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.
Kategorie: TraFo
TraFo
Digging Deeper: Contested Livelihoods and Sociocosmological Relations among Artisanal Miners in Laos
by editorial board •
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.
TraFo
Women Forgotten in the History of the Trade Union Movement: The Figure of Chérifa Messaadi
by MECAM •
By Arbia Selmi. Despite its important role in the history of Tunisia, the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) is one of the most telling examples of the perpetuation of gender inequalities in Tunisia. The trade union environment is considered a male universe and is dominated by a patriarchal culture where women, until today, do not really find their place.
TraFo
Commemorating International Struggles at UGTT Sfax: Palestinians and Saddam Hussein
by MECAM •
By André Bank. Internationally, the standing and profile of Tunisia’s General Labor Union (French: ‘Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail’, UGTT) has been shaped by three broad images: The first image emanated from the UGTT’s active participation in the so-called Jasmine Revolution in 2011, when its leadership and members protested the ‘ancien régime’ of President Zine Abidin Ben Ali.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
Seven Men and One Table: The 20th Century through a Photograph
by MECAM •
By Elizabeth Bishop. A photograph near the bottom of the wall caught my attention at the Habib Achour exhibit in the Kerkennah branch of the Union Générale des Travailleurs Tunisiens (UGTT, General Union of Tunisian Workers). A caption provides the information that the black-and-white photograph was taken on 26 January 1978.
TraFo
Touche pas à ma UGTT: The Syndical Movement as a ‘Secular Sacred’ Value
by MECAM •
By Alyssa Miller. In a 2012 essay published on the webzine Nawaat, sociologist Hela Yousfi alleged that the Ennahda party – then head of Tunisia’s transitional government and dominant partner in the ‘Troika’ coalition – was surreptitiously attacking the UGTT by dumping garbage in front of its regional branches.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
The UGTT: A “Counter-Power” in Contentious Times – Notes from the Field
by MECAM •
By Alyssa Miller and Arbia Selmi. Since the time of its foundation in 1946, the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) has shifted its focus from trade union activism to political action. Due to its participation in the independence struggle, alongside the national liberation movement led by the Neo-Destour party, the UGTT has enjoyed unparalleled historical legitimacy on the Tunisian political scene.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
The Use of Humor During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Taiwan
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Chunping Lin. The word “幽默 yōumò,” which means “humor” in Chinese, is originally from Jiǔzhāng 九章 of the Chu Lyrics 楚辭 Chǔcí (475 B.C.–221 B.C.) and was used to describe the tranquility of nature. Lin Yutang林語堂 (linguist, philosopher, and translator, 1895–1976) translated the English word “humor” with the word “幽默 yōumò”.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
Vergangene Zukunft? Der russisch-ukrainische Krieg und die Rückkehr der modernen Zeiterfahrung
by editorial board •
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.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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?
TraFo
“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”.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
Women and a Multiplicity of Life Forms in El Meya’s Paintings: An Interview
by MECAM •
Interview with El Meya by Katarzyna Falęcka. The artist Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya) was born in 1988 in Constantine, Algeria. Her paintings, often populated by women, respond to different visual legacies that include Orientalist images and the iconography of the Algerian War of Independence. El Meya is interested in the interiority of women, their dreams, desires, sins, life forms, and sociability.
TraFo
Les femmes et la multiplicité des formes de vie dans les peintures d’El Meya
by MECAM •
L’artiste Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya) est née en 1988 à Constantine, en Algérie. Ses peintures sont souvent peuplées de femmes, car elle réagit à différents héritages visuels, notamment les images orientalistes ou l’iconographie de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
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”.
TraFo
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.
TraFo
“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.
TraFo
“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.
TraFo
Future | Cinema | Archive: On Appropriation Processes of Protest Videos
by MECAM •
By Alena Strohmaier. “Politics in the Middle East is now seen”, proclaimed political scientist and director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House Lina Khatib in 2012, designating a new era of political activism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
TraFo
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.
TraFo
What Local Gold Extraction Tells Us about a Globalized Mining Economy
by editorial board •
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”).
TraFo
Chomsky Is No Friend of the Syrian Revolution
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
Just three weeks following my release after 16 years in prison in Syria, I started translating a book into Arabic. The book was “Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order,” by Noam Chomsky. It had taken me some time to realize that the leading linguist and the harsh critic of American imperialism was the same person.
TraFo
Envisioning Work: The Visual Cultures of Labor – Call for Contributions
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Hala Auji and Nurçin İleri. Capitalism’s far-reaching social, industrial, and cultural implications on the socio-political aspects of production, labor, and class struggle are well-documented. Scholarship on labor has emphasized the social and economic aspects of the capitalist economy and the history of working classes in a global context.
TraFo
Yearbook on the African Union
by Forum Transregionale Studien •
By Ulf Engel. In October 2021, I published the Yearbook on the African Union (YBAU). This yearbook is the first of its kind. The YBAU is first and foremost an academic project that provides an in-depth evaluation and analysis of the institution, its processes, and its engagements.
TraFo
Comics as Witness and Testimony: An Interview with Jennifer Howell
by MECAM •
I’ll start by stating that not all comics at the core of my scholarship were created in the digital age. Yet, artists working today are very active in the blogosphere. The online dissemination of comics – and, in particular, those that critique authoritarian regimes or bear witness to shared and/or individual experiences of political trauma – keeps pace with the general dissemination of information on the internet.
TraFo
Global South Scholars in the Western Academy: Harnessing Unique Experiences, Knowledges, and Positionality in the Third Space
by editorial board •
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.
TraFo
« S’alarmer face aux mécanismes de la vérité » : une conversation avec Montassir Sakhi
by MECAM •
Montassir Sakhi, né en 1988 à Rabat, est membre fondateur du Mouvement 20 février. Il s’est engagé depuis longtemps dans les dynamiques militantes et la vie politique du Maroc. En Europe, sa recherche porte sur les mouvements sociaux, l’émergence des idéologies, l’Islam politique en particulier, ou encore sur la problématique de la radicalisation.
TraFo
“I’m Staying in Ukraine to Understand what is Happening” – Interview with Artist Alevtina Kakhidze
by editorial board •
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.