Co-creating health with non-humans: Reflections from Urban rooftop organic gardening in South Asia - Dr. Gomathy KN

Two of the many socio-environmental problems associated with rapid urbanisation in the global south are food safety and urban waste management. Practices like organic food gardening in cities, are becoming popular in-situ responses to the problem. However, the dominant discourse on urban organic food gardening is often human-centric, neglecting the agency of non-humans that make it a more indeterminate and dynamic practice. Using relational ethnography and the new materialistic, more-than-human turn in social sciences, this talk follows elderly urban rooftop gardening in city of Thiruvananthapuram, South India to examine what it means to create health with non-humans. This could entail making meaning, making place for non-humans, becoming their kins, tending to other multiple kinships in the garden, drawing competency from childhood memories, and so on. In effect, participating in the co-creation of an animistic care world in built environments such as urban rooftops and of care-communities beyond home.

Donnerstag, 22.05.2025 16-18 Uhr c.t.

Schloss Hohentübingen, Seminarraum 03

Gomathy KN - is an early career scholar, having completed her doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Hyderabad, India. Her doctoral work was an ethnographic study of the practice of urban rooftop gardening in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, South India. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher and Teach@Tuebingen fellow at the Department of Ethnologie, University of Tuebingen. Her research interests include human-environmental relations, gender, migration and health.

Layers of Memory: Between Personal and National Narratives in Contested Public Spaces - Dr. Monika Palmberger

This lecture examines the complex processes of remembering, placemaking and silencing in the city of Mostar Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the aftermath of the 1992-1995 war, Mostar’s urban landscape has become an arena for competing national narratives, each seeking to impose its version of history through monuments, memorials, and public symbols. These official representations obscure alternative histories and interpretations, including the memories of individuals whose lived experiences do not align with the dominant public national discourses. The lecture critically examines how individuals of different "generational positioning" navigate and position themselves within this newly prescribed memorial landscape, where personal memories and dominant national narratives do not always coincide. It explores the tension between public and personal, often marginalized, memories, highlighting the non-linear and sometimes ambivalent ways in which people engage with the past.

Montag, 11.11.2024 17:00 Uhr s.t.         

Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, Ausstellungsraum

Dr. Monika Palmberger - Visiting Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University (CEU) and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna

Class and Caste in Industrial India - Dr. Christian Struempell

In this talk, I look at the process of class formation in the industrial belt of eastern India, and the ways it relates to caste. The focus is on the regions Adivasis (indigenous people), who are routinely stereotyped as representing the Other of the urban-industrial modernity the development of a local steel industry was supposed to launch. Based on ethnographic research and oral histories covering period from the inception of the industry in the 1950s, I highlight how this stereotyping serves the upper-caste elite to legitimate the placing of Adivasi at the bottom of the local labour hierarchy and at the fringes of the modern township, but also how Adivasis contest their stereotyping, exploitation and dispossession. As I will further show, the class polarization that has grown among the steel workforce during the last decades also cuts through Adivasi communities, and reflects in different experiences of being Adivasi and in divergent politics. This reveals more generally, I argue, that the relationship between class and caste or local notions of difference is dynamic, open to historical change, and I discuss what ramifications this holds for anthropological theorising.

Donnerstag, 28.11.2024 18-20 Uhr c.t.

Schloss Hohentübingen, Seminarraum 03

Dr. Christian Strümpell - is a Research Associate at the Max Weber Forum of South Asian Studies, Delhi, and affiliated to the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universität Hamburg. His latest publications include the monograph Steel Town Adivasis: Industry and Inequality in Eastern India and the co-edited volume Industrial Labour in an Unequal World: Ethnographic Perspectives on Uneven and Combined Development.

Diversity in Intimacy: Migration and Difference in romantic relationships

Love and Intimacy has been a neglected topic in sociological and anthropological research. My study of intimacies and diversity studies the negotiation of difference, diversity and boundaries among mixed couples of migrants and non-migrants. I am particularly interested in negotiations of power and hierarchies in relationships, particularly, in terms of status, race, class and gender, religion. By way of biographical trajectories of migrants and non-migrants, refugees and permanent residents, Jews and Muslims, my research analyses how migrants and non-migrants, refugees and permanent residents, Jews and Muslims, my research analyses how migration regimes and the politics of difference affect relationships and livelihoods. The biographical interviews and ethnographic observation illustrate how individuals draw on identifications in order to negotiate their position in the relationship and the social environment in the current political climate. While public discourse often focuses on ‘cultural differences’ as the obstacle for ‘Love’ to work, I rather suggest, that the migration regime and structural inequality affect intimacies in the most severe ways. Zooming into the micro-dynamics of relationships will then offer a broader understanding of contemporary forms of intimacy and relationships in superdiverse societies.

Donnerstag, 16.01.2025 18-20 Uhr c.t.    

Schloss Hohentübingen, Seminarraum 03

Dr. Vanessa Rau - is a sociologist and a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen. Her current project entitled ‘super-diversity meets intimacy’ is a research on intimacy and relationships among refugees and permanent residents and she also researches intimacy among Jews and Muslims. She was in the initiating team project “Encounters: Jews and Muslim in Urban Europe” and is one of its Advisors. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge which examined Israeli migration and the emergence of a new Jewish scene in Berlin. Her research interests include religion and secularism, migration and disability, gender and sexuality and the politics of difference more broadly.

Empowering crisis? Temporalities of women's climate mobilities in northern Ghana

Rural northern Ghana forms a region of migration par excellence. While migration practices have long been dominated by men, women have increasingly become visible migratory actors over the past decades. In particular, yong women engage in seasonal rural-urban migration and look for informal work opportunities in the urban settings of Accra and Kumasi, Ghana's biggest cities, to contribute to rural household livellihood security or dor personal use. Initially included by environmental crises such as droughts in the 1980s which endangered livelihoods, women's motives for migration have shifted from securing household livelihoods to mere individual motives.

Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork since 2007, Dr. Christian Ungruhe will analyse these long-term dynamics of women's migration practices that root in their climate mobilities of the 1980s. Specifically, this talk will investigate in how far these dynamics have led to women's social mobility in the rural setting, e.g. indicated by greater access to resources and education more general and shifting ideas of women's social positioning in society. Hence, by focussing on how drivers and practices have transformed over time, it will contribute to a debate on ‘climate migration’ and show its dynamics and temporalities. This will qualify the role of crises as a single determining and persisting factor for spatial mobility and conceptualise (crisis) migration as a multi-layered and entangled social reality that is continuously negotiated and in flux.

Mittwoch, 22.01.2025 16-18 Uhr c.t.

Schloss Hohentübingen, Seminarraum 03

Dr. Christian Ungruhe - Universität Passau