Our faculty member Christian Steiner has co-organized this year’s K’Universale that brings together acclaimed scholars discussing posthumanism and its meanings.
Please find the programme of the lecture series here!
Events
“Emotional Emplacements – Space and Emotion in the Politics of the Climate Crisis” (Jan Winkler, MLU Halle-Wittenberg)
On October 23, 2024, Dr. Jan Winkler will visit us in Eichstätt to give a guest lecture and teach a workshop for our fellows. Please stay tuned for further information about time, place and topic of his lecture!
Jan Winkler is research group leader at the European Centre for Just Transition Research and Impact Driven Transfer (JTC) at MLU Halle-Wittenberg (Department of Geography). Currently, he is also principal investigator in the research project “Städtische Geographien des Verlusts” (funded by “Bundesverband Wohnen und Stadtentwicklung”) as well as part of the management of the “Franconian Geographical Society e.V.”.
“Leisurely Gentrification? Conflictual Places and Practices in Contemporary Fiction” (Maria Sulimma, Freiburg)
“Respect for Reality – Unfeeling and Grief in the Ecological Crisis” (Henrike Kohpeiß, FU Berlin)
On May 14 we are welcoming Dr. Henrike Kohpeiß. She is a philosopher working as a postdoctoral researcher at SFB 1171 “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. In her lecture “Respect for Reality – Unfeeling and Grief in the Ecological Crisis” she considers how the imminent threat and concrete consequences of the climate crisis seem strangely absent in daily lives and future imaginaries in the global north. She asks how a thorough examination of the deep “structures of unfeeling” (Berlant) and a practice of mourning can reconfigure the “respect for reality” (Freud) that appears weakened?
“Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature” (Sabine Meyer, Bonn)
On December 7, 2023, Sabine N. Meyer from the University of Bonn will join for a guest lecture. Under the title “Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature,” she will talk about The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) and Black Indigenous Literature. Please find an abstract of her talk below. The lecture will be held on Zoom from 12 to 2 pm.
If you would like to join, please use this link: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/62362308168
“Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature”
Over the last two decades, Black Indigenous literature, that is, literary works written by authors who identify as Black Indigenous, has emerged as a prominent medium for the negotiation of Black Indigeneity and for carving out a space outside the racial order implemented by North American settler states since the 18th century. My talk sets out to explore negotiations of Black Indigenous identity and relationality in one of the most recent examples of Black Indigenous fiction, Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021). My close reading demonstrates that the novel, through theme and form, consequently thinks together Blackness and Indigeneity in both past and present and explores the possibilities of shared Black Indigenous futures. Throughout my analysis, I also emphasize why it is important for scholars to engage with Black Indigenous literary production: shedding light on the politics and methodological limits of Western epistemologies and advancing alternative ways of knowing and making known, Black Indigenous literature is useful for confronting the “impasse between Blackness and Indigeneity” (Cheryl Harris) that has come to dominate discourses on Blackness and Indigeneity inside and outside academia.
Lecture Hanjo Berressem (collaboration with American Studies LMU)
We are delighted to announce that Hanjo Berressem (Cologne/Colorado Springs) will hold a guest lecture at “Practicing Place” that we organize in collaboration with the department for American Studies at the University of Munich:
Title: Concrete Ecology: Brutalist Architecture with Félix Guattari
Date: November 28
Time: 6 pm
You can download the poster for the lecture here.
The lecture will take place virtually. Please contact gk-practicingplace@ku.de if you would like to join!
Guest Lecture Bernard Geoghegan
We are delighted to announce that Bernard Geoghegan (Max Planck Institute for the History of Sciences) will hold a guest lecture at “Practicing Place” on November 16:
Title: Poetics of Rendering: How Graphics Format Territories
Date: November 16
Time: 6 pm
The lecture will only be accessible through Zoom:
https://kuei.zoom.us/j/64048402969?pwd=NVF4SUozZ2RiMEE2RE1rQ0JhOUlqUT09
Lecture “Narratives of Displacement and Placemaking: Notions of Diaspora in Indigenous Literatures” with Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky (American Studies, Uni Augsburg)
We will be joined on the 21st of July 2022 for a lunchtime guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky. Visiting us from the American Studies department at the University of Augsburg. The lecture will be held at KGA-304.
Narratives of Displacement and Place-Making: Notions of Diaspora in Indigenous literatures
‘Place’ is a central issue in Indigenous literatures and, as numerous Indigenous writers and scholars have highlighted, in Indigenous epistemologies, with communal and political practices, as Anishinaabe writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson puts it, “reflective of the relationality of the local landscape” (2017, 3). The settler colonial politics of displacement and dispossession over the past centuries thus present a violent disruption of fundamental relations; land rights, accordingly, are crucial to contemporary struggles for Indigenous sovereignty in Canada and the United States, with ‘place’ inextricably interwoven with notions community, its history, its land relations, and its language.
But geographical displacements have also at times led to new land relations and community formations that did not erase memories of the community history and place connections so violently disrupted, but incorporated them into processes of renewed place-making. Some writers, for instance the Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez (2021), use the term ‘diaspora’ to account for community building away from but tied to ancestral lands. For many scholars, ‘diaspora’ is a term antithetical to Indigenous experiences and constellations (e.g., Clifford 1994; Coleman 2017); for others, it offers a potentially productive avenue to capture complexly interlinked processes of place-loss, place-experience, and place-making (e.g., McCall 2010).
In light of these debates, this talk will explore the potential and the limits of ‘diaspora’ in the work of Muscogee poet, musician, playwright, and memoirist Joy Harjo, the incumbent United States Poet Laureate. In her more recent work, Harjo pays increasing attention not only to Muscogee territory of her youth in Oklahoma – a constant in her poetic engagement with place for decades – but also to the lands in Alabama from which the Muscogee were expelled in the 1830s to be forcibly resettled in the ‘Indian Territory’ that was to become Oklahoma. This talk does not seek to make claims regarding the general valence of ‘diaspora’ in Indigenous contexts; rather, I am interested in how this specific poet’s work might help complicate notions of place-making and diaspora.
References:
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 3 (1994), pp. 302-338.
Coleman, Daniel. “Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space: Of Literalism and Abstraction.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (2016), pp. 61-76.
McCall, Sophie. „Diasporas, Indigenous Sovereignties, and Metis Writing in Canada.” Canadian Literature, vol. 204 (2010), p. 121.
Perez, Craig Santos. Navigating Chamoru Poetry. University of Arizona Press, 2021.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done. Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Lecture and Workshop on “Mediating infrastructures. On the materiality and temporality of socio-technical networks” with Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher (University of Mainz)
We will be joined on the 19th of May for a lecture from Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher, professor of Media and Cultural studies at the University of Mainz. The lecture is an open event from 18.30-19.30 at KGA-205.
You can also join via Zoom: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/64726594064?pwd=N2dXN0FsSjBqSzU2Vy9sR2RVV043Zz09
Meeting ID: 647 2659 4064
Passcode: 351201
‘Mediating Infrastructures. On the Materiality and Temporality of Socio-Technical Networks’
Infrastructures are regarded as the backbone of modern societies. They represent the state’s provision of public services and are a sign of increasing economic interdependence in the context of international trade relations. They circulate goods, people, animals, but also energy, water, waste and information, thus organizing the spatial and temporal transfer of a wide variety of entities. It is this performance of infrastructural systems that constitutes their medial quality. But what exactly does this quality consist of? From a media and cultural studies perspective, the talk explores the materiality and temporality of infrastructures and proposes three perspectives that are relevant for their mediality: the in/visibility of infrastructures, the scalings they accomplish between the global and the local, and their processuality.
Prof. Schabacher will then be leading an internal workshop on Friday the 20th of May, in Marktplatz 2, with open to fellows, faculty, and associated members.
Gabriele Schabacher is professor of media cultural studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and co-speaker of the Collaborative Research Center 1482 “Humandifferenzierung.” Her research focuses on media and cultural theory, media history of transport, mobility and infrastructures, cultural techniques of repair, digital regimes of surveillance, media history of seriality and theory of autobiography. Her recent publications include the volumes she co-edited on the cultures of repair (2018) and on the practices of workarounds (2017), and the articles “Time and Technology. The Temporalities of Care” (2021), and “Staged Wrecks. The Railroad Accident between Infrastructural Lessons and Amusement” (2019). Her new book on infrastructures, entitled Infrastruktur-Arbeit, will be published in June 2022.
Lecture “What’s in a place? Locating Traces of the Past as a Strategy for Remembering Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp – Audio Walk Gusen” with Dr. Tanja Schult (Art History / Stockholm University)
Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp – Audio Walk Gusen (2007) leads users through three market towns in Upper Austria which during World War II were the sites of concentration camps. Mayer’s artistic sound collage succeeds to visualize a long supressed past in an individual listener’s mind, and establishes an intimate and reflective form of commemoration which leads to critical questioning of neglected or institutionalized practices of commemoration. My talk reflects on how Mayer succeeds to bridge the distance to this past and makes it relevant for us today, and explains in which way his artistic practice can act as a guideline for the creation of other memory works elsewhere – especially in places where most traces of the past were erased and where everyday life goes hand in hand with a will to remember a painful past which happened right there.
The event is going to be filmed and will be uploaded to our YouTube channel shortly after.
ZOOM: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/8535747861