Planet History

Kategorie: TraFo

Reconfiguration of Cultural Spaces in Tunisia: Public and Private Intervention, International funds, Grassroots Practices – 5in10 with Alessia Carnevale

Alessia Carnevale holds a PhD in Civilizations of Asia and Africa from Sapienza University of Rome. Her doctoral thesis deals with Tunisian counter-culture and the ‘committed song’ of the 1970s-1980s. She previously graduated in Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Naples l’Orientale. Her research explores the relations between culture and politics, issues of collective memories and (counter)narratives, and grassroots/top-down interventions in the cultural field.

Digital Monolingualism, Archives at Risk, and Global Views on Open Access

By Kathleen Schlütter and Eva Ommert (Research Centre Global Dynamics, Leipzig University). Report on the Roundtable “The Future of the Archive(s): Digital Infrastructures Across Regions”  

(17.11.2023 at the University of Regensburg (Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies) & Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) and online, NFDI4Memory in cooperation with CrossArea e.V.)

The Rule of Law Restoration in Poland – Legal and Political Challenges

In this conversation with RevDem editor and a re:constitution fellow Kasia Krzyżanowska, Krzysztof Izdebski (Batory Foundation) and Bartosz Pilitowski (Court Watch Poland) discuss all the current challenges the Polish government is facing with the legal legacy left by the Law and Justice party. How to restore trust in the judicial institutions? How to deal with the irregularly established Constitutional Tribunal and the National Council of the Judiciary? What should be the role of the judges in designing the judicial system?

Dévoilement des Identités et Croyances Religieuses: l’Enseignement Chiite Dans le Milieu Savant à Kairouan à l’Èpoque Fatimide – 5in10 avec Asma Helali

Asma Helali est Maitre de conférences en islamologie à l’Université de Lille (France), elle a occupé plusieurs postes de recherche dans le monde arabe ainsi qu’en Europe et au Royaume-Uni. Ses recherches portent sur la transmission des textes religieux en Islam premier. Au sein de MECAM, le projet d’Asma Helali porte sur le dévoilement des croyances et identités religieuses: l’enseignement des textes religieux dans le milieu de Qayrawan au 11ème siècle. A. Helali est auteur de The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qur’an in the First Centuries AH (Oxford University Press, 2017) et co-auteur avec Stephen R. Burge, de, The Making of Religious Texts in Islam: The Fragment and the Whole (Gerlach, 2019).

When Off-the-Record Takes Over: Research Ethics under Authoritarianism

By Çiçek İlengiz. In recent years, restitution demands for several artifacts raised by the Turkish government have fueled heated debates on “what belongs to whom and under which conditions,” and have simultaneously opened a new ground to reinscribe civilizational narratives onto the politics of heritage. Centered on questions around the construction of legal ownership, as well as „imaginations of inheriteance“, the author’s project aspires to connect the notions of heritage and inheritance by illustrating the links between what is considered public and private. In other words, it is an attempt to understand how what is supposedly belonging to everyone (world heritage) is legally, discursively and materially treated as inheritance.

Rule of Law or Rule of Norms? Informal Institutions and their Role for Democratic Resilience

By Veronica Anghel. This contribution delves into the intricate interplay between formal and informal institutions in contemporary
European political landscapes. It investigates the vital role of informal institutions in supplementing and at times
circumventing the formal rules that define the parameters of political functioning.

The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958 

In 2020, the Vatican has opened its archives for the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), which has been accompanied by strong media coverage. While a lot of scholarly attention has been given to the actions of the Catholic Church during the Second World War and the Holocaust, the research group „The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958“ is the first attempt to focus on the post-war period and tries to address new questions about the Vatican’s role in the phase of reconstruction after 1945, the emerging conflicts between the capitalist West and the communist East, and the processes of decolonization in the global South. Simon Unger and Julian Sandhagen in conversation with Alex Favalli.

The End Zones of the Circular Economy: Capitalism and Waste in North Africa – 5in10 with Joshua Rigg

Joshua Rigg holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His research interests include socio-political transformations in the Middle East and North Africa, the politics of extractivism, everyday political thinking, and the afterlives of colonial and post-colonial North Africa. He has previously written on everyday understandings of justice in post-overthrow Tunisia, extractivism and marginalization in Tunisia’s south, and the circulation of revolutionary political thinking in the Mediterranean space.

Doing Research Under Current Ethics Regimes: Some Observations

By Birgit Meyer. Even if one does not find issues regarding data management and research ethics particularly exciting as such, it is necessary to delve into the rules and regulations that underpin the institutionalization of current ethics regimes in the social and cultural sciences. This is part of the basic infrastructure of knowledge production, that scholars need to know so as to be able to operate therein.

A Global History of Hungary: Concept, Implementation, Reflection

By Ferenc Laczó, András Vadas, and Bálint Varga. As a recent project on the global history of Hungary aims to demonstrate, studying Central and Eastern Europe through the systematic application of transnational methods and from a truly global perspective can offer original and valuable insights. In this essay, the authors of Magyarország globális története (A Global History of Hungary) would like to outline their agenda of applying transnational methods to the long-term reinterpretation of a country’s history and reflect on the ambition to embed Hungarian history comprehensively in global frameworks.

Karl who? – Haushofer, Japan and the Free and Open Indo-Pacific

By David Malitz. Following its first public conceptualization in 2007, the „Indo-Pacific“ has been adopted as the geopolitical framework for strategic policies by numerous governments. This global adoption of the „Indo-Pacific“, with differing geographic definitions, has led to the emergence of a sizable literature on the region and the different strategies, visions, and outlooks formulated for it. In this literature, it is customary to refer to the German scholar Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) as first geopolitical thinker to use the term “Indo-Pacific“ in the 1920s and therefore to claim or imply an influence of Haushofer’s thought on 21st century policy.

The Identity of the EU Legal Order as a “Shield” for Judicial Independence in the (Polish) Rule of Law Crisis

By Maciej Taborowski. This contribution takes a closer look at how the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has shaped the value of rule of law as the “very identity of the EU legal order”, and how it has used the rule of law to build a “shield” that serves as a defense for national judges against interference with their independence on the basis of the principle of effective judicial protection. Such a “shield” is particularly useful in those EU Member States where there is an ongoing rule of law crisis, such as Poland.

The “(Un)forgotten” Pandemic: The 1918 Influenza Virus in Turkish Literary Texts

By Seda Yucekurt. Why was the 1918 Influenza pandemic largely “forgotten”? The conceptualization of the pandemic as a catastrophic event is multifaceted, involving socio-historical and cultural dimensions. The potential answer lies in the observation, that it coincided with the final stages of the First World War, allowing for socio-historical interpretations based on this contextualization. Apart from the overshadowing effect of the First World War, as several resources indicate, the experiences of the 1918 pandemic may have faded from collective memory due to inadequate documentation and reporting. Does this oblivion or silence prevail in Turkish literature?

“The urgency to tell the Palestinian story to the world and to keep reminding Palestinians of their own story is crystallizing at this moment” – 5in10 with Sanabel Abdelrahman

Sanabel Abdelrahman holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Studies, focusing on magical realism in Palestinian literature, from Philipps-Universität Marburg. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at EUME at the Forum Transregionale Studien 2023/2024 in Berlin. Sanabel co-founded the Berlin-based Nidalat initiative for teaching about Palestine and is co-editor of the FUNNY POLITICS publication. She is a bilingual writer of essays critiquing art and literature as well as fiction. She is interested in contemporary art and film.

Introducing “Beyond Guidelines”: Navigating Mismatched Expectations between Research Ethics and Institutional Ethics Regimes

In this introductory post to the blog series “Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production”, principal investigator at BEYONDREST Banu Karaca raises a few issues pertaining to the key concepts in ethics guidelines that emerge from the mismatched expectations between scholarly research ethics and institutional ethics regimes. Tackling these mismatches is ever more urgent as these ethics regimes are ultimately part of governance structures of higher education and academic research that are themselves increasingly subject to critique in the social sciences.

Words and their Worlds: A Conversation with Dilip M. Menon

In this Philological Conversation, Dilip M. Menon dwells on the questions of how to think concepts and theorize from the Global South and on writing history beyond the Eurocentric, colonial, nationalist, and terrestrial. We discuss the political and epistemic implications and consequences of such urgent tasks. Dilip M. Menon speaks about his affinities with Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and refects on the themes of coloniality of knowledge, postcoloniality, decoloniality, oceanic history, and the idea of paracoloniality. A conversation with Mahmoud Al-Zayed.

“War and war-induced displacement create ruptures in people’s sense-making narratives that are at the core of their identities and understanding of the past.” – 5in10 with Viktoria Sereda

Viktoria Sereda is a sociologist, head coordinator of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS) and academic senior advisor to the project “Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration and Memory”. She has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna War, Migration, Memory research group since 2022. Her latest publications include Displacement in War-Torn Ukraine (2023, Cambridge University Press).

Palestine and the Migrant Question in Postcolonial France

By Olivia C. Harrison. This article is a review of Olivia Harrison’s new book „Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France“. She examines the intersection of antiracist and pro-Palestinian activism in France from the 1970s to the present. Against the ubiquitous association of pro-Palestinianism with Islamism and anti-Semitism, she shows that the Palestinian question has served as a “rallying cry” for anti-colonial and antiracist activists for the past fifty years.

Fighting Impunity Through Intermediaries: The European Union, International Criminal Justice, and the Rule of Law

By Raphael Oidtmann. What legal principle – that may also be derived from its treaty framework – determined and guided EU support towards Ukraine? This contribution argues that at least certain streams of EU assistance for Ukraine in countering the Russian Federation’s aggression – namely those aimed at ending impunity for international crimes – have been organized within a distinct rule of law context.

“Migration, whether internal or international, can contribute to reducing inequalities.”– 5in10 with Mohamad Amara

Mohamed Amara received his master’s degree in economic modeling from the Higher Institute of Management of Tunis in 2004, before undertaking a PhD in Geography at the University of Paris I and a PhD in management (quantitative Methods) at the University of Tunis in 2010. His research focuses on development economics, regional sciences, labor market, youth and gender in MENA region, and applied micro-econometrics. He has published in a range of journals on a variety of topics such as the Annals of Regional Science, Social Indicators Research, Annals of Economic and Statistics, Growth & Change, Papers in regional science, Middle East development Journal, and Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences.

The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language

By Maryam Fatima, Alexander Jabbari and Mehtap Ozdemir. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the afterlives of the Persianate beyond the nineteenth century, this Philological Encounters’ special issue addresses questions of literary modernity in the Persianate world and takes the question of form to the fore, advancing a comparative methodology attuned to formalism and historicism.

Resisting the Hobbesian Narrative: Hope and Morality in ‘The Hunger Games’

In this article, Looay Wattad focuses on the evolution of hope and morality in dystopian narratives. Through the case study of ‚The Hunger Games‘ trilogy, he explores how dystopian literature manifests and reverberates in our daily lives and emphasizes its development into a tangible political statement—one that challenges Hobbesian philosophy and its expression in contemporary politics. This analysis takes on added poignancy in light of current events, such as the ongoing war on Gaza, highlighting the timeliness and relevance of dystopian reflections in the face of contemporary conflicts and wars.

“In times of upheaval, the social fabric is eroded and the social sciences help producing reflections on the new reality” – 5in10 with Natalia Zaitseva-Chipak

Natalia Zaitseva-Chipak is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University. Her scientific interests focus on problems of modern Ukrainian society and individual social groups, such as youths or internally displaced persons (IDPs). She has been a non-resident Fellow and member of the Prisma Ukraïna War, Migration, Memory research group since 2022.

„Під час потрясінь, руйнується соціальна тканина соціуму і соціальні та гуманітарні науки допомагають відрефлексувати нову реальність“ Наталія Зайцева-Чіпак

Наталія Зайцева-Чіпак – соціологиня, доцентка кафедри соціології Українського католицького університету. Її наукові інтереси зосереджені на проблемах сучасного українського суспільства та окремих соціальних груп, таких як молодь або внутрішньо переміщені особи (ВПО). Наталія Зайцева-Чіпак є учасницею дослідницької групи Prisma Ukraïna „Війна, міграція, пам’ять“ з 2022 року.

An Unruly Persianate

By Purnima Dhavan. The Persianate world has long been defined as a distinct historical formation in the premodern era with a beginning and an end. More recently, scholars have rightly started to question this premature assumption of its demise. The special issue of Philological Encounters extends and complicates the argument about the long life of the Persianate. One hesitates to call it an afterlife, as it seems the “death” of the Persianate never happened.

The Anticolonial Solidarity Campaign of 1962 in the Hungarian Countryside: An Attempt to Make Global Connections

By Réka Krizmanics. This article discusses a case study of an anticolonial solidarity campaign in the Hungarian countryside based on the archival records of the Hungarian Women’s National Council (HWNC), focusing on spaces and protagonists that are rarely centered in similar investigations. By expanding on this example, it seeks to demonstrate some of the difficulties that arose for women in their practical work that underpinned an important anticolonial initiative.

Capitalism and Rent: A Destructive Relationship – An Interview with Hartmut Elsenhans

Hartmut Elsenhans’s new book „Capitalism and Rent: A Destructive Relationship“ (2023) is a summary of his central argument on capitalism: Capitalism, profit and development depend on rising mass incomes and hence on the empowerment of the labouring masses. The powerful always fight against such empowerment, with increasing success because of globalisation of rent. A conversation with Rachid Ouaissa.

Woman, Femininity, Body, & Medicine in Nawal El Saadawi’s novella Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1960)

By Dalia Said Mostafa. Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021) was a renowned Egyptian feminist activist, physician, writer, and novelist. Her passing away in March 2021 led to countless obituaries underscoring her accomplishments and celebrating her outstanding career in fighting for gender equality and social justice for women, men and children. But El Saadawi was also a controversial figure who caused much disturbance to authorities in Egypt due to her long-standing feminist activism against patriarchal dominance and the oppression of women. This essay focuses on her first short fictional work Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, which was published in the original Arabic in 1960.

Wie erzählt man von einem Kriegsverbrechen? Zu Roman Ljubyjs Film Iron Butterflies über den Abschuss des Passagierflugzeugs MH17 im Donbas

Von Fabian Erlenmaier. Am 17. Juli 2014 schossen russische Soldaten im Donbas mit einer Bodenluftrakete auf ein Passagierflugzeug. Das in Amsterdam gestartete Flugzeug mit dem Ziel Kuala Lumpur stürzte ab. Alle 298 Insassen des Flugs MH17 starben. Roman Ljubyjs Film Iron Butterflies (2023) dokumentiert auf beeindruckende Weise ein Kriegsverbrechen. Der Auftaktfilm des Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin dieses für eine breite Öffentlichkeit sichtbar.

Inequalities, Economies of Fear and Geopolitical Turmoil: Southeastern Europe and Central America Beyond Borders

By Felipe Hernández. This article explores the socio-political costs of global destabilization in countries where democracy is a contested terrain between opposing actors and where the rule of law is a reality experienced by a minority. Nowadays, South Eastern Europe and Central America allow us to follow the shadow zones of democracy, where a large part of their inhabitants live a life on the margins of the globalization of capital.

Avtoportreti Zghvarze: A Film Essay on Memory, Hope and the Search for One’s Identity

Anna Dziapshipa’s essay film „Self-Portrait Along the Borderline“ (2023) was screened as part of the Georgian Film Series at the Ukrainian Film Festival (UFF) in Berlin. In the film, Dziapshipa uses her family archive to reconstruct an intimate portrait of her Georgian-Abkhazian family and to reflect on broader issues of identity and memory in the context of war. A review by Ekaterina Grineva.