In this lecture I look at ways in which the content and form of Ghanaian folktales are being subverted to reflect the narrators’ lived realities (or their dreams) and to articulate their ideological perceptions. The revised stories feature (1) open-ended plots that break the presumed “stylistic consistency” of the folktale and (2) characters who inscribe themselves onto a ‘modern’ scene which is a far cry from the fantasy world typically associated with the folktale. I examine how these features challenge long held views in narratology, especially as they pertain to the narrative subject—views which have resulted in a shift in literary studies away from narrative grammar in search of a pragmatics of narrative. Furthermore, given that folktale studies have provided a site for the construction and demonstration of literary and cultural paradigms, my analysis of the Ghanaian folktales will form a basis for exploring the potential of this genre for generating new directions in African studies, particularly with regard to dismantling the foundations of the seemingly intractable colonizing epistemological order that has held sway within the discipline.

Main Research Interests

• Gender Identity in Oral and Written African Literature
• African American and American Literature
• Eighteenth Century British Literature
• Practice in Criticism

Publications (selected)

• With Gordon Adika, George Ossom-Batsa: New Perspectives on African Humanity: Beliefs, Values & Artistic Expression. Accra: Adwinsa Publications, 2014.
• After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems by Ama Ata Aidoo. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
• Critical Readings of Faceless. Accra: Sub-saharan Publishers, 2014.
• Throwing Stones in Jest: Kasena Women’s Proverbial Revolt. Saabrücken: Lambert Academic Publishers, 2011.

Terrain is an important concept in both physical and military geography. However the term is often used in a relatively unproblematic way to describe the forms and textures that define particular spaces. This lecture draws elements from both traditions but situates them within a more explicitly theoretical-political inquiry, that of thinking the materiality of territory. Terrain is important in understanding territory because it combines materiality, strategy and the need to go beyond a narrow, two-dimensional sense of the cartographic imagination. Instead, terrain forces us to account for the complexity of height and depth, the question of volume. Terrain makes possible, or constrains, various political, military and strategic projects. It is where the geopolitical and the geophysical meet.

All attempts at fixing territorial boundaries and shaping territories are complicated by dynamic features of the Earth, including rivers, oceans, polar-regions, glaciers, airspace and the sub-surface – both the sub-soil and the sub-marine. These complexities operate at a range of spatial scales, from the boundaries of nation-states to urban infrastructure projects. Taking the measure of these factors is crucial for a political-legal theory of territory more generally. Essentially the key question is: how can theories of territory better account for the complexities of the geophysical?

Main Research Interests

• Modern History
• Political Geography
• Philosophy

Publications (selected)

• Foucault: The Birth of Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming January 2017.
• Foucault's Last Decade. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
• The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

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In one of the last interviews preceding his premature death in 2014, filmmaker, artist and writer Harun Farocki pondered the question to what extent the prime visual metholodogy of political modernism, namely montage, has been replaced by the paradigm of navigation. Moreover, Farocki implicitly asked what the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of such a shift would be. In my talk I will attempt to continue this interrogation of the condition of contemporary digital visual cultures, mobilizing the notion of "navigation" to trace the terrain of operational image production and usage. Being particularly interested in the fate of the idea of the political or dialectical image, this line of questioning aims at addressing the modes through which images are being converted into dataspaces to be travelled as well as the instrumental life of images as tools of navigation (from neurosurgery to targeted killings).

Main Research Interests

• Contemporary and Late Modernist Art
• Governmentality of the Present

Publications (selected)

• Übergriffe. Zustände und Zuständigkeit der Gegenwartskunst. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2014.
• With Mark Terkessidis: Fliehkraft. Gesellschaft in Bewegung – von Migranten und Touristen. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2006.
• With Mark Terkessidis: Entsichert. Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhundert. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2002.
• With Mark Terkessidis: Mainstream der Minderheiten; Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft. Berlin / Amsterdam: ID Archiv, 1996.

21st January, 2015

The burgeoning international social science literature on public religion and secularization has paid less attention than it might have to recent developments in postsocialist societies, though these are extremely interesting theoretically as well as empirically. In some countries where religion was formerly repressed severely, it now approximates the role (de facto if not de jure) of a state religion. Some churches seem to be entering into compromises with the new state power reminiscent of those they reached with atheist Marxist-Leninists in the last decades of socialism. Some secular identities conflict with constitutional guarantees and international standards for religious human rights. How should academic analysts approach these issues? The lecture will draw on results of recent projects at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, as well as other recent anthropological projects in Russia, Poland and Hungary.

Chriss Hann

Professor of Social Anthropology and director of the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.

Main Research:

• economic organization

• property relations

• religion

• civil society

• ethnicity

• nationalism

Publications (selection):

• Renleixue de quewei (The Theft of Anthropology. Selected contributions on postsocialist transformation from anthropological perspectives). Beijing: Minzu University Press, 2014.

• with Keith Hart: Economic Anthropology; History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

• with the "Civil Religion" group: The Postsocialist Religious Question: faith and power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. Münster: LIT, 2006.

• Not the Horse We Wanted! Postsocialism, Neoliberalism and Eurasia. Münster: LIT, 2006.

• with the “Property Relations” Group: The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition. Münster: LIT, 2003.

Kader Konuk follows the plight of German-Jewish humanists who escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in a Muslim-dominated society. Konuk asks why philologists like Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach found humanism at home in Istanbul at the very moment it was banished from Europe. She challenges the notion of exile as synonymous with intellectual isolation and shows the reciprocal effects of German émigrés on Turkey's humanist reform movement. By making literary critical concepts productive for our understanding of Turkish cultural history, Konuk provides a new approach to the study of exile. Central to the lecture is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, written in Istanbul after he fled Germany in 1936. Konuk draws on some of Auerbach's key concepts—figura as a way of conceptualizing history and mimesis as a means of representing reality—to show how Istanbul shaped Mimesis and to understand Turkey's humanist reform movement as a type of cultural mimesis.

Prof. Dr. Kader Konuk

Professor for Turkish Studies, Turkish Literature and Cultural Studies at University of Duisburg-Essen

Main Research Interests

• Migration
• German-Jewish and Turkish-Jewish Literature
• East West Mimesis
• Secularism
• Exile Studies

Publications (selected)

• East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
• Identitäten im Prozeß: Literatur von Autorinnen aus und in der Türkei in deutscher, englischer und türkischer Sprache. Essen: Blaue Eule, 2001.
• With Cathy Gelbin and Peggy Piesche: AufBrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland. Sulzbach/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer, 2000.

Migration in our contemporary globalized world is a phenomenon reaching far beyond the dichotomizing perspective raised by Georg Simmel in his essay on “The Stranger”. No longer, can concepts of identity be brought to the formula of a “person who comes today and stays tomorrow”. In contemporary literature, we rather find different forms of identity, such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism and nomadism as well as characters, such as the traveller, or the party girl as a new variation of Benjamin’s flâneur, etc.

The lecture will scrutinize these figurations of migration based on an intersectional approach that brings together these concepts of identity with theories of cultural memory (Halbwachs, Assmann, Erll/Nünning et al.) and which is based on Anglo-American Post Colonial Studies and the Francophone concepts of Métissage and Créolisation. The theoretical reflection will be exemplified by selected literary texts (published in German speaking countries for a German speaking audience) dealing with immigration from Central and Eastern European countries.

Prof. Dr. Helga Mitterbauer

Austrian Visiting Associate Professor at University of Alberta

Main Research Interests

• Austrian and German Literature of the 18th to the 21st Century
• Modern Novel, Literary Theory, esp. Transcultural Studies, Cultural Transfers
• Relations between Austrian und (Central) European Literature, Migration in Literature.
• Figurations of Migration

Publications (selected)

• With Christa Gürtler: Elfriede Gerstl:Werke, vol. 1: Mittellange Minis. Graz: Droschl, 2012.

• With András F. Balogh: Gedächtnis und Erinnerung in Zentraleuropa. Vienna: Praesens, 2012.

• With Federico Celestini: Ver-rückte Kulturen. Zur Dynamik kultureller Transfers. 2. Aufl. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2011.

• Postkoloniale Konzepte in der Erforschung kultureller Transferkonzepte. In: Diethild Hüchtker, Alfried Kliems (eds.): Überbringen – Überformen – Überblenden. Theorietransfer im 20. Jahrhundert. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2011, 75-89.

In 2011, in an interview with the journalist Fréderic Joignot, Édouard Glissant commented on the Archipelagean Becoming of Europe. Bringing Europe closer to the epistemic grounds of „Antilleneaty“, Glissant discussed the epistemic implications of the translation of this Caribbean concept to the European context. From this angle the world can be thought in the Gestalt of creolization. This understanding of creolization introduces a notion of “living together” departing from a critical race and decolonial perspective. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Manchester (UK) on Spanish and Latin American diasporic networks between 2010 and 2013, this paper looks at the strategies of “making homes” resonating or contesting the epistemological framework of creolization.

Prof. Dr. Encarnación Gutiérrez- Rodríguez

Professor of Social Studies at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen

Main Research Interests

• Transcultural Studies
• Post/Marxist and Decolonial Perspectives on Feminist and Queer Epistemology and Their Application to the Field of Migration, Labour and Culture

Publications (selected)

• Migration, Domestic Work and Affect.: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor. London, New York: Routledge, 2010.
• With Manuela Boatcă, Sérgio Costa: Decolonizing European Sociology.  Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
• With Hito Steyerl: Spricht die Subalterne Deutsch? Migration und Postkoloniale Kritik. Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2003.
• Intellektuelle Migrantinnen - Subjektivitäten im Zeitalter von Globalisierung. Eine postkoloniale dekonstruktive Analyse von Biographien im Spannungsverhältnis von Ethnisierung und Vergeschlechtlichung. Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999.

In public discourse, the topic of "Flight and Expulsion," that is, the forced migration of millions of ethnic Germans at the end of the Second World War, continues to be politically highly sensitive (see the recent controversies surrounding the foundation Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung). There is consensus that post-war German history cannot be adequately understood without consideration of the influx of millions of Germans from the Eastern territories (who made up 20% to 25% of the post-war population in East and West Germany). However, attention to flight and expulsion and to the attendant victimization of Germans is often viewed as being at odds with the recognition of Germany's responsibility for WWII and the Holocaust. As a result, scholars have largely shied away from examining the momentous events of forced migration and their lasting effects on subsequent generations, -- a situation that has changed only in the past two decades. Writers, on the other hand, began to address these issues in the post-war period and continue to do so to the present day. The lecture will discuss recent developments in both scholarship and in literature. Special attention will be given to the concept of (forced) migration, the role of postmemory, generational changes, and changing notions of place and belonging.

Prof. Dr. Friederike Eigler

Professor of German and Chair of the German Department at Georgetown University

Publications (selected)

• Heimat, Space, Narrative: Toward a Transnational Approach to Flight and Expulsion. Rochester N.Y.: Camden House, 2014.
• With Jens Kugele: Heimat at the Intersection of Memory and Space. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012.
• Gedächtnis und Geschichte in Generationenromanen seit der Wende. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2005. 

For many years indigenous forms of knowledge were treated by Western scholars as “mistaken epistemologies,” i.e., as un-scientific, irrational folklore and childish worldviews. This old view of animism was a product of the evolutionist and anthropocentric worldview of the Enlightenment. However within the framework of ecological humanities, current interest in posthumanism, postsecularism and discussions on building altermodernity (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), indigenous thought is used to critique modern epistemology and develop alternatives to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as equivalent to Western knowledge will be presented here as a (potentially) decolonizing and liberating practice. The concept of alter-native modernities, emerging from indigenous ways of being in the world, will be explored as one response to the challenges to Euromodernity. The investigation will compare literature on indigenous cultures from Latin America, Africa and East-Central Europe. Following recent works by anthropologists and archaeologists such as Nurit Bird-Rose, Philippe Descola, Graham Harvey, Tim Ingold and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, new animism will be treated as a relational ontology enabling rethinking of the question of relations between human and non-humans, going beyond human exceptionalism.

Prof. Dr. Ewa Domanska

Permanent Professor at the Department of History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland and Visiting Associate Professor at the Anthropology Department at Stanford University California, USA

Main Research Interests

• Comparative Theory of the Human and Social Sciences 
• Contemporary Theory and History of Historiography
• Posthumanities 

Publications (selected)

• Existential History. Critical Approach to Narrativism and Emancipatory Humanities. Warszawa: PWN, 2012.
• Unconventional Histories. Reflections on the Past in the New Humanities. Poznan: Wydawnictwo Poznanskie, 2006.

In this talk, I will review my concept of co-witnessing (Kacandes: Talk Fiction. 2001) and then position us, vis-à-vis some trenchant examples, for a group discussion about the current “refugee” situation:  Which stories, which traumas exactly, are in the news? Who is authorizing him/herself or is being authorized to co-witness to those stories? Who is listening?  What events and peoples are being left out altogether?  And the culminating question behind my title:  What is the future perfect—here I obviously mean in the grammatical sense, with a play on the words’ connotations—of that selective co-witnessing (or lack of it)?  When such and such will have happened, what will Europe’s future be?  A specific component that interests me passionately concerns whether some individuals will be allowed to have become “new Europeans.”

Prof. Dr. Irene Kacandes

Main Research Interests

• Modern Greek Literature
• Narrative Theory
• 20th-Century Cultural Studies

Publications (selected)

• Daddy's War: Greek American Storytelling, Family Memory, and Trauma. A Paramemoir. Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
• With S. Denham and J. Petropoulos: A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Recent discussions on the (post-)secular nature of ‚western‘ society or culture usually criticize a ‘simplistic’ or ‘unidirectional’ account of progressive secularization. But no alternative concept has yet emerged. It seems that the idea of ‘secularization’, as problematic or vague as it may be, might prove indispensable at least as the study of culture is concerned. For if we do no longer understand ‘secularization’ as a concept or a theory, but rather as a trope or a narrative, we cannot only revisit the past and present debates, but also develop new ways of studying cultural productions as texts, images, or practices which are neither clearly secular nor religious. I argue that this ‘afterlife of religion’ in culture is not only an important topic for future research but might help to unsettle the distinction between the ‘secular’ west and its ‘religious’ other that still determines and distorts our understanding of the global present.

Main Research Interests

• Interrelation of Religion and Literature
• Theories of Secularization
• History of Philology and Literary Theory
• German-Jewish Literature

Publications (selected)

• Gershom Scholem. Politisches, esoterisches und historiograhisches Schreiben. München: Wilhelm Fink 2003.
• Bibel und Literatur um 1800. München: Wilhelm Fink 2011.

West German Holocaust memory of the 1980s and 1990s might very well be the most self-reflexive and self-critical collective memory of genocide we know. But German Holocaust memory is also a complex and ambivalent discourse which combines seemingly unflinching acknowledgments of historical responsibility with a great deal of imaginative and self-serving interpretations of history.

This lecture investigates examples from popular television productions, which have been the primary platform of collective memory in Germany for many decades. It offers a critical reading of mediatized memory, noting how television has proven adept at averting its gaze from the key moral challenges of the Nazi past by, for instance, turning perpetrators into bystanders and bystanders into victims. Among the handful of (West) German public TV programs that focus squarely on the perpetrators and bystanders of the Final Solution, most still fail to develop narrative and aesthetic strategies that render said perpetrators and bystanders clearly visible to the audience as distinct historical-political challenges.

In historicizing the history of televisual memory, this lecture argues that before the invention of the Holocaust paradigm, perpetrators and bystanders disappeared in a fog of tact, disinformation, and helplessness. With the development of the Holocaust frame they recede behind the figure of the survivor; and after the height of self-reflexive Holocaust memory they vanish in the moral maelstrom of Knopp TV, with Unser Mütter, unsere Väter marking a turning point in perpetrator TV narratives as yet another instance of highly selective remembering. This discussion of public television as a platform of collective memory draws on conceptual and theoretical developments in media history, cultural history and memory studies to outline a critical history of (West) German collective Holocaust memory.

Main Research Interests

• Representation and Collective Memory of World War II and the Holocaust in Germany
• Postwar Historiography and Philosophy

Publications (selected)

• With Christoph Classen: Historical Representation and Historical Truth. History & Theory Theme Issue 47. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009.
• In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Creativity and ideation techniques, such as brainstorming, mind maps, scenario analyses, or morphological boxes are used in the context of designing, planning, and problem solving in various disciplines: for example in the range of education for designers, architects or engineers, in management courses, writing seminars or psychological testing. These techniques represent a vital, and highly multidisciplinary part of contemporary knowledge production. Nevertheless, up to now very little is known about the cultural history of creativity and ideation techniques. This is particularly true with regard to their remarkable rise and prosperity in the 1950ies and 1960ies, when a great variety of creativity techniques and guidebooks were being launched and propagated in both academic and professional fields. Especially in western culture, creativity was regarded as a highly precious human property that needed to be fostered in a systematic way. The talk will place selected creativity and ideation techniques in the context of post war era, and will show, how these techniques have been shaped and influenced by social, political, and economic debates on creativity and knowledge production at that time.

Main Research Interests

• Design Methodology and Epistemology
• Knowledge and Experimental Design and Media Practices
• History and Practice of Creativity and Ideation Techniques

Publications (selected)

• With Christof Windgätter: Long Lost Friends. Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Design-, Medien- und Wissenschaftsforschung. Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013.
• The Epistemology of the Unspoken. On the concept of tacit knowledge within contemporary design research. In: Design Issues, Vol. 28, Nr. 2, 2012, 61–71.
• Design als Wissenskultur. Interferenzen zwischen Design- und Wissens­diskursen seit 1960. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011.

Scientists feel uneasy when cultural studies scholars perceive climate change as a "construction", humanities people are unhappy with straightforward positivists. The presentation refers to a years-long collaboration with scientists in the context of policy advice and advocacy. And it will lay out some general orientation for a new research approach in the "Environmental Humanities".

Claus Leggewie

Professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI) , Chairman of their Board of Directors and Co-Director of the Käte Hamburger Collegium “Political Cultures of World Society” at University of Duisburg-Essen.

Main Research:

• Climate and Culture: Cultural factors of the adaptation of modern societies to the consequences of climate change
• Inter-Culture: Preconditions and Consequences of cultural and religious globalization
• Culture of Memory: European conflicts of memory and politics of history
• Furthermore: Political and scientific communication through digital media, democratisation of non-western societies

Publications (selection):

• Zukunft im Süden. Wie die Mittelmeerunion Europa wiederbeleben kann. Edition Körber-Stiftung 2012
• Mut statt Wut. Aufbruch in eine neue Demokratie. Edition Körber-Stiftung 2011
• (Harald Welzer, Hans-Georg Soeffner, Dana Giesecke, Hg.)KlimaKulturen: Soziale Wirklichkeiten im Klimawandel. Campus Verlag. Frankfurt/New York 2010
• (mit Harald Welzer) Das Ende der Welt, wie wir sie kannten. Klima, Zukunft und die Chancen der Demokratie. S. Fischer Verlag. Frankfurt/Main 2009

This lecture addresses the relationships of scientific and political changes in the twentieth century, focusing particularly, though not exclusively, on examples from the four regime changes in German and Austrian history marked by the dates 1918, 1933/34/38, 1945 and 1990 in transnational context. In keeping with the meaning of the German term Wissenschaft, “science” refers here to natural and life sciences as well as humanistic disciplines.

The central claims to be defended here, among others are: (1) that sciences and politics could be and often were used as resources for one another in multiple ways during each of the events described; (2) that political ideologies and/or ideological constructions of science were only two of many types of resources involved in this complex interaction; (3) that (relative) autonomy for science and scholarship (Wissenschaft) was never a pre-ordained or guaranteed result of such interplay, but always needed to be negotiated amongst scientific and political or policy actors; (4) that (relative) autonomy, when it was achieved, often came at a high cost.

The word „crisis“ has many meanings. In particular, talk of a “crisis of science” or a “crisis” in one or more of the sciences was common before and during the Weimar Republic. At the same time, radical regime changes could be and were perceived in twentieth-century Germany and Austria as crises of a different sort, namely as threats to institutional continuity. In addition, the impact of politically caused dismissals created crises of yet another kind in the personal lives and careers of scientists and scholars, for example those dismissed on racist grounds in the Nazi era. All of these meanings of the word “crisis” will be explored here.

This presentation will draw from a larger project that aims to articulate notions of sovereignty, democracy, and freedom in affective and sensory terms. It conceives of sovereignty as an embodied practice rather than an abstract concept and as something that must be learned and experienced collectively over time rather than as a fixed and final condition of a sovereign or discrete individual or nation. Focusing in particular on how my work on affect has been informed by art practice, the talk will develop the concept of the “sovereignty of the senses” through a discussion of queer and feminist installation projects by Zoe Leonard, Rachael Shannon, and Karin Michalski that use built environments to transform affective, sensory, and social experience.

The paper will address the lecture series theme of crisis by considering the significance of affect as research method. In so far as the sovereignty of the senses is about forms of inquiry and expertise that are affectively and somatically based, how can it facilitate different ways of responding to "crisis"? Like my previous work on depression, this project also displaces the category of the crisis in its insistence on the everyday, the ordinary, the ongoing, and other related moods and temporalities.

Ann Cvetkovich

Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Main Research:

Her current writing projects focus on the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counterarchives and interventions in public history.

Publications (selection):

• Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992)
• An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003)
• Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the political landscape of Asia changed dramatically. From the Ottoman Empire to Persia, from North India and Southeast Asia to China and Japan, Asian monarchies underwent processes of dynastic decline, experiencing radical and pervasive changes in society and culture. These events attracted the attention of a wide array of European commentators. My talk explores the ideological purposes and orientations of their reports and discussions and aims at locating Asia in the genealogy of Western concepts of revolution and political change from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Focusing on China in particular, I will touch on four contexts: (1) (Asian) revolutions in European political language; (2) narratives of Asian revolutions colonial and travel writing; (3) historiography; (4) in European drama, novel, and visual art.

Sven Trakulhun

Assistant Professor of Modern History of Asia at the University of Zurich.

Main Research:

• History of Thailand and Southeast Asia
• History of the European Expansion in Asia,
• Transnational History of Ideas
• History of Transfers between Europe and Asia

Publications:

• Hg. (mit T. Fuchs), Das eine Europa und die Vielfalt der Kulturen. Beiträge zur Kulturtransferforschung in Europa 1600-1850, Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag 2003.
• Siam und Europa. Das Königreich Ayutthaya in westlichen Berichten 1500-1670 (Reihe: Formationen Europas, Bd. 2), Hannover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn-Verlag 2006 (auch erschienen inder Schriftenreihe der Deutsch-Thailändischen Gesellschaft, Bd. 24). Überarbeitete Fassung der Dissertation
• (Hg., mit Ralph Weber), Modernities: Sites, Concepts and Temporalities in Asia and Europe, New York: SUNY Press (erscheint 2012).
• (Hg., mit Henning Trüper), Biography Afield in Asia and Europe (=Asiatische Studien/Etudies Asiatiques, issue no. 4, 2013)

This event addresses the field of Science Communication, as one guiding topic in the study of culture, with a closer view on exhibition practices and curation. The GCSC therefore invited two renowned specialists and scholars: Fred Turner (Stanford University) gives a lecture drawing on essential links between cold war exhibition practices and the psychedelic counterculture and thereby sets the stage for discussing present practices of curation in the open forum with the curator Anselm Franke (Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin). Further, according to Anselm Franke as one of the curators of the exhibition and conference “The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside“ in 2013 at HKW, with Fred Turner as Keynote Speaker, the open forum gains from their former collaboration, addressing questions of bringing complex scientific fields into the public discourse.

A project conceptualized and organized by Vera Fischer; supported by Research Area 4, sections Oikos, Museumskultur, and Kulturmanagement.

The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America

In the early 1960s, young bohemians swayed together under the swirling lights of psychedelic slide shows, surrounded by walls of amplified sound, in dance halls and art galleries from Greenwich Village to San Francisco. For a generation of historians, their tribal rites have long represented a sharp break with a vastly more conservative early cold war media culture. This talk makes a very different case. It first returns to World War II, to explore the widespread fear that mass media technologies might turn Americans into authoritarians. It then recounts how, as the fighting began, American social scientists and Bauhaus refugees collaborated to produce new multimedia environments with which to turn the senses of their fellow citizens in explicitly democratic directions and so bolster their will to fight fascism. The talk shows that this turn became the basis of both two decades of cold war American propaganda and the multimedia utopianism of the 1960s. As it traces this history, the presentation reconnects the immersive, multi-mediated environments of the 1960s to those of the decades that preceded them. In the process, it reveals the long-forgotten links between the counterculture and mainstream, cold war America – as well as the long-hidden roots of our contemporary, multiply mediated social world.

Open Forum: Fred Turner & Anselm Franke (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin),

Chair: Vera Fischer (GCSC, Giessen):

After the lecture a transition by Anselm Franke and the discussion in the open forum provide space to draw on present practices of curation that can not only be linked to a historical view but set the focus on these practices as a means of communicating science.

Anselm Franke

Curator and Head of the Visual Arts and Film Department at HKW Berlin.

Publications (selection):

• The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside (editor with Diedrich Diederichsen). Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013.
• Animism, Volume 1 (editor). Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.
• Death and Life of Fiction. Taipei Biennale. Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2012.

Fred Turner

Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University and Director of Stanford’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

Publications (selection):

•  The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. University of Chicago Press, 2014.

• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

• Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Anchor/Doubleday, 1996; 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Media discussions of “the Greek crisis,” and especially assertions of Greek “corruption,” obscure an important fact: that patronage and bribery are reflections of larger geo-political processes dating back to the Western creation of the modern Greek nation-state – processes that powerful Western European and North American countries have been dangerously reluctant to acknowledge.  The speaker will analyze this history in terms of the durable imposition of colonial rule in the cultural sphere.  This pattern of domination, which is a refraction of a global hierarchy of cultural value, has both inflated and exploited Greek cultural nationalism, with its claims of deep antiquity and European quintessence.  The consequences for governance today, especially in the context of a the unclear trajectory of the European Union, have been catastrophic for the Greek people, and they will not cease to threaten international relations as well as the internal cohesion of the Greek nation-state until the root causes are identified and discussed in a public fashion.  There are signs that this is increasingly well understood in Greece.  Will it be equally well understood, and will its implications be squarely faced, by the more powerful nations of the Western world?  The topic will be addressed through comparisons with several other countries, notably including Thailand (another site of the speaker’s research).

Michael Herzfeld

Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Main Research:

• social theory, history of Anthropology, social poetics, politics of history; Europe (especially Greece & Italy), and Thailand.

Publications (selection):

• Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome; University of Chicago Press; March 2009.
• Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State; New York: Routledge.1997. Italian edition, Naples, L’Ancora. 2001. 2nd, revised U.S. edition. 2005. Serbian edition, Belgrade, XX Vek.
• The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value; Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004
• Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society; Oxford: Blackwell; Paris: UNESCO. 2001.
• The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy; Oxford: Berg.1992. Paperback reprint, The University of Chicago Press. 1993.
• Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece; Austin: University of Texas Press. 1982. Paperback reprint, Pella (New York), 1986; Greek edn., Athens: Alexandria.

Misled by the naïve formalism of contemporary diagrammatics, we tend to conceive of network visualization in an abstract and ahistorical way. The lecture challenges this tendency through an analysis of cinematic representations of the "coming of the dial" to the telephone network: the rapid introduction, in the 1920s and 1930s, of the dial interface and associated technologies of automatic switching and call routing. In dialogue with Rick Altman's notion of a "crisis historiography" of media, and drawing on an archive composed – among other things – of recruitment, training and instructional films, documentaries on cable repair and network history, and comedies of telephone operators in love, I underline the materiality, heterogeneity and historicity of telephone networks, and reveal the political stakes of their representation.

Brían Hanrahan

Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.

Main Research:

• Film and cinema studies
• Acoustic media & auditory culture
• Weimar culture
• Media theory

Publications:

• Traces of War: Gas Shell Bombardment, 1918, Sounding Out!, July 2014
• “Live on the Air, Live on the Ground: the Chamberlin Flight as Spectacular Event, June 1927,” in Thomas O. Haakenson and Jennifer Creech, eds., Spectacle. Peter Lang: German Visual Culture (forthcoming 2014).
•  “The Mobilization of Weimar Radio: Traveling Microphone and Radio-Film,”
  Transfers: Journal of Mobility Studies, vol. 3, number 2, summer 2013, 4-23
• “For Future Friends of Walter Benjamin,” Los Angeles Review of Books. July 2012.
• “June 13, 1930: German radio broadcasts Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend, a film without images,” in Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson, eds., A New History of German Cinema. (Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 264-272.

In the moment of the book’s anticipated demise, when digital technology supposedly renders the codex obsolete, we witness the proliferation of creative acts fetishizing the book medium.  From book earrings to codexical laptop covers, from Youtube videos about books coming to life to altered book sculptures (what Garrett Stewart calls “bookwork”), these diverse efforts participate share an aesthetic strategy that I call “bookishness.” This talk explores bookishness across diverse genres, media, and aesthetics to show what this cultural phenomenon tells us about our medial shift and the role of the literary within it.

Main Research:

• 20th and 21st-century American literature
• digital poetics
• media theory

Publications (selection):

• Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• with N. Katherine Hayles (eds.): Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
• with Lisa Swanstrom (eds.): “The Literary,” A Special Issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly. Boston: DHQ, 2013.

This lecture is an introduction to standards for textual data. Although there is growing awareness about standards for text data and funding for research increasingly requires the use of standardized formats, research projects often quickly discover that the general landscape of text data standards can be quite confusing.

Andreas Witt

Leiter des Programmbereichs Forschungsinfrastrukturen des IDS Mannheim; Honorarprofessor für Digital Humanities an der Universität Heidelberg.

Main Research:

• Texttechnologie
• Digital Humanities

• Informationsmodellierung

• Korpuslinguistik

• Auszeichnungssprachen

Publications (selection):

• mit Nils Diewald: Texttechnologie an der Universität Bielefeld. In: Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie (7). Paderborn : Mentis-Verlag, 2006.

• Multiple Informationsstrukturierung mit Auszeichnungssprachen. XML-basierte Methoden und deren Nutzen für die Sprachtechnologie. Dissertation. Bielefeld, 2002.

• Sprachverarbeitung mit getypten Attribut-Wert-Matrizen. Dependenzgrammatik und Konzeptuelle Semantik. Magisterarbeit. Bielefeld, 1996.