahrten in der deutschen Literatur"

Abstract
Seefahrt und Kolonisation sind Phänomene, die in der deutschen Geschichte und Literatur 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts in gegenseitiger Potenzierung zum Ausdruck kommen. Auf ihren Seefahrten müssen die literarischen Figuren nicht nur politische, sondern auch kulturelle Grenzen durchqueren und überwinden. So bietet sich die hohe See als Projektionsfläche europäischer Eroberungsphantasien an, welche die ganze Welt in Anspruch nehmen und somit alle Grenzen zu überschreiten begehren. Doch auf der Seefahrt muss der Einzelne sowie das Kollektiv auf unerwartete Hindernisse und somit an Grenzen stoßen – seien es widrige Naturverhältnisse, Seuchen, aber auch unberechenbare Begegnungen mit kulturell Anderen – die Pläne und Vorstellungen einer Revision unterziehen.
So liefern Meer und Meerfahrt im kolonialen Zusammenhang den Anlass zu einer ästhetischen und ferner hermeneutischen Herausforderung der Bejahung, Hinterfragung oder Kritik überlieferter europäischer Bilder und Expansionsvorstellungen. 
Die Seegeschichten lassen darüber hinaus einen Diskurs der fließenden nationalen und kulturellen Grenzen entstehen, was in der maritimen Globalisierung schon ab der Antike aufkommt und heute (auch im Kontext der Flüchtlingsströme und deren Seenöte und Schiffbrüche) einen ausgeprägten Aktualitätsbezug aufweist. 

Bionote
Raluca Rădulescu is Professor of Intercultural German Studies at the Institute of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest (Romania). Her research interests are: intercultural literature, exile literature, migration literature, cultural theory, modernist poetry, and intermediality. She currently is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with a project on colonial sea voyages in German-language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dr Àlex Mas-Sandoval
"The genetic footprint of racial and gender hierarchies"

Abstract:
Most American populations descend from indigenous Americans, European colonisers and sub-Saharan African slaves. However, the admixture process resulting from the colonisation of the Americas is constrained by socioeconomic and cultural stratification. 
By analysing the DNA fragments of each individual that are inherited from each of these three ancestral populations, we quantify how much the mating has not been random related to the genetic ancestry proportions of males and females.
In this way, we reconstruct how interactions between racial and gender hierarchies shaped population stratification since the colonisation of the Americas. We challenge the oversimplified understanding that mestizaje reduces population stratification: a high degree of mixture cannot translate into a decrease in inequality if it occurs with strongly gendered patterns. Finally, we analyse the role of racialised phenotypes in stratifying the population beyond the effect of socioeconomic stratification. 
Overall, we show how social stratification leaves a footprint in the genetic structure of human populations and how, by studying it, we can reconstruct the evolution of inequalities throughout human history.

Bionote:
Àlex Mas-Sandoval is a population geneticist that studies how evolutionary processes driven by social structure and cultural changes impact the genetic diversity of populations. He got his PhD at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF), in Barcelona, and at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre. There he focused on the reconstruction of the precolonial demographic history from admixed populations of Brazil. Then, during a Postdoc at Imperial College London, he studied how social hierarchies constrain the mating patterns and the admixture dynamics of the populations of the Americas. As a postdoctoral researcher at Università di Bologna, he is focused on understanding the socioeconomic factors that drive assortative mating in these populations.

Dr. Mas-Sandoval is currently a short-term visiting researcher at Universität Tübingen in the framework of the Global Encounters platform, aiming to disentangle how social inequalities and population stratification have impacted a wide range of populations across time and space.

Professor Dr Gregor Paul (Karlsruher Instituts für Technologie):
„Sind nicht alle Menschen Menschen? Ziele, Methoden und Inhalte Interkultureller Philosophie“
(Lecture held in German language)

Abstract:
With the exception of cultural fundamentalists, hardly anyone doubts that there is nothing that connects all cultures or could ultimately unite them, since all cultures are also the work of man. And hardly anyone accepts cultural imperialism. Hardly anyone wants Eurocentrism or sinocentrism.  But as important as such general explanations are for any kind of intercultural philosophy, they require extensive and detailed development. It is about stating precisely, unambiguously, and in a manageable way how to avoid mistakes and achieve goals. How can cultural similarities and differences be identified and explained? Which similarities and differences are important? Which ones are not? And why are they important or not? Above all: What can be inferred, indeed learned, from such statements and explanations?

How is the highest goal of any intercultural engagement, a non-violent intercultural understanding, to be realized? In other words: the goal of establishing a culture that embraces all of humanity, maintains peace and respects human rights, without neglecting the legitimate claims of individual cultures to preserve their distinctiveness?

The lecture focused on methods that allow for universal hypotheses. They were illustrated by examples from the philosophy of human dignity and human rights. The explanations were based, among others, on the "Introduction to Intercultural Philosophy" (WBG 2008) and "Philosophy in the History of China" (Bochum: Project-Verlag 2022).

Bio:
You can read more about Professor Dr Gregor Paul here.

"TamilThanmai: A historical Ethnography of caste and gender in public political lives in Tamil Nadu, India"

Abstract:
This work is a historical ethnography of Sulur, a town in Coimbatore district of Tamilnadu, India. Through in-depth interviews and archives, both personal and public, of textual and visual sources, Ponni Arasu has evolved an analytical framework from which to understand everyday public political lives. With a focus on the 1950s to 70s, before the consolidation of state power and political discourses in Tamil Nadu, she traced public politics from the perspective of the everyday lives of its ordinary members, all of whom are men. Based on this narrative she has identified elements of what she terms TamilThanmai. TamilThanmai, as she proposes, is a historically grounded analytical framework which describes the essence of public political lives that provided a way of being and sense of self for all those who lived it. Her research is a historical ethnography of and through TamilThanmai. Her work analyses the past rigorously with all its complexity in order to imagine and play a role in creating an egalitarian and just society in the future. 

Bio:
Dr Ponni Arasu is a feminist researcher, historian, activist, legal practitioner, translator and theatre artist hailing from Chennai and currently based in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. She is trained in History at the University of Delhi, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Toronto. Her academic work is on historical ethnographies of contemporary India, with specific focus on social movements such as the Dravidian movement and the women's movement(s). Her PhD research has led her to propose a theoretical framework and methodology called TamilThanmai. She has done research in India and Sri Lanka on the realities of those marginalised on the grounds of their gender, sexuality, caste, class, language, labour, ability, ethnicity, religion etc. for the past twenty years. Her research emerges from and feeds back into movements for social change that she is a part of. She has taught entire courses and guest lectures in the disciplines of history, South Asian studies, Tamil studies, women and gender studies, Caribbean studies and anthropology at the University of Toronto - Canada, University of Minnesota - USA, University of Tubingen - Germany, the University of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, the Tata Institute of Social Studies, Azim Premji University and the University of Pune in India. She has been evolving pedagogic methods of teaching the history and contemporary realities of Sri Lanka with a focus on rigorous research methodology and critical thinking in non-formal and yet consistent teaching spaces to Tamil-speaking students from all over Sri Lanka. This has taken the form of the “Ezhuval: for young women and social change” that she has designed and co-teaches, hosted at the Church of the American Ceylon Mission, Batticaloa. For the past three years she has undertaken research projects in Sri Lanka including on women farmers' collectives; lives and movements for change of women living with disabilities in eastern Sri Lanka; the present realities of LGBTQIA+ individuals and on the status of sex workers. She has produced theatre work with collaborators in India and Sri Lanka on a range of issues which are grounded in using the arts to further the important process of making realities of the marginalised visible and accessible to all. Ponni is also a trained expressive arts therapist practicing primarily in Tamil among women and queer folks from marginalised communities in India and Sri Lanka. She is the Arts and Catalyst Fellowship holder for 2023 at the Studio for Movement Arts and Therapies in Bangalore. She is currently a Global Encounters fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tubingen pursuing research on the life of the goddess Mariamman among descendants of largely Dalit indentured workers in Port of Spain, Trinidad and among rural communities in Tamilnadu. She hopes to bring her proposed concept of TamilThanmai as theory and method to this work.

Dr Keyvan Allahyari (Englisches Seminar)
"Abdulrazak Gurnah's Oceanic Border Thinking"

Abstract
In this talk, Dr Keyvan Allahari explores the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001) as a critique of the normative understanding of the border as having a singular, prohibitive function for the refugee, and instead reads it as a call to register the border as a moving and permeable formation. What he calls oceanic border thinking conveys Gurnah’s optic into the imbrication of littoral and land zones, and the effect of proliferation of biopolitical technologies associated with various iterations of colonial and postcolonial bordering, including partitioning, arbitrary detention, deportation and expulsion. Oceanic border thinking enables one’s sense of the world not only in water but onwards into the land, whether it is in Africa, England, and continental Europe. This method helps exploring how cartographic, literary and imaginative conceptions of border as observed from the Indian Ocean, bears the potential to trouble easy categorisations of borders and the histories associated with them.

Bionote
Dr Keyvan Allahyari (PhD, Melbourne 2019) is Postdoctoral Humboldt Fellow at the University of Tübingen and the University of Potsdam, and the incoming Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of Peter Carey: The making of a Global Novelist (Palgrave 2023). His articles have appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (forthcoming), ARIEL (forthcoming), The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel, Australian Humanities Review, Antipodes, Journal of Australian Studies, and JASAL. 

Dr Laurie Atkinson (Englisches Seminar)
"Co-Creativity in Early English Literary Print"

Abstract
Who were the makers of English literature before Shakespeare? And why don’t we talk about them? There were myriad agents involved in the production and consumption of English literary texts during the first decades of printing in England: the patrons, printers, booksellers, et al. who mediated between, and collaborated with, the author and the reader. The collaborative energy which characterised literary production was harnessed in this period to convince an expanding and diversifying readership of the value of new literary texts in English, but it contradicts the post-Romantic notion of the sovereign author as the unmediated and sole source of a text. This talk examines the hugely popular collaborative collection, A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), together with earlier English literary publications, as evidence for the diverse, interactive, but today too often ignored literary agents that made them. It shows how different agencies were emphasised or obscured depending on their perceived vendible qualities and makes a case for the importance of co-creativity to the formation of English literature as we know it today.

Bio note
Laurie Atkinson completed his PhD at Durham University in 2021. He afterwards provided research as an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate for the new Cambridge University Press edition of the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Laurie is now a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tübingen, where he works on early English literary print. His monograph, Ideas of Authorship in the English and Scottish Dream Vision: Skelton, Dunbar, Hawes, Douglas, is scheduled for publication with Boydell & Brewer in March 2024.

Professor Lynne Tirrell (University of Connecticut): "Toxic Speech: Resisting Extremist Rhetoric"
Lecture by Professor Lynne Tirrell (University of Connecticut) as part of the Science&Innovation Days at the University of Tübignen, followed by a panel discussion with Dr Rolf Frankenberger (University of Tübingen, Institute for Research on Right-Wing Extremism) and Felix Steinbrenner (Stabsstelle "Demokratie stärken!", Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Baden-Württemberg).

Lecture abstract:
Speech can be toxic in many ways, to many degrees, and it can cause a variety of different harms. This talk focused on the toxic dimensions of right-wing extremist rhetoric, for two purposes. First, to understand its mechanisms, and second to identify ways to resist and promote resistance. The approach focused on discursive practices rather than one-off speech acts, emphasizing patterns of speech that enact norms shaping how we treat each other, how well we can thrive, and we function as citizens. When a society is besieged by the drumbeat of hate in everyday speech and in political pronouncements, what can the average citizen do? This question was explored together, with a clear eye on what is at stake.

Also check out this event here: www.sidays.com/events/toxische-sprache

#SIDays23
"Resilienz. Gemeinsam arbeiten wir dran."

Guest Lecture by Professor Jan Willem Duyvendak (Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam)
"The Return of the Native. Navigating between nostalgic nativism and hopeful liberalism"

At the beginning of the winter term we invited all international fellows and interested university members to the College of Fellows semester opening event. Duyvendak, building on his co-authored new book The Return of the Native (Oxford University Press, 2023), explored the extraordinary rise of nativism in liberal settings, paying particular attention to nativist narratives that intertwine islamophobia, racism, populism and nostalgia. He discussed the rise of nativism in France, the US and the Netherlands, focusing on striking similarities and small differences.

Following the guest lecture, Professor Dorothee Kimmich (Tübingen) and Professor Boris Nieswand (Tübingen) joined Professor Duyvendak on the podium for a discussion, and the College of Fellows presented its programme and activities it offers to international fellows. The concluding reception offered the opportunity to exchange and network with other Fellows and scholars from Tübingen over drinks.

About Jan Willem Duyvendak:
Jan Willem Duyvendak is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Since 2018, he is also director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). In 2021, he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and in 2022 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
More information here: www.jwduyvendak.nl 

Professor Rita Felski:
Public Lecture "How not to talk about Experience"

The College of Fellows cordially invited the public and all university members to join the public evening lecture by Prof. Rita Felski. The lecture was held in English.

Abstract:
Why do standard textbooks of literary theory avoid the concept of experience? And why is the turn to literary experience now an accelerating trend? This talk looks to recent German theory, especially Hartmut Rosa’s account of the phenomenology and sociology of resonance, as a resource for literary critics interested in rethinking experience in relational and worldly terms.

About Professor Rita Felski:
Rita Felski is John-Stewart-Bryan-Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Niels-Bohr-Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). She is a leading scholar in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory and cultural studies, feminist theory, modernism, and postmodernism, and has been influential in such areas as the development of postcriticism and the discussion of Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in literary studies.
Felski has published The Limits of Critique, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, Literature After Feminism, the Blackwell Manifesto Uses of Literature, and Rethinking Tragedy, among others, and is a former editor of New Literary History. The Limits of Critique, in particular, has been widely reviewed and discussed. Felski raises comparable topics in the anthology she co-edited with Elizabeth Anker, Critique and Postcritique. Hooked: Art and Attachment, which explores how and why works of art captivate us, was published in 2020. Felski has recently begun work on a book project about the new Frankfurt School and its significance for literary studies.

Professor Rita Felski
"Postcritique, Recognition, Life World"

“Rather than taking it for granted that a work gains its meaning in relation to a historical or political context that is being assumed by the critic, why not insist on its potential to transform what counts as a relevant context?”
(Rita Felski)

Abstract:

The "postcritical turn" within literary and cultural studies has initiated a major turn in the practice of critique, offering new ways of reading, methodology and criticism which foreground emotion and affect in the reader's experience, and which generally redirect the attention to aesthetic dimensions in the reception and interpretation of a text. As such, postcritique is relevant beyond the boundaries of literary criticicm addressing pressing issues across the humanities.

The workshop "Postcritique, Recognition, Life World" (23-26 October 2023, Tübingen) will enable discussions with Rita Felski, one of the major proponents of postcritique, building on her recent scholarly work. Pieces of Rita Felski’s current work will be circulated and are expected to be read in advance by the participants. Consisting of three sessions, the workshop will open with a session on theoretical and methodological aspects; a second session builds on a chapter on ‘Recognition’ and on Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims (published in New Literary History) and a third session discusses a chapter on ‘Life World’ and on Magda Szabo’s The Door. Along the following and other questions, the workshop will explore aspects and implications of Felski's concepts: What theoretical impulses can be derived from her re-orientation in critical and creative vocabularies? How does her recent work further develop the theoretical field of postcritique? Can the notions of ‘Recognition’ and ‘Life World’ serve as a reconfiguration of ‘post-critical’ concepts and forms of reading and interpretation? How do such reconfigurations contribute to theoretical shifts within current debates in the humanities?

Program:

    Mon, 23 October, 4:00-7:00 p.m.:
    Opening session with an introductory input by Rita Felski, followed by a discussion on theory basics
    Tue, 24 October, 4:00-7:00 p.m.:
    Presentation by Rita Felski, followed by a discussion on the topic of "Recognition"
    Wed, 25 October, 7:00 p.m.:
    Public lecture by Rita Felski titled "How Not To Talk About Experience"
    Thu, 26 October, 4:00-7:00 p.m.:
    Presentation by Rita Felski and discussion on the topic of "Life World" with further invited guests and a wrap-up of the topics. The discussion of research questions and topics from related fields was particularly welcome, and references to the participants' own projects were explicitly encouraged.
The workshop was held in English.

About Professor Rita Felski:
Rita Felski is John-Stewart-Bryan-Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Niels-Bohr-Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). She is a leading scholar in the fields of aesthetics, literary theory and cultural studies, feminist theory, modernism, and postmodernism, and has been influential in such areas as the development of postcriticism and the discussion of Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in literary studies.
Felski has published The Limits of Critique, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, Literature After Feminism, the Blackwell Manifesto Uses of Literature, and Rethinking Tragedy, among others, and is a former editor of New Literary History. The Limits of Critique, in particular, has been widely reviewed and discussed. Felski raises comparable topics in the anthology she co-edited with Elizabeth Anker, Critique and Postcritique. Hooked: Art and Attachment, which explores how and why works of art captivate us, was published in 2020. Felski has recently begun work on a book project about the new Frankfurt School and its significance for literary studies.

Abstract: 
In his lecture, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro  presented his scholarly work, which has set decisive impulses in anthropology and cultural theory. His concept of perspectivism, which is closely linked to the concept of “multinaturalism”, proved to be particularly stimulating for anthropological theory. 
Contrary to Western conceptualisations of naturalism, which regard nature as the objectively given, in Amerindian mythology humanity is the premise from which all kinds of animals, plants and things in their diversity emerge. This inwardly persisting human condition is common to all beings, whereas the bodily condition conveys different perspectives on the world: “non-humans see things [the same way] as ‘people’. But the things that they see are different” (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Thus, differences between species are due to their physical dispositions, while personhood is common to all living things, which is described by Viveiros de Castro as “multinaturalism”, a concept that is both irreducible to the distinction between nature and culture and transversal to the opposition of relativism and universalism. Assuming different natures, it is in a sense antithetical to the Western concept of multiculturalism, which assumes only one nature and different cultures.
This notion of multinaturalism implies a ‘cosmopolitical’ view, which Viveiros de Castro describes as follows: “What we could call the natural world, or “world” for short, is for Amazonian peoples a multiplicity of intricately connected multiplicities. Animal species and other species are conceived as so many kinds of people or peoples, that is, as political entities. […] What we call the environment is for them a society of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia.” (Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s 2015)

Dr Eleonora Bedin (Teaching@Tuebingen Fellow, Institute of Classical Archaeology, University of Tuebingen, Germany)
"The Ancient Mediterranean as a Global Stage: Tracing the Mother Goddess Across Borders"

Abstract:
The Ancient Mediterranean, characterized by interconnected shores and extensive networks, served as a vibrant global stage where diverse people, cultures, ideas, and religious beliefs converged. However, globalization in the region was not solely driven by mobility but also influenced by the Mediterranean’s geography, climate, and maritime sphere, which played a pivotal role in defining the characteristics of cults and deities.
The lecture delved into the intricate web of connections and interactions that spanned the Mediterranean region from the Bronze Age until the Hellenistic period, with a particular emphasis on the transmission and pervasive presence of the mother goddess archetype across borders. Drawing from mythological texts, epigraphic sources, and archaeological evidence, it traced the journey of the mother goddess from the Near East to the West, examining the mechanisms through which her cult spread, and her dependence from the human experience of the Mediterranean region.
Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the complex dynamics between globalization, regional influences, and the worship of deities in the ancient Mediterranean. By examining the long durée of the mother goddess's journey and the cultural factors that shaped her worship, it provides a deeper insight into this significant historical era.

Bio:
Eleonora Bedin is a Teaching@Tuebingen Fellow at the Institute of Classical Archaeology, University of Tuebingen. With a strong emphasis on cultural identities and globalization in the Ancient Mediterranean world, Eleonora's research centers around exploring the dynamics of connectivity, religious patterns, and adaptation strategies. Her primary area of expertise lies in the Southern Levant, with a particular focus on Hellenistic Palestine. In her scholarly pursuits, she employs a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates various fields of study, including anthropology, epigraphy, archaeology, and literary culture. By integrating these diverse perspectives, she strives to gain a comprehensive understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics and historical transformations within the ancient world.

Dr René Alberto Ramírez Gallegos (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México):
"‘Buen Vivir’ as an uchronic political horizon"

Abstract:
After a long and broadly participative constituent process, in 2008, Ecuador approved a new political Constitution where Buen Vivir or Sumak Kawsay was established as a social priority. The research contends that mainstream theories of well-being are insufficient to translate this social endeavor into practice, thus the need to establish a specific epistemic framework for the concept of Buen Vivir outlined in the Andean country. The research proposes the political socioecology of life as a theoretical, methodological, and empirical framework to examine, interpret, and dispute the realization of Buen Vivir in Ecuador. For this purpose, based on a critique that exposes the limitations of using money as an evaluator of well-being, the research applies the metric “time for a good life” as the unit of analysis. The measurement of time “well lived” has the advantage of being an ambivalent indicator; it is both empirical-factual and prescriptive-desiderative: it accounts for a fact and reveals a desire. The research shows how time well lived is characterized by the production and enjoyment of relational goods, a concept that allows us to address time distribution focusing on the time of existence / life; the time dedicated to the good life; the concentration or inequality of time well lived; geography and the time of time well-lived; the macro structuring of time for good life; the temporality of the Pachamama (nature’s sumak kawsay); and the impact of time on satisfaction with life. The conference ended by proposing a uchronic agenda for the good life.

Dr Ramona-Elena Irimia:
"Using herbaria to track biological invasions and plant response to climate change – a case study of Japanese knotweed"

Abstract:
Biological invasions are among the most serious threats to biodiversity because they disrupt ecosystem processes and function. However, biological invasions are also large unplanned experiments across spatial and temporal scales that enable us to observe evolution in the wild and address many key aspects of global change. Herbarium records offer an excellent opportunity to examine the temporal and spatial characteristics of plant invasions since many of these invasions occurred during the past two-three centuries and are well documented in museum collections. These collections are a vast repository of botanical metadata including plant functional traits, phenology, plant-herbivore and plant-disease interactions and genetic data, allowing to model past processes and gain insights into the species responses to environmental and anthropogenic perturbations. Species of the genus Reynoutria (Japanese knotweed) are among the world’s worst invasive weeds. Native to SE Asia, they were introduced around the world ca. 180 years ago as garden ornamentals and later became highly invasive in Europe and North America. In this project, we genotyped hundreds of herbarium specimens of Japanese knotweed from the native and invasive range to reconstruct the species’ invasion history and evolutionary changes associated with invasiveness. We also measured spatiotemporal variation in leaf functional traits and leaf chemical defenses against herbivores. The findings will provide a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms that contribute to the invasion success of this species complex and potentially identify appropriate strategies for containment.

Bio: 
Ramona-Elena Irimia is a plant evolutionary ecologist at the Institute of Evolution and Ecology at University of Tübingen. Her work focuses on understanding ecological and evolutionary processes underlying species adaptation to changing environments. She uses invasive species as study systems and a combination of field, common garden experiments and genomics to investigate species resilience to climate change, invasive abilities and adaptive potential across native and introduced ranges. Recently, she started to explore historical DNA from museum collections to study the evolutionary history of invasive Japanese knotweed.

Junior Professor Dr Carola Lorea:
"Covid Demons, Corona Goddesses and Online Rituals: Pandemic Research Modalities on a Post-secular Virus"

Abstract:
Viral contagion, a social relationship acting between bodies and across national borders, is a dramatic instantiation of global encounters. Thinking with a virus and its representations in diverse cosmologies, we developed CoronAsur: a collective research project that takes a global health crisis as a starting point to develop new forms of international collaborations that can democratize the scholarship on religion and disease and decenter Western narratives of Covid-19.
How does the digitization of ritual gatherings impact lived religion? In which ways has the enforcement of hygienic and ‘social distancing’ protocols changed the aesthetic, affective and material dimensions of religious communities? How are the mutual shapings of religion and society unfolding during a pandemic and in a post-pandemic world?
CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age is about to be released as a fully open access “phygital” volume that follows the documentation and analysis of the abrupt societal shifts triggered by the pandemic to understand current and future pandemic times, while revealing further avenues for research on religion that have opened up in the Covidian age.
The project founders and editors discussed transformations in religious communities’ engagements with media, spaces, and moral and political economies, documenting the dynamic range of ways the pandemic shaped, and was shaped by, religious people and their

Speakers:
Carola E. Lorea, Editor and Founder of CoronAsur, PI of the research project “Religion Going Viral”
(Junior professor of Rethinking Global Religion at the University of Tübingen)

Emily Zoe Hertzman, Editor
(Research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore)

Natalie Lang, Editor
(Research fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen)

Erica M. Larson, Editor
(Research fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore)

Conference: "Discourses of Unity in Ireland and Europe"

Organisation:
Professor Maurice Fitzpatrick (Visiting Professor in Irish Studies during the winter term 2022/23) and the Chair for English Literatures from the 18th Century to the present at the University of Tübingen

In this conference, a number of keynote lectures by renowned speakers from Ireland and the US analyzed the current situation in the wake of Brexit and recent historical developments: the conference panels brought together scholars from the Irish Studies community in Germany to discuss literary and cultural manifestations of Discourses of Unity.

The conference was held in English, and was accompanied by two exhibitions in German: "Irland und die Geburt Europas" and "Into Europe: Irland und die EU". Both exhibitions were accessible at the conference venue during the breaks (Coffee/Lunch).

Read the detailed programme here: "Discourses of Unity in Ireland and Europe"

"Boarder Spaces" (Grenzräume)
16 June, 06:00 pm, Kino Atelier
The documentary "Border Spaces" deals with borders and border spaces in Brazil and accompanies different people who describe their experiences with and at borders. The film is based on the research project "The Social Construction of Border Zones", coordinated by Hermílio Santos. This study seeks to identify perspectives of different actors who "make" borders in everyday practice and work at three Brazilian borders - the borders in the south with Argentina and Uruguay; in the Midwest, in the border area with Bolivia and Paraguay, Corumbá region; and in the north, on the border with Bolivia and Peru, in the Brasileia and Assis Brasil region, in Acre, a region marked by immigration from Haiti and several African countries.

The documentary brings together different perspectives: of those involved in border control, such as members of the federal police, army, police or Internal Revenue Service; of those who use borders for criminal activities such as drug smuggling and are imprisoned as a result of these illegal activities; of those who produce agricultural products in border regions; and the perspectives of members of the indigenous population who settled in these border areas before the colonization of Brazilian territory by the Portuguese. 

Following the film screening, director Hermílio Santos will introduce some of the research findings and discuss the experiences and perspectives presented in the documentary.

About the director Hermílio Santos
Hermílio Santos (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) is a sociologist and professor of the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the School of Humanities at his home university. Santos has been president of the Research Committee "Biography and Society" of the International Sociological Association since 2018. He worked as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge in 2022. 

In 2023, he is the first visiting professor of the Tübingen CAPES Lectureship Program, which is based on a cooperation between the Brazilian funding organization CAPES and the University of Tübingen; Santos is hosted by the Baden-Württemberg Center for Brazil and Latin America and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies (ICGSS). Santos will present his academic work and film productions in various formats, which address topics such as violence, adolescence, borders, slavery, and gas and oil production platforms.

"Infância Falada" (Stories about Transformation through Dialogue)
 

In "Infância Falada," Hermílio Santos accompanies social projects in the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Ceará, Pernambuco and Minas Gerais to find out how children try to change the environment of constant violence into which they are born. The film is based on research coordinated by Hermílio Santos, whose results reveal an intense experience of violence among children in these urban areas.

"Infância Falada" introduces various social projects which, in different ways, promote dialogue among children and with children and youth as an alternative to violence in everyday life. These are moving stories of boys and girls who have taught their families to resolve conflicts through dialogue, and who dream of bringing peace to their neighborhoods through peaceful communication and behavior. The final message is an optimistic scenario of this dialogue led by children and youth.

The research and film were funded by the Bernard van Leer Foundation to obtain data on the violence faced by children in precarious urban conditions in Brazil. The results are used in projects by governments and social non-governmental organizations to improve children's living conditions.

About the director Hermílio Santos
Hermílio Santos (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) is a sociologist and professor of the Graduate Program in Social Sciences at the School of Humanities at his home university. Santos has been president of the Research Committee "Biography and Society" of the International Sociological Association since 2018. He worked as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Film and Screen at the University of Cambridge in 2022. 

In 2023, he is the first visiting professor of the Tübingen CAPES Lectureship Program, which is based on a cooperation between the Brazilian funding organization CAPES and the University of Tübingen; Santos is hosted by the Baden-Württemberg Center for Brazil and Latin America and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies (ICGSS). Santos will present his academic work and film productions in various formats, which address topics such as violence, adolescence, borders, slavery, and gas and oil production platforms.

A poetic and musical journey with Orpheus – the archetypal poet, musician and magus – from antiquity to the present day, from the enchantment of animals to ecological crisis

Poetry:   Luke Fischer
Violin:   Hong Yu Wong
Lute:      Niels Pfeffer

Orphic Elegy was a performance that alternated between music for violin and lute and readings of the five-part poem ‘Orphic Elegy’. This mythopoetic and philosophical poem reimagines the legends and teachings of Orpheus and travels from scenes in antiquity of Orpheus enchanting animals with his song and suffering dismemberment by the maenads, to the revival of Orphism in the Renaissance, to the atrocities of the twentieth century and the current period of ecological crisis and mass extinction. ‘Orphic Elegy’ is the opening poem of Luke Fischer’s book A Gamble for my Daughter (Vagabond Press, 2022); part of the poem also appears in Best of Australian Poems (2022).

Biographies:
Luke Fischer is a prize-winning poet and philosopher from Sydney, Australia. Fischer’s various books include the poetry collections A Gamble for my Daughter (Vagabond Press, 2022), A Personal History of Vision (UWAP, 2017) and Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), and the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the ‘New Poems’ (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is an honorary associate of the University of Sydney. www.lukefischer.net

Hong Yu Wong is a philosopher and musician. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tübingen and Head of the Philosophy of Neuroscience Group at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience. He studies the baroque violin with Mónika Toth, Richard Gwilt, Rachel Podger, and Simon Standage. He also does research on the philosophy of music and on musical cognition. With his friends, a mix of professional musicians and academics, he founded an early music ensemble, the Tractatus Musico-Philosophicus.

Niels Pfeffer studied guitar, lute, harpsichord, and basso continuo in Stuttgart, Freiburg, The Hague, and Basel. In 2021, he began his PhD and started working as a research assistant at the University of Tübingen. Niels teaches continuo and theorbo, while also serving as a harpsichord accompanist at the University of Music Stuttgart. He has been successful in numerous competitions and has performed with various baroque ensembles, such as La Cetra, Capricornus Consort, and the Bach-Stiftung St. Gallen.

Dr Ritu Vij:
"De-Pathologizing Precarity"

Abstract: 
Figurations of precarity encompass multiple and conflicting registers of thought and feeling. Abjection, melancholia, resilience, or utopic lines of flight from the depredations of capitalism provide recognizable markers of the “age of precarity.” These conflicting figurations, however, carry shared pathologized mappings of precarity. Paradoxically, these mappings appear in the shifting terrain of reparative redress itself, in efforts to de-pathologize precarity. Converging on a disparate selection of cinematic images, art-work and literary texts on precarity in contemporary India, this paper explores the antinomies of a reparative aesthetics. I focus on Anamika Haksar’s Ghode ko Jalebi  Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis),  Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness and ‘slum art’ produced in Dharavi, Mumbai, now in worldwide circulation, as recent attempts to de-pathologize precarity. A principal aim of this exercise is to tease out the challenge of untangling precarity’s imbrication as concept and form with modernity writ large.

Bio: 
Dr Ritu Vij is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. Her primary areas of research and teaching are in political economy and international political theory. In the past few years, her intellectual engagements circle principally around the question and problem of precarity in the Global South, specifically the problem of recuperating precarity as an aesthetic form of life. She has explored heterotopias of homelessness through work produced by artists and rough sleepers in Tokyo, cinematic narratives of precarity in Japan and, more recently, responded, to aesthetic modes of ‘Precarious Writings’. Her current work, a book project, focuses on Dharavi, a shantytown in Mumbai, India, and its aesthetic production and circulation in the international. She is widely published in these areas. Among the publications most relevant to her talk on ‘De-Pathologizing Precarity’ are ‘The Global Subject of Precarity’ in Globalizations 2019, and an edited volume Precarity and International Relations, Palgrave 2021.

International Research Symposium Figurations of the Precarious: New Directions in Global South Studies

On May 3^rd and 4^th, the ICGSS organised an International Research Symposium on “Figurations of the Precarious – New Directions in Global South Studies” in cooperation with the College of Fellows. It prepared the cooperation with the ICGSS's international partners in the running up to the Grant Bid for the Research Training Group “Figurations of the Precarious in the Global South” and continued a cycle of activities with our 2023 CAPES Chair Prof. Hermílio Pereira dos Santos Filho (PUCRS). The symposium included two key note lectures by Hermílio Santos and Dr Ritu Vij (Aberdeen), the latter in the framework of the Global Encounters Lecture Series.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education

Leadership in higher education takes different forms and addresses an array of stakeholders – students, academics, alumni, university management, administrators, third-party funders, governmental institutions etc., and presents itself as a diverse and growing field of inner – and interinstitutional careers.

The panel discussion on “Leadership in Higher Education” convened cross-cultural perspectives on higher education leadership and focused on challenges and opportunities facing leaders in both the United States and Germany.

Panelists were:
Professor Frankie Augustin (South Carolina HBCU), Dr Courtney Dorrol (Furman University), Professor Dr Janet Ward (Yale)

Moderated by:
Professor Dr Astrid Franke (Tübingen)

Hermílio Santos (Pontifícia Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS), Brazil) is the first visiting professor of the CAPES Tübingen lectureship programme based on a partnership between the Brazilian funding agency CAPES and the University of Tübingen. At our semester opening, he will present his academic work and film productions in which he deals with violence, childhood, adolescence, borders, public policy, and the experiences of different generations of indigenous women in the south of Brazil. 
The semester opening also offers the opportunity to network with other fellows and scholars based at Tübingen University, and you will get to know the College of Fellows team and offers for international fellows currently based in Tübingen.

Professor Eric Nelson, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology:
"Daoist wuwei in the Anthropocene"

Abstract:
Wei wu wei 為無為 has been interpreted as indifference and inaction, minimalism and adaptability, and responsive resonance and releasement. Despite the depoliticization of wuwei as a mystical state, a flexible knack, or a reflexive flow, its early meaning was ethical, political, and social. In the Daodejing 道德經, wuwei concerns the art of rulership and the ways in which peoples and things “anarchically” organize and nourish themselves. “Nature” (ziran 自然) consists of the interactive self-patterning and participatory self-ordering of the myriad things (wanwu 萬物) correlated with wuwei and the shared nourishing of life (yangsheng 養生). Daoism has been criticized as opposing action vs. inaction, complexity vs. simplicity, culture vs. naturalness, hierarchical society vs. “primitive” freedom and equality. Its point is participatory relationality: it fosters simplicity in complexity, naturalness in culture, responsive attunement in activity, and reciprocal self-ordering. Daoist wuwei concerns the appropriate uses of things and technologies, indicating an alternative response to the Anthropocene.

Short Bio:
Eric S. Nelson is Professor of Philosophy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has published on Chinese, German, Jewish, and intercultural philosophy. He is the author of Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2023), Daoism and Environmental Philosophy (Routledge, 2020), Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other (SUNY Press, 2020), and Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Workshop im Rahmen der Focus Group 'Intercultural Studies'
Organisation: Dr Olusegun Samuel

Abstract:
The question of sustainability has received attention in both academic and public domains. What is sustainability and how can we bring it about? With the hope of contributing to the existing understanding of and solutions to sustainability concerns, this workshop aimed to investigate and engage two important aspects of the question.

The first concerns theoretical-conceptual issues about sustainability. A theory is a lens through which we view, understand, and interpret our experiences. How we understand sustainability, for example, would influence the method we choose to achieve it. Given that a theory provides the justifications for our gaze and the reasons underlying our method and practices, scholars have raised the importance of developing a new theoretical lens that would provide a better understanding of sustainability. Many scholars, including Robert Bullard, J. Baird Callicott, Val Plumwood, Workineh Kelbessa, and Mogobe Ramose, challenge the dominant theoretical orientations (economic, religious, and political) about sustainability that place more emphasis on humanity, ignoring other beings and ecosystems. Holmes Rolston III and Richard Routley call for ‘a new environmental ethics’, which not only incorporates nonhumanity within our environmental-ethical gaze but also emphasizes the need for their continued existence. There is a concern that anthropocentric foci not only misrepresent the place of other beings but also hinder a plausible sustainability agenda. But how do we transcend anthropocentrism in a way that is possible for humanity to realize sustainability?

This workshop engaged theoretical problems about sustainability, including how we should understand sustainability, the roles of ethics and ontology in sustainability thinking, and methodological issues in framing sustainability. It looked at questions such as: Are there approaches to sustainability from the global South that challenges existing western conceptions? What valuable lessons do they offer?

The second involves practical human issues undermining sustainability. Increasing literature and debates on sustainability have identified political disagreements as core to negotiating positive change in how people use the environment they share with others. Irmelin GramHanssen et al, for example, have drawn attention to the conflict between indigenous communities and their colonizers, thereby emphasizing how oppressive structures shape and impact sustainability plans. These structures manifest in various ways, including colonialism, racism, genderism, and speciesism, which all threaten those in the weaker group. This reflects the hegemonic dominance of a people, class, gender, and species over another. While there are solutions in the literature and public policies to these problems, this workshop will investigate how we might build what Felix Wagner and Marcus Andreas describe as a culture of sustainability that does not merely incorporate the economic, social, ecological, and cultural aspects of life but also disrupts the antagonistic hierarchies and privileges in an illuminating way. This workshop considered works that speak to practical sustainability issues, including solutions to environmental colonialism, injustice, speciesism, gender gap, and cultural apathy to non-anthropocentric practices. Considering sustainability from both theoretical and practical perspectives would help enrich our engagement with socio-ecological problems.

Organisation: Dr Abbed Kanoor

Keynote speakers: 
Mark J. Sedgwick, Angus Nicholls, Patrick McGuinness

Workshop abstract: 
The development of cultural anthropology and the rise of cultural studies are signs of a global introspection, as if the memory of the world is involved in a state of retrospection instead of generating metaphysical systems. This turning point has rightly been called a „cultural turn” with devastating consequences: launching the debate on multiculturalism, transculturality and interculturality on the one hand and opening up the horizon of global studies, world philosophies and critical de- & postcolonial approaches on the other.‬‬‬

The Zeitgeist of the 1990s gave the impression that ideologies had been erased from mental maps and that “the end of history” had been reached; the era of liberal or social democracies would be the future of the world and the only remaining problem would be the compatibility of cultures, values and lifestyles. But after 30 years, a fundamental question should be asked: why, despite the growing global commitment to cultural openness, is the rise of ideologies such as chauvinistic nationalism, institutional racism and religious fundamentalisms stronger than before? Or to put the question more clearly: why does the age of multiculturalism go hand in hand with the revival of hard ideologies and the return of archaic forms of hatred, exclusion and rage? 

Ideologies arise when cultural canons are obsolete, when world-visions become broken mirrors and the res religiosa finds no equivalent. The consequence is the essential paradox of ideology: it is the subjectivation of the totality insofar as it excludes the permanent search for intersubjective truth (and this makes it different from culture, which envelops the subject in the totality of a relation to the world as a whole). But the same process leads to the de-totalizing vision of truth, which manifests itself in the egocentric consciousness cut off from reality. The ideologized mind, dispossessed of its symbols, seeks to reinvest itself in secularized ideas.

Professor Han-luen Kantzer Komline (Protestant Theology)
Title: The Idea of the New in Early Christian Thought

Abstract:
For many contemporary people, new is better than old as surely as fresh is better than stale.  In ancient times, however, these values were not assumed in the same way.  Rather, the tendency was just the opposite.  “Older is better,” a popular saying went.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the popular imagination suggests a vision of the early Christians—the “fathers of the church,” as they are sometimes called—as stodgy traditionalists who nervously fanned away any fresh winds of change that happened to blow in their direction.
Yet a closer look begins to erode these caricatures.  Just as contemporary societies and social groups can exhibit a powerful sense of nostalgia, ancient societies and groups were much more complex, multifaceted, and ambivalent in their assessments of novelty than we might at first tend to assume.  This lecture will present some of this complexity as displayed among early Christians as they sought to articulate and defend the innovative character of their faith.

Bio:
Han-luen Kantzer Komline is Associate Professor of Church History and Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, USA and the author of Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2020).  Her research focuses on early Christian theology, with many of her publications focusing on Augustine or his relationship to other thinkers, ranging from Ambrose and Cyprian to Karl Barth and Marilynne Robinson. Professor Volker Drecoll is her host as she pursues her research here in Tübingen.


Dr Diana Liao (Biology)
Title: Vocal Flexibility in Crows

Abstract:
Understanding how human speech evolved is an enormously difficult problem. One approach to doing so is via the comparative method - investigating the vocal behaviors and associated mechanisms of extant animals. In addition to studying closely related species as a means to reconstruct our own evolutionary history, we can also examine the capabilities of much more distant relatives. Currently, I study crows - corvid songbirds - who have departed from the human lineage over 300 million years ago but still demonstrate striking abilities to flexibly learn and produce complex vocalizations. Songbirds possess a highly-specialized set of brain nuclei - collectively known as the song system - that is integral to how juveniles learn to sing from a tutor. In addition to song, I am interested in other cognitive aspects of flexible vocal behaviors and will present results on two projects - one demonstrating the crow's vocal control over the number of calls they make and the other on their capabilities to grasp recursive sequences.

Bio:
Dr Diana Liao is interested in the evolution of complex cognitive and social behaviors using the comparative approach. She first got interested in cognitive neuroscience during her bachelor studies at Johns Hopkins University. She then did a doctorate at Princeton University studying vocal interactions and development in marmoset monkeys. For her postdoc, she switched animal species and traveled to Germany on a Humboldt fellowship to study the complex vocal capabilities of crows at the University of Tübingen.

Dr Abbed Kanoor (Global Encounters Fellow):
"Return of Ideologies - A Critical Analysis in the Light of Intercultural Phenomenology"

Abstract:
The cultural turn is, at the philosophical level, correlated with the fragmentation of all ontologies that we have been witnessing for the last two centuries and which leads to the rejection of monolithic blocks of beliefs. However, we are not entirely free from the resonant power of cultural ontologies. Cultures are visible features of an invisible process of sense-constitution, often overlooked in representational approaches. Cultures claim a total understanding of the world, but when their claims are deprived of recognition, they can be vulnerable to alternative forms of totality, i.e. ideologies. This may explain why, despite the growing global commitment to cultural openness, we are facing a new rise of ideologies such as chauvinistic nationalism and religious fundamentalisms. Intercultural phenomenology is a possible approach to better understand the meaning and consequences of the fragmentation of all ontologies with the aim of searching a third possibility beyond culturalism and traditionalism.

Professor Mohammed Ech-Cheikh (University Hassan II, Marokko):
"Would we need to re-read classical Arab philosophers?"

Abstract:
The time when philosophical thought was approached from a single point of view is over. With the increasing interactions of the contemporary world and the emerging movement of transcultural philosophy, the time has come for a multi-perspective reading of philosophical thought. Both Western philosophical traditions (continental and Anglo-Saxon) and non-Western ones are beginning to learn from each other and to interchange. Arab philosophical traditions are no exception. Should we re-read these Arab philosophical traditions? If yes, then Why? What can be interesting and inspiring in these traditions? Can they bring us some lessons of wisdom, humility and serenity at a time when postmodern man is beginning to worry about his future?

Dr Francesco Padovani (Classical Philology)
Title: Rethinking the Platonic Dialogue in the Early Imperial Age: The Case of Plutarch

Abstract:
Plutarch was the most eminent writer of Platonic dialogues of his time; nonetheless, only scarce critical attention has been devoted to his relationship with the Platonic model. In the Early Imperial Age, Plato represents a dynamic model for the development of further formal, stylistic and philosophical innovations, which are enhanced by the hybridity of the Platonic dialogue as a literary genre. Plutarch’s renewal of the Platonic model concerns crucial aspects of the dialogue, i.e. the role of the author, the characterization of the main figures, the settings, the hybridization with other literary genres. The literary aspect, as well as the relationship with the Second Sophistic and the Middle-Platonism represent the core of the research. A more general question concerning the adaptation of the Socratic ‘democratic’ model to the elitist Greco-Roman society of Plutarch’s time belongs nonetheless to the context of this project and has to be taken into consideration.

Bio:
Francesco Padovani (Verona, 1989) has obtained his PhD in Ancient Greek Literature and Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italy, with a dissertation about the etymologies of the divine names in Plutarch’s works. His research interests cross the boundaries between literature, philosophy and ancient religious studies, focusing mainly on Plutarch of Chaeronaea, Plato and the history of Platonism. In the last few years, he has also intensively explored the fields of classical reception studies and literary theory.


Professor Dalia Nassar (Philosophy)
Title: From Romantic Empiricism to the Embodied History of Trees

Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to develop a picture of trees and of the ways in which they challenge some of our most basic biological and ethical concepts. Beginning with an account of my recent book, "Romantic Empiricism," I explicate how this research led me to the study of plants, and trees in particular, and go on to articulate the character of trees, homing in on the ways in which trees "embody" their history and environment, and how environments are themselves expressions of their trees. I conclude by considering the implications of these insights for our understanding of life, the environment, and ethics.

Bio:
Dalia Nassar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her research sits at the intersection of environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of German philosophy. She is the author of two books including, most recently, Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (Oxford, 2022), and editor of several books, including an anthology of works by women philosophers in the long nineteenth century.

Professor Sabine Wilke (German Studies)
Title: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in Recent German Performances

Abstract:
Every late spring since 1951, the Vienna Theater Festival brings performers from around the world to Vienna for an opportunity to share recent developments in performance styles. Equally amazing and transformative, on June 1, 2017, a scholarly symposium on animal music took place at the university in Linz. Both of these cross-species performances probe the limits of our common understanding of how performance space works, who is supposed to inhabit it, what the interaction is like between performers and audience members, and what it means to perform in the first place. They blur the boundaries between the realms of humans, animals, and machines by focusing on the radical idea of how these realms could work together.

Bio:
Sabine Wilke is the Joff Hanauer Distinguished Professor in Western Civilization and Professor of German at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include modern German literature and culture, intellectual history and theory, cultural and visual studies, and the environmental humanities. She has written books and articles on body constructions in modern German literature and culture, German unification, the history of German film and theater, German colonialism, and the German environmental imagination.


Dr Qi Li (Plant Genetics)
Title: Molecular Mechanisms Underlying Lateral Shoot Formation during Maize Embryogenesis

Abstract:
Cereal grains provide ~50% of calories consumed by humans and livestock. With the population growing, there are urgent demands for increasing yield and improving nutrient quality of cereal grains. The oil-stored embryo has become an attractive target for crop improvement. Comprising a shoot/root meristematic axis that develops into all organs in the plant, the embryo also received considerable attention of geneticists. Studies in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana have dissected mechanisms underlying development of the dicot embryo coupling with a transiently filled endosperm. This knowledge is, however, not directly transferable to embryogenesis in the monocot grasses. Not only are the two classes of embryos morphologically diverse, the developmental processes establishing the embryonic axis are distinct. Aiming to coordinate a heavy load of nutrient transfer from endosperm to embryo in cereal grains, the monocotyledon (aka scutellum) needs to be developed nearby the endosperm, which separates endosperm and the embryonic shoot-root axis initiated at the opposite face. In this talk, I will introduce our present investigations into regulatory mechanisms underlying formation of this adaxial-abaxial polarity characteristic for the monocot embryo. Insights gained allow a comparative understanding of embryogenesis and can facilitate improvement of key agricultural traits.

Bio:
I’m a geneticist solely using maize/corn as the study organism. Before wandering in the corn field of Tübingen as a Humboldt research fellow, I got my bachelor degree in China Agricultural University, Beijing and my PhD in CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences, Shanghai. Now I’m obsessed with exploring molecular mechanisms of essential developmental processes in cereals.

Dr Florian Wimmers:
"Hey Google, directions to immune protection. Combining lab- and AI-based methods to map out the immune system"

30 November 2022, 12.00 pm (sharp/s.t.!)
ZMBP, room 4U09
(Center for Plant Molecular Biology/Zentrum für Molekularbiologie der Pflanzen)
Auf der Morgenstelle 32, Tübingen

Abstract:
The emergence of Omics technologies enables scientists to construct highly precise maps of the biological processes inside our bodies. Like Google Maps, these maps can be layered to offer insights at multiple regulatory levels allowing researchers to gain comprehensive system-wide insights on diseases. This talk will look at examples of how these multi-omics maps are used to study infectious diseases and vaccines. 

Read more about Florian Wimmers and his project here.

27–28 October 2022
Neuphilologicum (Wilhelmstraße 50, 72074 Tübingen)
room 215

The workshop shed light on the relationship between intercultural philosophy and decolonial thought and aimed to promote exchange between these two fields of research.
The workshop will took place on ZOOM.

The workshop was organized as part of the Franco-German Doctoral Program.

Lunch Talk with Associate Professor Martin Porr (University of Western Australia, Archaeology/Centre for Rock Art Research + Management):

“The German Ethnographic Expeditions to the Kimberley, Northwest Australia. A Collaborative Assessment of Research History, the Interpretation of Australian Aboriginal Heritage, and Digital Repatriation”

Abstract:
Historical ethnographic collections continue to be increasingly important for Indigenous communities today. However, the processes of repatriation and efforts to make materials in overseas institutions accessible to Traditional Owners can be a long and challenging process. These aspects are the focus of a current project that is jointly coordinated by researchers from the University of Western Australia and the Frobenius Institute (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) in collaboration with three Aboriginal Corporations.
This presentation will provide a brief overview of some preliminary results from the initial collaborative assessment of the ethnographic materials from the German expeditions to the Northwest Kimberley (Western Australia) in 1938 and 1955. These expeditions were conducted by the Institut für Kulturmorphologie (now Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt am Main) and the then Museum für Völkerkunde (Munich). The project draws on unpublished archival materials in Germany (photos, drawings, sketches, reproductions of rock art images, personal notebooks), published books and papers and the direct input from members of the relevant Australian Indigenous communities. As such, the project is a case study of critical research history and anthropo¬logical knowledge production with similarly great significance to the participating Aboriginal partners and the archival institutions in Germany.

Martin Porr was our Fellow in Focus in October. Read more about him here. 

The College of Fellows participated in the Postdoc Days 2022, informing participants about its work and role as a university-based Institute for Advanced Studies.

The Graduate Academy and the Research Funding Office, in cooperation with the faculties and central supporting structures, have put together a diverse program with virtual and in-person meetings. The CoF will be present with an information stand at the "Get together" in the "Alte Aula" on 28 September.We are looking forward to meeting you!

Neue Aula, room 236
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, Tübingen

Organisation: Madalina Guzun

How can we define a foreign language? And how does learning a foreign language change the way in which we experience what we call our “own”? Language as the mother tongue is the place of familiarity, it is a place of belonging. What changes, then, when we make a step out of this familiarity? From a philosophical point of view, and enabling intercultural dialogue, this international workshop discusses what kind of displacement a foreign language may imply. 

Full workshop abstract

Workshop programme

University of Tübingen
Keplerstraße 2, room 003

Organiser: Juan Rivera

Abstract

This workshop intends to test one of the conditions present in the main answers that have been proposed to the question of how to conceptualise those indigenous worlds that interrupt the so-called “one-world world”. This condition requires that we, as ethnographers, seek to take a position of symmetric openness to the conceptual conditions we are confronted to in the field, allowing them to inflect our own conceptual tools. Such requirement will become the main methodological feature of this workshop, whose pursuit will focus on discovering – and comparing – different indigenous forms and relations of ownership in South America. Converging on the ethnography of indigenous life-projects, the workshop will explore Amerindian “relational ontologies” contrasting them to those worlds where humans own objects as property.

In order to analyse possible Amerindian alternatives to the extractivist ruination of the Anthropocene and produce reciprocally illuminating studies of how South American indigenous peoples’ relationships with things could be conceptualised (or not) as “ownership”, this workshop will explore the following issues:

●      The main principles and the undecidabilities around which human/non-human interactions and ownership forms play out in the South American regions where the participants have conducted their own fieldworks.

●      The comparative test of the possible inseparability, as previous ethnographic insights seem to suggest, between South American ownership forms and their practices and idioms of “care”, “nurture”, "mastery", among other concepts.

●      The ways in which indigenous life-projects, sustained by the particular ownership forms explored in the workshop, could illuminate so far invisible or ignored indigenous worldings. More specifically, the workshop participants will explore the entanglements of these worldings with the asymmetrical national politics and ideologies predominant in South American contexts saturated by the life ruination of neoliberal extractivism and developmentalism.

●      The distinct ways in which these ownership forms contest (obliging us to redefine) previous conceptualisations of “relational ontologies” usually labelled as a search for a “good life” based on “offerings” to (and “respect” toward) “sacred” earth beings (such as “Mother Earth”) which are taken, in current political narratives, as an alternative to the regional consequences of the so-called Anthropocene.

●      Finally, how do explorations of indigenous “relational ontologies” and ownership forms relate to the realm of the legal and notions of property or rights currently in use in South American countries?

Programme

The workshop is open for participation, please send an email to jjriveraandiaspam prevention@gmail.com.

Event review

From September 1 - 3, 2022, a group of 12 Americanists from different parts of the world (Europe, North America and South America) gathered in Tübingen to discuss the theme "Indigenous Forms of Ownership in the Context of Extractivism and the Anthropocene: Ethnologic Comparisons from South America". The presented papers were mutually enlightening, as participants approached the theme from different perspectives; historical, linguistic, ethnologic and (in most cases) ethnographic ones. The central question was: what does it mean to own something among South American indigenous communities? Converging on the ethnography of indigenous life-projects, the workshop explored Amerindian “relational ontologies” contrasting them to those worlds where humans own objects as property. In order to analyse possible Amerindian alternatives to the extractivist ruination of the Anthropocene and produce reciprocally illuminating studies of how South American indigenous peoples’ relationships with things could be conceptualised (or not) as “ownership”, the participants explored the following issues:

- The principles around which human/non-human interactions and ownership forms play out in the Andean and Amazonian regions.
- The apparent inseparability between Andean and Amazonian ownership forms and their practices and idioms of “care”, “nurture”, "mastery" and "familiarizing predation".
- The ways in which Andean and Amazonian life-projects sustained by particular ownership forms could illuminate so far ignored indigenous worldings.
- The entanglements of indigenous worldings with the asymmetrical national politics and ideologies predominant in South American countries saturated by the life ruination of neoliberal extractivism and developmentalism such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Venezuela.
- The distinct ways in which ownership forms contest previous conceptualisations of “relational ontologies” usually labelled as a search for a “good life” based on “offerings” to and “respect” toward “sacred” earth beings.

The fruitful and informative proceedings will be the base of a collection of chapters to be published either in a collective volume or in a peer-review journal´s special issue.

26 July 2022, 6.00 pm
Großer Senat, Neue Aula (Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, Tübingen)

Abstract:
Rights of Nature (RoN) denotes nature’s inherent right to exist and flourish. Inspired by indigenous ontologies, RoN have seen the recognition of rivers, mountains and forests as living beings in Latin America, former British colonies and inspired a fast-growing political movement worldwide. RoN’s transformative promise is a new mind set respecting human as well as non-human living beings as agents and to tackle one of the most pressing issues we are facing today: the emancipatory transformation of destructive and deeply unjust anthropocentric development models. This talk gives an innovative perspective on socio-environmental conflicts by (re)conceptualising them within the framework of ‘ontological politics’. Scaling-up insights on indigenous peoples’ understandings of nature and how these are mobilised in resistance to projects of resource extraction, development or conservation imposed on their territories, the lecture concludes with a research agenda that explores the potential of RoN in the Global South as well as in global climate activism to yield legal and institutional models for more sustainable and just human–nature relations.

Lunch Talk with Sarah Lohmann: “Utopian Chronotopes and the Feminist Utopia as Critical Thought Experiment”

Abstract:
Literary utopias tend to occupy an uneasy space between fiction and abstract social planning, and have historically been criticised on both counts. In my paper, I will be employing a third path of analysis, that of treating utopian novels as literary-philosophical thought experiments within the genre of science fiction, in order to make a case for an analysis of their success in terms their basic structural configuration around Bakhtinian chronotopes. In particular, I will juxtapose what I term the ‘homeostatic chronotope’ of the traditional utopia with the ‘complexity chronotope’ of the critical feminist utopia of the 1970s. Having presented my terms, I will briefly analyse Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as examples of thought experiments that fundamentally function as self-organising and self-optimising complex adaptive systems on both the societal and the narrative level as chronotopes. Finally, I will explore some of the implications of complexity theory as providing frameworks for sustainable utopian systems in non-literary contexts, and how it might provide some inspiration in our current period of global crisis and reconfiguration.

Watch the video of Professor Loidolt's Husserl Lecture here.

Abstract

What does it mean to be in public, to appear and to act? The existential significance of public spaces and encounters has become clear to us in the last two years of the pandemic, especially through withdrawal experiences. But even in the years before, classical concepts of the public sphere and privacy had been put to the test theoretically and practically, insofar as they rearrange and hybridize themselves through advancing technologization and economization. All these are contemporary experiences and moments of crisis of the public sphere – a crisis that requires a phenomenological reflection in the Husserl sense, on primordial foundation, processes of meaning and types of experience of the public.

In the Husserl Lecture, basic lines of a "phenomenology of the public" are developed in recourse to the rich phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition. It is conceived as a methodically reflected analysis of structures of experience, existence, and appearance, as well as the constitution of reality. In addition to the essential characteristics of the commonality and visibility of what appears in public space, anonymity and exposure, accessibility and exclusion, participation and distance, as well as modes of dispute and judgment as experiential and social types of the public are in question. In this way, beyond mere psychological state shots, it is possible to open up how worlds, public, private and above all hybrid worlds constitute, er- and are lived, how ambivalences with regard to the appearance of the world, self and others emerge and how successful and failing experiences of the public can come about as a result.

Abstract:
What is land? what is a river? What is the nature of earth, water, and how could they be inextricably related to both danger and pleasure? How do they become indispensable for diverse compositions of the worlds?

This convivial talk would tried to describe how people from other latitudes and environments conceive non-human entities that surround them. Current issues of the Anthropocene, a Latin American writer and Amerindian mythology and ritual music come together to offer a possible storytelling for evaluating how to survive in a damaged planet otherwise.

Venue: College of Fellows, University of Tübingen, Germany

Organization: Niels Weidtmann, University of Tübingen, Germany

Topic

“The comparative anthropology of worlding”

Anthropologist Philippe Descola says of himself that he was ill-prepared for the field work for which he lived with the Achuar in Ecuador in the 1980s. Poorly prepared, however, not because of his own failings, but because of the self-evident way in which he took for granted the distinction between nature and culture at that time - a distinction which anthropology has always worked with and which had hardly ever been seriously questioned until then. The matter-of-course nature of this distinction, however, not only prevented (and still prevents) a genuine understanding of societies such as that of the Achuar, but also suggests a fatal misunderstanding of these societies. Since nature and culture cannot be easily separated in their case, they are called “primitive peoples”, who still remain in the prehistoric and pre-cultural stage of human development. Descola points out that such a description is completely mistaken. Instead of being trapped in their immediate natural environment, the Achuar recognise in most animals and plants their own personalities with whom they can communicate at least rudimentarily and whose interests they must respect. The nature-culture-border does not carry here.

Committed to the descriptive method of anthropology, Descola pleads to discard any form of ontological preconception when visiting foreign societies. The different life-worlds are not adequately understood if they are merely classified as different cultural interpretations of “the” one nature. Instead, the life-worlds, for their part, first establish the ontology and thus also the understanding of man and the world that corresponds to them. Descola summarizes this with the term “worlding”. He names four different forms of such worlding: naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism. The ontology of naturalism, which is generally assumed by modern sciences, is on an equal footing with the other forms. Which ontology is valid is determined by the life-world, but not does a presupposed ontology give the correct understanding of the life-world.

In political terms, Descola opens up new possibilities for linking the rights of nature not only to the resource requirements of man. But how is it possible to give non-humans access to the political sphere? What does that mean with respect to current debates on climate change and conservation? A philosophical difficulty that arises from Descola's work can be summarized in the question of the possibility of plural ontologies. How do we escape the arbitrariness of relativism without simply assuming a universalism again? Furthermore, are there other forms of worlding besides those pointed out by Descola? Shall we conceive them as four completely separate categories to describe the continuities and discontinuities between humans and non-humans? Or are they rather something like Weberian ideal types – useful for thinking, but hard to turn into iron boxes?

These and other questions have been explored in the Workshop.

Organisation

This workshop enabled discussions with Philippe Descola about his ideas and contributions across several themes. It was be of interest to participants from a wide range of disciplines. There was be an opening session on day one. Day two to four consisted of an initial overview paper by Professor Descola, which was  followed by participant contributions and discussions. The school ended with a closing session and a wrap-up of topics on day five. Participants were also invited to attend a public lecture by Philippe Descola during the week.

Participants presented a 15-minute paper that critically discussed one of the themes and/or questions of the workshop. Engagement with current research questions and issues were particularly welcome as well as connections with current PhD projects.
This workshop was open to doctoral students from all disciplines.

Applicants had to supply the following documents:

• Application form
• CV (2 pages max)
• 300-word expression of interest
• Paper title and 300-word abstract

In his lecture, Descola focused on the "multiple births” of naturalism, pointing towards aspects of naturalistic thinking inherent already in ancient thought. At the same time, he sketched the unique historical emergence of naturalism in modern (natural) science as a way of tackling the rich yet ‘chaotic’ relations of analogism. While outlining differences between the ontologies, Descola also touched upon common features. In particular, he highlighted transitions between analogist and naturalist knowledge, which both share the notion that singularities can be linked in networks of multiple relationships, as mixed entities with intrinsic differences. He thus provided a framework both for understanding the emergence of scientific thought in Europe as one decisive form of worlding, as well as for an understanding of naturalism’s formative influences on the world in which we live today. Even if Descola rejects an all too simple alternative, as to think of a way out of the naturalist mode of worlding, his comparative insights call for a rethinking of strict dichotomies within the ontology of naturalism, especially those of nature and culture, and of humans and non-humans.

Descola’s well-attended Summer Lecture was the first large event organised by the College of Fellows, officially inaugurated in April 2022 as a platform for interdisciplinary research and networking among international research fellows at the University of Tübingen. The lecture was accompanied by a five-day workshop (30 May – 3 June) for international PhD students, who discussed Descola’s work with him, and explored its theoretical applications and stimulating potentials in their own contributions across several desciplines. Both events have been part of the activities of the Focus Group “Interdisciplinary Anthropology” at the College of Fellows.

You can find more information here.

German-French Doctoral College
"New Critical Theories and Decentralized Epistemologies"
Doctoral College of the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès and the University of Tübingen
Head of the Programme: Professor Dr Dorothee Kimmich

The Focus Group "Intercultural Studies" participated on the the design of the program.

For more information go to: https://uni-tuebingen.de/de/226905

You can find the flyer here.

Traditionell sind die Philosophen die Subjekte der Philosophie. Sie sind diejenigen, die philosophische Theorien formulieren. Es hat jedoch viele Versuche gegeben, mit dieser Idee zu brechen und andere mögliche Subjekte der Philosophie in Betracht zu ziehen. Können „normale Menschen“ Philosophie betreiben? Oder können „normale Menschen“ Wissen produzieren? Gibt es eine Philosophie der Massen? Wenn ja, wie wird sie ausgedrückt? Wie nutzt sie Technik und Medien?

Ziel dieses Workshops war es, die Begriffe „Gemeinsinn“, „Alltäglichkeit“ und „Medien“ (bzw. Mittel) interkulturell zu hinterfragen. Zu diesem Zweck wurden die Texte von Miki Kiyoshi, Tosaka Jun, Nakai Masakazu und Nakamura Yūjirō verwendet. Diese Autoren haben nicht versucht, den gesunden Menschenverstand des Status quo zu rehabilitieren, sondern im Gegenteil, den Gemeinsinn der Massen zu denken. Zu diesem Zweck konzentrierten sie sich auf die Massenmedien: die Zeitung und den Film. Diese in Japan entstandene Medienphilosophie kann nützlich sein, um eine Reihe von Fragen von aktueller Relevanz zu beantworten: Wie ist es möglich, eine interkulturelle Medienphilosophie zu denken? Inwieweit kann das Alltägliche revolutionär sein? Welche Rolle spielen Medien und Maschinen in der aktuellen philosophischen Debatte?

Seit den 1930er-Jahren gab es in Japan einige Autoren, die versuchten, die philosophische Kraft des Gemeinsinnes zu retten. Wie Gramsci mit seinem buon senso oder Lefevre mit seinem Begriff der quotidiennté versuchten diese japanischen Philosophen, Formen der Erkenntnis der Wirklichkeit „von unten“ zu erforschen. Miki Kiyoshi postulierte eine Grunderfahrung (kisokeiken), nämlich die körperliche Erfahrung des In-der-Welt-Seins. Für Miki war diese Erfahrung historisch und manifestierte sich in der Praxis und in der Erfahrung des Proletariats. Für Tosaka Jun, einen Kollegen von Miki an der Universität Kyoto, war das Prinzip der historischen Zeit weder in der subjektiven Zeit der Phänomenologie noch in der objektiven, rationalisierten Zeit der Wissenschaft zu suchen. Das Prinzip der historischen Zeit sei vielmehr in dem zu finden, was er „Alltäglichkeit“ (nichijōsei) nannte. Diese Alltäglichkeit war die situierte Zeitlichkeit des Arbeiters, die sich nach den Bedürfnissen seines Arbeitstages richtete. Miki und Tosaka beschränkten sich jedoch nicht darauf, über diese Begriffe abstrakt nachzudenken. Sie suchten nach anderen Wegen, Philosophie im Einklang mit ihren Theorien zu betreiben. Auf diese Weise haben sie beide Journalismus betrieben. Tosaka wiederum theoretisiert ebenfalls über die Bedeutung des Films.

Ein anderer Autor jener Zeit, Nakai Masakazu, war ebenfalls ein sehr wichtiger Filmtheoretiker. Für ihn bot der Film ein Mittel, durch das die Massen ihre Gefühle ausdrücken konnten. Die Erfahrung der Maschine war für ihn das „Mittel“ (mitteru), das dies ermöglichte, denn während eines Films sind es die Zuschauer, die die aktive Aufgabe haben, die Szenen und Schnitte in ihrem Kopf zu vereinen. Abschließend sei noch der Fall von Nakamura Yūjirō zu erwähnen. Obwohl Nakamura hauptsächlich in der Nachkriegszeit schrieb, wurde er stark von Miki, Tosaka und Nakai beeinflusst. Im Gegensatz zu Miki und Tosaka kehrt Nakamura zum aristotelischen Sinn des gesunden Menschenverstands als koinē aisthēsis zurück. Der gesunde Menschenverstand in seiner idealen Funktion ist für Nakamura das, was das Gesamtbild in den Blick nimmt und spontan auf die sich ständig verändernden Anforderungen der realen Welt und ihrer konkreten Situationen antwortet.

Während des Workshops wurde eine Auswahl von Texten dieser Autoren gemeinsam diskutiert und kommentiert. Die Diskussion begann mit einem Impuls von einem der Teilnehmenden. Am Ende eines jeden Tages gab es außerdem einen speziellen Vortrag. Die Veranstaltung fand auf Deutsch und Englisch statt.

This Online-Workshop was organised by the former fellow Dr Elise Coquereau-Saouma.

Topic

‘Freedom’ in modern and contemporary Indian philosophy in English can have two different meanings. One is metaphysical and universal. It describes a state of being to be reached, often called ‘(transcendental) liberation’ or ‘mokṣa’. The other is political and inter-personal or social. It implies a freedom of action, an inter-personal process that often requires negotiation within society, or political struggles. During the freedom movement in India, it was discussed as ‘svarāj’ (self-rule, independence), famously known from Mahatma Gandhi. Yet the borders between a metaphysical, or spiritual/religious sense of freedom, and a political or social one, are difficult to trace in contemporary Indian philosophy.

Mahatma Gandhi’s or Aurobindo’s political struggles are at the same time spiritual, with particular reinterpretations of Advaita. In academic philosophy, the ‘svarāj in Ideas’ of Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya, addressed to his students, pled for extending the political struggle to an intellectual one against “cultural subjection”. Independence is correlated to freedom in thinking. In his Studies in Philosophy, ‘freedom’ is described as one Absolute, detailed in a gradual detachment from all objectivities, toward the absolute subjectivity. Even though in the twentieth century freedom is located within the boundary of knowledge, and even though there are not specific ritualistic Hindu references, ‘freedom’ also has a universal, transcendental, spiritual connotation, as the highest state to be reached in an inner realization of the Absolute.

In a way, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya expresses a persisting plurality and subtle intermingling of the quest for ‘freedom’ in contemporary Indian philosophy: Is freedom a political svarāj, in which case it ought to be reached with others in the socio-political realm, or is freedom the way to reach inwardly an absolute state of liberation from the world of alienation that others cause? Even if it is socio-politically, is independence also not a struggle against alienation, namely a quest for independence from Others (colonial rulers), and in which case is this independence also a liberation from a world? Is realizing one’s own inward liberation a way to recognize the unity of all, or an exclusion of all those we leave behind?

In modern and contemporary India, responses vary: they question the socio-political formation of the idea of freedom in relation with colonization, the inclusivity of Brahmanical metaphysics and the secularization of mokṣa, and in relation with existentialism, the relation to alienation and inter-subjectivity, namely the role of Others in the realization of freedom. Highlighting the diversity and continuity of the concepts of freedom in Indian philosophies, and the newness that the political context and the contacts with non-Indian philosophies brought to the concept, this workshop questions the relation between freedom(s) and Others, svarāj and mokṣa, and the intricacies between metaphysics and politics.

Programme

This online workshop was organized by our Fellow Dr Fernando Wirtz and Dr Carina Pape

At the first Young Researchers Workshop of the Society for Intercultural Philosophy, young intercultural philosophers will briefly present their individual projects.

Christian Sinn

School teachers are mainly executors who depend on theoretical results. They do not have time nor the will for proper theory production, and their main task is the imposition of knowledge

These are common suppositions about teachers not only by society but also by academics. Opposed to this external attribution, the investigations of the Grupo de la Historia de la Práctica Pedagogica have shown a variety of differing self-attributions. During the 70s’, teachers and educational workers uncovered a different intellectual and political self-attribution, as empowered active constructors of social and political life. By framing this different teacher role as an activist of life (militante de la vida), Contreras & Murcia have analysed the political interpretation of Colombian teachers in the social movement. Colombian teachers fought for political and social recognition of their knowledge and expertise, mainly incarnated in a right to theorise themselves and to co-decide on educational politics. In the workshop I will present two fundamental approaches I have found on Colombian teacher roles in relation to Claudia Brunner’s concept of undoing epistemic violence.
 

Alessio Gerola
Beyond control: philosophical and ethical implications of biomimicry

Biomimicry is a contemporary design approach that takes nature as source of inspiration for technological innovation. Besides biomimicry, other bio-inspired approaches exist, such as biomimetics and bionics. Their interests and scope lean closer to those of engineering than to those of ecology. This situation creates a fundamental ambiguity within bio-inspired approaches. While biomimicry aims at more sustainable and bio-inclusive design, biomimetics and bionics seem to imply a more subtle form of exploitation of nature. In the context of the Anthropocene, such ambiguity raises questions about the possible forms of our planetary futures. If nature is supposed to inspire not only our technologies but also our ecological ethos, what kind of relationship with nature can we imagine in order to shape a more sustainable future? I will briefly explore potential directions in which Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitaro can help us addressing this question.
 

Sakine Mohamadi Bozorg
A Historical Investigation into the “Emersion” or “Problematization” of Critical Thinking in Iranian Modernity

The discussion of modernity in Iran and its various dimensions has been a significant issue in recent Iranian academic and intellectual debates. The variety of research questions and approaches stemming from these debates address subject areas such as political modernity, social modernity, modernization, and the discussion of development. They have also produced plentiful attempts to provide different readings of historiography and the definition of modernity. However, most of these studies are based on Occidental modern philosophy, with Iranian scholars attempting to formulate Iranian modernity based on the ideas of Foucault, Habermas, Giddens, and others. My project investigates theoretical dimensions and philosophical concepts in modern Iranian thought. For this purpose, I will question of the concept of critique and the characteristics of critical thinking. I focus on a specific contemporary Persian literary genre, namely Persian travelogues.

This hybrid workshop was organized by our Intercultural Fellow Dr Abbed Kanoor.

Languages: German, French, English

As François Laplantine (anthropologist) and Alexis Nouss (linguist) in their book Le métissage (1997) hinted at the richness of  this term in its historical (Mediterranean, Latin  America), linguistic (translation, creolization), cultural (Andalusia, Renaissance) and philosophical (Nietzsche, Bruno, Erasmus) aspects, they were in fact tracking the  Zeitgeist of late 1990s at the interface between cultural anthropology and philosophy with a fundamental question: what would a thinking look like that begins in medias res, instead of metaphysical quest for foundations or pursuing a systematic philosophy of principles? Their promising attempt – resulted later in their jointly published lexicon
Métissages. De Arcimboldo à Zombi  (2001) –  was not only in resonance with Serge Gruzinski’s major anthropological study in La pensée métisse (1999), but also deeply inspired by the specific philosophical era in French thought scene after 1960s (Deleuze and Derrida).

20 years later, there are rather concepts such as “interculturality”, “transculturality”, “global history”, “decolonization” and “globalization” in the foreground of cultural debates. The challenge is however still the same: how does philosophy relate to our cultural actuality? Does it play a methodological role i.e. preparing the theoretical frame of theories of culture? Does it react to it through a critical examination of the canonical historiography of philosophy and forms of thought? Evidently. There is however, in addition, the philosophical claim of cultural phenomena which has to be taken into account, that is when the cultural “in-between” opens the door to philosophical assessments; namely  both 1) when the descriptive approach of cultural anthropology to the phenomena of métissage leads to philosophical interrogations concerning the philosophy itself in its self-reflection, and 2) when thematizing the métissage in a phenomenological aspect involves the philosophical consideration of the lived experience expressed in literature, art  and narration of bodies engaged in this situation in a lively interaction with other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, cultural and literary studies.

Apart from the cultural anthropological debates around this term in the French speaking context, its thematization in the context of German-speaking intercultural philosophy  could serve the following dual goal: i) reviving the theoretical discussion about the métissage in a new interdisciplinary framework delimiting it from concepts such as “mixture”, “hybridity” and “synchronism” ; ii) contributing to the philosophical examination of the moment “inter-” through the complex concept of métissage which interrogates the limits of models such as assimilation and integration.

This online workshop was organized by our former Fellow in Intercultural Studies Dr. Elise Coquereau-Saouma.

Topic

‘Freedom’ in modern and contemporary Indian philosophy in English can have two different meanings. One is metaphysical and universal. It describes a state of being to be reached, often called ‘(transcendental) liberation’ or ‘mokṣa’. The other is political and inter-personal or social. It implies a freedom of action, an inter-personal process that often requires negotiation within society, or political struggles. During the freedom movement in India, it was discussed as ‘svarāj’ (self-rule, independence), famously known from Mahatma Gandhi. Yet the borders between a metaphysical, or spiritual/religious sense of freedom, and a political or social one, are difficult to trace in contemporary Indian philosophy.

Mahatma Gandhi’s or Aurobindo’s political struggles are at the same time spiritual, with particular reinterpretations of Advaita. In academic philosophy, the ‘svarāj in Ideas’ of Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya, addressed to his students, pled for extending the political struggle to an intellectual one against “cultural subjection”. Independence is correlated to freedom in thinking. In his Studies in Philosophy, ‘freedom’ is described as one Absolute, detailed in a gradual detachment from all objectivities, toward the absolute subjectivity. Even though in the twentieth century freedom is located within the boundary of knowledge, and even though there are not specific ritualistic Hindu references, ‘freedom’ also has a universal, transcendental, spiritual connotation, as the highest state to be reached in an inner realization of the Absolute.

In a way, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya expresses a persisting plurality and subtle intermingling of the quest for ‘freedom’ in contemporary Indian philosophy: Is freedom a political svarāj, in which case it ought to be reached with others in the socio-political realm, or is freedom the way to reach inwardly an absolute state of liberation from the world of alienation that others cause? Even if it is socio-politically, is independence also not a struggle against alienation, namely a quest for independence from Others (colonial rulers), and in which case is this independence also a liberation from a world? Is realizing one’s own inward liberation a way to recognize the unity of all, or an exclusion of all those we leave behind?

In modern and contemporary India, responses vary: they question the socio-political formation of the idea of freedom in relation with colonization, the inclusivity of Brahmanical metaphysics and the secularization of mokṣa, and in relation with existentialism, the relation to alienation and inter-subjectivity, namely the role of Others in the realization of freedom. Highlighting the diversity and continuity of the concepts of freedom in Indian philosophies, and the newness that the political context and the contacts with non-Indian philosophies brought to the concept, this workshop questions the relation between freedom(s) and Others, svarāj and mokṣa, and the intricacies between metaphysics and politics.

Program

Belonging is an increasingly questionable concept in the 21st century, in which human society is becoming more and more global. Societies are becoming more diverse, national allegiances are being challenged by modern labor migration as well as by flight and poverty migration, and traditional ties seem to be generally dissolving. At the same time, a new need for belonging is emerging. Do the phenomena of globalization and belonging contradict each other? Or are we challenged today to rethink belonging at all?

The topic of the workshop takes up a number of research questions that are currently being widely discussed in many humanities and social sciences. The question of the lines of belonging along which increasingly globalized societies are structured is a key issue everywhere. The different perspectives and emphases of the individual disciplines not only complement each other, but also productively challenge each other.

"Belonging" is explained in English dictionaries as "to have a proper place". Thus, the term opens up perspectives on space, on "one's own" and on property, which one possesses quite concretely. "Property is an institution that simultaneously constitutes a thing-relationship and a socialrelationship" and also forms a particular form of self-relationship. Owning movable things - in the narrower sense "belongings" - or land does not only mean that one can freely dispose of them, generate income from them, resell them, and exclude others from them. Rather, ownership, selfworth, recognition, and even identity enter into a far-reaching alliance in modern societies: The modern subject is one who owns what he or she uses or needs, or, to put it another way, only those are sovereign subjects who own what they use and need.

Property guarantees power of disposal, right of exclusion, participation and belonging. These rights are protected by modern states and are considered fundamental rights of freedom. The protection of property and the freedom to own are not value-neutral regulations, but are based on normative principles.

This is followed by questions about the justice of distribution or about formats of distribution and belonging. Increasingly discussed today are concepts of distribution and belonging in terms of the - historical and contemporary - "commons": tangible and intangible resources are referred to as commons. These include air and water, of course, but today also access to education, knowledge and information. In principle, they can be used by all members of a community and thus combine a specific type of "belonging" with a particular type of "affiliation."

Belonging and Property

If one follows the suggestion that modern orders can be recognized by the fact that they can no longer hide their contingency, the view becomes free for the reactions that this provokes. Without being backed up by metaphysics any longer, the rational bipeds step onto the stage - and intervene in the course of events. Through the exchange of signs we create orders, give structures to the social world. We establish relationships and draw boundaries; we erect symbolic orders, regulate proximity and distance, and tie belonging to certain conditions. None of this is harmless, no gesture neutral.

And all of this happens without our being able to claim extramundane authority for it. What we call "reality" owes itself to perpetual classifications and categorizations. Orders of belonging must be examined within this horizon - that is, those social practices through which recognition, entitlement and participation, resources and capitals are allocated. In this context, the triad of race, class and gender comes into view. But it does not stop there. Other categories must also be taken into account and examined in their interplay.

These processes of negotiation are rarely conducted cooperatively and consensually; it is less likely that they are conducted violently. Because these struggles do not stop at the borders of the nation state, it is also important to look at the power relations that have developed between the Global North and the Global South.

Belonging to the World and Situatedness

When we think of belonging, we first think of something like a connecting and often correspondingly binding relationship. A person belongs to a group, a thing belongs to someone's property. When we describe belonging in this way, the moment of not-belonging is already included. It is true that what belongs to another is by no means unaffected by this form of relationship, but on the contrary can be decisively determined by it, for better or for worse. And yet, there is no identity; that which belongs exists in its essence independently of the respective form of belonging, and could therefore also not belong (or belong to something else).

Differently with regard to the belonging to the world. One cannot not belong to the world, this is true for persons as well as for things. But what then still means belonging? If there is nothing beyond belonging to the world, then the distance described above is lost in relation to the world, then the belonging person or thing has no being in itself independent of the world. Belonging to the world is therefore constitutive for everything that exists. However, the world itself, to which we all belong, does not exist beyond our belonging to it either. World as such does not exist. The analysis of belonging to the world therefore shows that what belongs and what it belongs to are mutually constitutive of each other and only emerge from the process of belonging itself. This, however, does not describe a special case of belonging, but instead captures a basic feature of every form of belonging.

Reflecting on this basic feature of belonging allows for a critical analysis of numerous entrenched forms of belonging (claims to ownership as well as self-understandings) that are no longer specifically performed and lived. An exciting question arises about the situatedness of belonging. "Belonging" does not exist in general; there are only concrete and temporary processes of belonging. In this we encounter something like the situatedness of world.

The Right of Belonging / Not-Belonging in the Global Encounter

That rights require belonging, i.e. that the validity of rights depends on their scope of application, to which one must belong, has been consensus at least since Hannah Arendt's critique of human rights. In her reading of Arendt, however, Judith Butler sharpens Arendt's critique once again when she rejects Arendt's talk of a pre-legal state of nature or of 'naked life' as a place or state of nonbelonging. For belonging and non-belonging are, according to Butler, equally the result of legal action. The assumption of a pre-legal non-belonging follows the logic of origin or founding narratives, which have a heuristic function and are usually oriented towards the deductive justification of a state, but do not describe historical processes - and cannot capture the complexity of globalization processes, migration and multiple belongings. Accordingly, not only does the question of the conditional relationship between law and belonging arise anew, but also that of the legal production of non-belonging.

The meaning of belonging, however, extends beyond the field of the juridical, since belonging also means a specific participation and being part of a group, which is expressed in social and cultural practices, ideas and narratives, and which is affectively justified and, if necessary, 'naturalized'. Belonging is accordingly more than just membership. It is part of and participates in (collective) processes of subjectivation. In view of the conditional relationship between law and non-belonging, the question arises, especially in the context of globalization, migration and multiple belonging, what role law plays in (collective) processes of subjectivation, how it relies on narratives, ideas and practices of socio-cultural and socio-historical belonging in its production of legal belonging and non-belonging, which it selects and communicates in order to establish belonging/nonbelonging.

Belonging, Emplacement, Home

In this section we want to explore the question of the human being's sense of place. One of the central traits of human belonging is linked to emplacement, in the questions of where we come from, where we live and dwell, where we stay. The question is most likely to arise when we find ourselves in unfamiliar, alienating places, such as when we are forced to stay in a hospital for an extended period of time, or in an alienating part of town where there is a sense that we do not belong. Nevertheless, the question of where one feels one belongs cannot be answered easily. Places of belonging, the positive localization of human beings, turns out to be complex and differentiated. Are places to be understood territorially, geographically? Or can they rather be traced back to the human being's sense of meaning? Should places be thought of at all only starting from the belonging to it, so that localization is to be understood actively - as a finding or creating of places?

It is in human habitation that the need for localization is most pronounced. However, dwelling is often temporary, i.e., temporal. What does it mean to dwell? Does it refer to human establishments or does it existentially define human beings? Is dwelling to be understood starting from habits (habitus)? Does dwelling presuppose familiarity? And what does it mean to feel at home?

The question of home arises especially with reference to the refugee and migration issue. Is home interchangeable? Can a new homeland be found or created? Or is home to be questioned as such at all, overtaken by today's mobility and globality? Beyond the frequent political misuse of the term homeland, especially in the refugee question, does homeland still have carrying power with reference to the belonging of the individual?

Religion and Belonging

Forms of religious belonging vary widely across the globe, depending on tradition and religious community. Of particular interest in the context of the conference is the change in the understanding of belonging and of attribution processes that can be observed in various social contexts in recent decades, not least as a result of the increasing religious pluralization of many societies. The congruence between official and self-identified affiliation, religious practice and religious conviction is by no means (any longer) given; nor does official nonaffiliation imply a lack of practice and conviction. Rather, even in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian societies, there are increasingly multiple affiliations, practices, and convictions that are more situationally oriented than defined exclusively by a particular religious community. The academic debates here discuss concepts of "believing without belonging" (Grace Davie) as well as "believing in belonging" (Abby Day) for Europe and North America. Thereby, "believing" is increasingly interpreted in the sense of a performative self-identification with regard to social relations. The link between religious and social belonging is particularly relevant in migration contexts, in which, for example, religious practice as confirmation of an ethnic identity can, on the one hand, become more significant for the individual than in the home country, and on the other hand, can hinder integration.

Little consideration has been given to non-Christian societies, such as those in East Asia, where intentional religious affiliation is largely irrelevant, but Buddhist or Shinto practice (in the case of Japan) is integrated as a matter of course into individual life courses and into the consciousness of national belonging. Given the diversity of conceptions of religious belonging, the question arises of how the relevance and forms of religious belonging change in religiously and ethnically plural societies.