31.05.2022

Two new junior professors for the "Global Encounters" excellence platform

In order to work on identified topics and to establish new networks, job profiles for four junior professorships were developed in the advisory board within the framework of the Global Encounters excellence platform. The junior professorships were advertised by the faculties (Faculty of Humanities, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences) - two were recently filled.

Bani Gill - Global Sociology. Urban Futures in the Global South

As a qualitative sociologist grounded in ethnographic sensibilities and a regional focus on South Asia and Africa-India encounters, Bani Gills primary research and teaching interests include Southern urbanisms, migration, and law, bureaucracy, and the state. Her scholarship has examined contemporary patterns of transnational mobility from the African continent, particularly West Africa, to Delhi, India, as an entry point to engage with questions of social difference and identity in relation to urban futures. 

She also has an interest in themes of ‘informality’, ‘illegality’, and everyday experience(s) of law and state power as lived in the socio-legal urban margins. Her next project at the University of Tübingen will examine deportation, infrastructures, and policing by attending to the complex relationship between urban space, identity and identification for different subject populations located in Delhi, India. Her interdisciplinary research trajectory thus aims to examine ‘new’ spaces and sociopolitical sites of Global Encounters and particularly the tensions and convergences emerging from hierarchized cultural, political, and socioeconomic encounters in the Global South.

Riccarda Flemmer - Political Struggles in the Global South

Riccarda Flemmer is a political scientist with a PhD from the University of Hamburg. Her expertise is in grassroots activism, international indigenous peoples’ rights, conflict transformation, and citizen participation in Latin America. In her previous research, she has worked with civil society activists, especially indigenous peoples, to understand their perspective on the multiple (inter)national political, social, and legal struggles over resource extraction in the Amazon.

As Assistant Professor of Political Struggles in the Global South, her focus is on the Rights of Nature (RoN) and indigenous peoples’ ontologies. The research she wants to carry out takes 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, she wants to explore the political potential of RoN in the Global South as well as in global climate activism.

She believes that RoN can be understood as a multitude of global encounters between indigenous and Western epistemologies and ontologies which may open possibilities to tackle one of the most pressing issues we are facing today: the emancipatory transformation of destructive and deeply unjust human–nature relations.

More info on the Global Encounters website 

Platform Global Encounters