By Andrii Portnov. Ukrainian history and literature in the German higher education system are the disciplines whose institutional weakness is more than obvious. Ukraine itself, in the eyes of a large part of German (including academic) society, still does not have enough cultural and historical agency and remains ‘in the shadow of Russia’.
Autor: editorial board
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A New Iran Has Been Born — A Global Iran
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Interview with Asef Bayat. This interview was published in Persian on Oct. 10 by the Tehran daily Etemaad. Shortly after its publication, the Iranian authorities ordered the newspaper to take the interview down from its website. The interview had already gone viral in Iran and abroad, and several other outlets that had reposted it were likewise forced to unpublish it.
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Picturing the Labor Landscape: The Silahtarağa Power Plant and Istanbul’s Electrical Infrastructure
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By Nurçin İleri. This essay centres on a series of photographs, which I first came across at an auction in November 2020. These black and white images depict Istanbul’s first urban scale power plant, the Silahtarağa campus and extension of the grid to the city in the early 1910s.
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Faith Without Compulsion: Reflections on Iran
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By Zahiye Kundos. Above and beyond the heartache that recent events in Iran engender among Muslims and people who are in solidarity with us, it harms what we truly and communally care about: finding creative ways to reassert who we are and what we stand for.
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Figuring a Women’s Revolution: Bodies Interacting with Their Images
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By L. Is the uprising in Iran a feminist revolution? This essay is an attempt to understand an intuition born of experiencing a gap: A gap between viewing photos and videos of protests online, and presence in the street. It’s an effort to explicate the short-circuit that courses in the opening between these two domains—virtual space and the reality of the street—in this historic moment.
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How Iran’s Rich Literature Can Help You Better Understand the Protests of Today
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By Letitia Nanquette. The images of the current protests in Iran are striking and possibly unexpected for some. However, there is a long history of political movements in Iran, and throughout this history, literary creations and politics have influenced each other.
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Normalization of Violence Against Women in Iran
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On 14 September, Mahsa Amini was detained by the Iranian Police because of an „improper hijab.“ Two days later, she was dead. For Iranians living under the fundamentalist state’s oppression of women during the last 43 years, this is not an exceptional incident.
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Web Scraping and Digital Archives: A Program for the Retrieval of the Transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia
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By Katarina Ristić and Nikola Ristić. Digital archives have created a number of opportunities for researchers, from accessing files and material collections irrespective of the archive’s location, to the possibility to search and obtain large amounts of material in a short time. At the same time, digital collections might be overwhelming, amounting to hundreds or even thousands of files which might be of interest for the research.
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The Military Destruction of the Late Soviet Urban Space in Ukraine and the Demise of the Soviet Man
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By Vadym Ilin. In the pre-war address in 2022 Vladimir Putin transparently hinted at the significance of the material space as a factor to “rewrite” history: “We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine”.
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Academic Freedom between Ideals and Daily Challenges
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By Jernej Letnar Černič. For decades, pluralism, the rule of law, and human rights have been the backbone of constitutional democracies. Those ideals have been embraced by academia, at least in constitutional democracies.
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Ever-Present Tobacco Dust: Women’s Labor Conditions at the Cibali Tobacco Factory
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By Zehra Betül Atasoy. In early Republican Turkey (1923–1945), women workers – predominantly in tobacco, weaving, and the food industry – were gathered mainly in Istanbul, where industry was relatively more developed. Although the number of female workers in industrial production gradually increased, gender-based wage differences continued, with women earning less, and these workers were subjected to long hours and inadequate health and safety conditions.
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“A New Form of Evil Emerges Now” – A Conversation with Olha Honchar
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In March of this year, IIn mid-March of this year, I interviewed Olha Honchar, the head of Territory of Terror Museum in Lviv and the initiator of the Museum Crisis Center. We discussed the Territory of Terror in the context of Ukrainian political events, heritage protection during the war, and how Russian aggression compares to historical events.
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Digging Deeper: Contested Livelihoods and Sociocosmological Relations among Artisanal Miners in Laos
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By Oliver Tappe. When I first visited the Lao tin mining area by the river Nam Phathaen in 2019, I was struck by the image of local villagers digging small pits and tunnels next to the roaring excavators of a Chinese mining company operating in the area.
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Semantic Geo-Annotation for Ancient History and Beyond
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By Elton Barker. Sometime in the second century CE, Pausanias of Magnesia wrote the Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece). Representing a unique deep dive into ancient Greece’s built environment to the level of individual statues and paintings, this text projects a tour of the Greek mainland in ten books, from Attica (I) to Phocis (X), in a clockwise circuit around the Peloponnese.
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The Rational Factory, Labour, and the Fordist Visual Imaginary
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By Rick Halpern. The first decades of the twentieth century were a remarkable period for heavy industry across much of North America and Europe. Mass production of goods such as rubber and steel – and consumer products like automobiles and radios – reached unprecedented levels.
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Trauma and the 1980s in Arabic Literary Studies
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What is a literary history of the present? There are many ways to imagine such a project and its debt to Foucauldian genealogy, from accounts of how literature writes history to how the notion of literature is a historical aspect of the present. This essay, part of the upcoming workshop, “The Literary 1980s in the MENA: Towards a History of the Present”, asks what trauma has come to name in Arabic literary studies since the 1980s.
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Constructing Global Order – Book Review
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By Ulf Engel. Four years after his ground-breaking presidential address to the International Studies Association (ISA) in 2014, in which the author called for decentring the Western-dominated field of international Studies, Amitav Acharya has produced a monograph on global order in which the contours of a different way of practicing international studies are outlined.
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Philology and Microhistory: A Conversation with Carlo Ginzburg
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Islam Dayeh in conversation with Carlo Ginzburg. In this Philological Conversation, Carlo Ginzburg reflects on the place of philology in his work and explores the connections between philology, microhistory, and casuistry. We talk about the people who inspired his early thinking, including his father Leone Ginzburg, his mother Natalia, and his grandfather, moving on to Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Sebastiano Timpanaro.
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Notes from Another Exodus: The Four-Month Struggle to Evacuate Afghan Poets and Scholars
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By Fatemeh Shams. On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, after twenty years of US-led military occupation. As the situation escalated over the following days and weeks, harrowing footage of airport stampedes, Taliban violence, protestors, chaos, and panic dominated the news. Four months later, the news cycle may have quietened, but the crisis in Afghanistan intensifies every day.
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The Russian War against Ukraine: Middle East Food Security at Risk
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By Eckart Woertz. As a region, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the world’s largest grain importer. Approximately 30 per cent of global exports of wheat and barley, 20 per cent of corn, and a whopping three-quarters of sunflower oil come from Ukraine and Russia.
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The Digital Threat to Science and Academic Freedom
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By Raffaela Kunz. The academic publishing system is in full transformation – but not in the way many had hoped for. Since the arrival of the Internet, it was predicted that the way knowledge is accessed and disseminated would undergo a fundamental change.
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The End of Unity: How the Russian Orthodox Church Lost Ukraine
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By Regina Elsner. Since the end of the Soviet Union, dozens of theologians and scholars of religion elaborated on the complicated relationships within the church community of the so-called Holy Rus’. The Moscow Patriarchate defines its territory of spiritual responsibility as encompassing the former Soviet Union – except for the old churches of Armenia and Georgia.
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Spatial Formats under the Global Condition – Book Review
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Reviewed by George White. Through their work at the Collaborative Research Centre at Leipzig University, Steffi Marung, Matthias Middell and their collaborators have produced a comprehensive and impressive volume on the weighty topic of globalization. The topic is innately geographical, specifically spatial, and geographers not only have a lot to say about it, they already have written much about it.
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Vergangene Zukunft? Der russisch-ukrainische Krieg und die Rückkehr der modernen Zeiterfahrung
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Von Clara M. Frysztacka. Nach zwei Jahren Debatten über den Beginn einer „Ära der Pandemien“ überbieten sich seit dem Einmarsch der russischen Truppen in die Ukraine die Prognosen über den Anbruch einer neuen (oder alten?) Zeit der Geopolitik.
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Africa and the Russian Aggression against Ukraine – Interview with Ulf Engel
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Interview with Ulf Engel by Megan Maruschke. Ulf Engel, Professor of African Studies at Leipzig University, recently launched a five-part blog series on Africa and Russia’s war in Ukraine in Leipzig University’s Research Centre Global Dynamics blog.
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Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses
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By Mehdi Khorrami and Amir Moosavi. Can a text, in its broadest sense, transcend its primary sensory medium and trigger multisensory reactions? Can a painting activate the sense of taste, in addition to sight? Is it possible to see, taste or touch a piece of music while listening to it?
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“I live in Ukraine, and Ukraine has been in trouble since 2014” – An Interview with Sasha Kurmaz
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By Natasha Klimenko. On April 13th, 2022, I spoke to Sasha Kurmaz, an artist from Kyiv who now lives in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine. When we started the interview, he told me to keep one thing in mind: “If the air raid siren goes off, I’ll have to close everything and go”.
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Contextualizing and Conceptualizing Debates about Academic Freedom in Europe
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By Anna L. Ahlers. After participating in the re:constitution seminar in Ljubljana, Slovenia in November 2021 and, also crucially, while working with colleagues in China, I cannot help but feel extremely lucky and privileged to be able to work under the academic circumstances that I do. They appear to be so much easier to deal with than the ones I learned about in my interactions with academics from China, Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey, and other countries.
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Before the Invasion: Conversation with Vasyl Cherepanyn
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Interview with Vasyl Cherepanyn by Inga Lāce. I sat with Ukrainian curator Vasyl Cherepanyn on the afternoon of Thursday, February 18 for a conversation via Zoom. The situation in Ukraine was already tense because the Russian army had strengthened its forces on the Ukrainian border and there was constant, alarming media focus on the threat of invasion.
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We Didn’t Start the Fire: Military Interventions from Kosovo to Kiev
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By Katarina Ristić. Only a few days before the attack on Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin responded to those scandalized by the prospect of a war in Europe, reminding Europeans that such a war had already taken place. In 1999, he said, it was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – not Russia – that had started a “large-scale military operation that included air strikes against a European capital, Belgrade”.
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Towards a Truly Global Digital Humanities
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By Diana Roig-Sanz. The idea that the digital humanities enjoy a global scope remains utopian. Most of the departments and research institutions that house postgraduate studies, summer schools, international conferences, and scientific journals on the matter remain anchored in the Global North, especially in certain countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
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“Resisting Multiple Pressures – Perspectives on Academic Freedom in Europe” – Side Note on the re:constitution Seminar
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By László Detre. re:constitution is a joint program of the Forum Transregionale Studien and Democracy Reporting International, funded by the Stiftung Mercator. Re:constitution awards fellowships, inspires and organizes topical seminars, and offers fact-based analysis on and around the rule of law and democracy in the European Union.
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“The Problem is Not in the Illusions, but in the Aims of the Apparatus of Power” – Interview with Gintautas Mažeikis
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Interview with Gintautas Mažeikis by Miglė Bareikytė. I remember when professor Gintautas Mažeikis, during the first week of the semester at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, told his students, including me, that we should read Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment”. We were young, the book was poorly translated, perplexity set in.
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The Russian Orthodox Church and Modernity
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By Regina Elsner. Russian Orthodoxy is often suspected to be pre or anti-modern because of its difficulties engaging with a plural and secular society – for example, when relating to democracy, human rights, or gender diversity. After the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church associated increasingly with the agenda of the political elites in Russia and other successor states of the Soviet Union.
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What Local Gold Extraction Tells Us about a Globalized Mining Economy
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By Diana Ayeh. When I first came to Houndé (Province of Tuy) in November 2016, the town of 150,000 inhabitants in southwestern Burkina Faso already had a certain gold-rush atmosphere. Not only was the landscape in and around Houndé marked with indications for future extraction (e.g. flags and fences symbolizing corporate “possessions”).
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Global South Scholars in the Western Academy: Harnessing Unique Experiences, Knowledges, and Positionality in the Third Space
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This book was conceptualized at an international conference on refugee studies in Germany in 2018, where the editors, Staci Martin and Deepra Dandekar, first met. At the time, Staci wanted to explore a pedagogic practice of teaching that co-creates spaces of critical thinking and hope in the classroom, resulting in social action or change. Deepra was focused on questions of migration, gender, and belonging outside the bureaucratic-administrative purview of citizenship.
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“I’m Staying in Ukraine to Understand what is Happening” – Interview with Artist Alevtina Kakhidze
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The artist Alevtina Kakhidze lives not far from Kyiv. She was active in the Maidan protests, and her performance for Manifesta 2014, in St. Petersburg, focused on the war in Eastern Ukraine. She speaks about the role of artists in conflicts, what happens to morality during war, and when it is acceptable to be a pacifist.
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Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia: The Bale Insurgency, 1963-1970 by Terje Østebø
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By Ulf Engel. Contemporary conflicts in Ethiopia are overshadowed by the ongoing war between the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on the one hand and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on the other. Between 1991 and 2018 both parties were partners in a Tigray dominated coalition front which finally failed to impose its hegemonic nation-building project on the multi-ethnic country.
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Unicorns in the Real World: Triple Discrimination within a Neoliberal Education System
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By Jennifer Wilkinson. The current neoliberal system has become a parasitic affront to the core aims of education. Woven into the fabric of education, Neoliberalism has risen to a state of liberal legality. With arbitrary and discriminatory standards of success, this legality obscures the fundamental right to learn.
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Whose History is it? The Challenges and Paradoxes of Studying Queer History in a Neoliberal and Nationalist Context
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By Mathias Foit. Ever since the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s victory in the 2015 parliamentary election, queer research in Poland has become especially challenging and more politicised than ever before. The moment the ultraconservative PiS party won the election in 2015 and secured an outright majority can be pinpointed as the beginning of what some have referred to as a “conservative revolution” in Poland.