Summer Semester 2022

Frictions and Transformations of Globalization

In cooperation with the Center for International and Transnational Area Studies (CITAS) at the University of Regensburg; the program is available here to download and outlined below.

Mondays, 18:15 - 19:45 | H19 (Sammelgebäude)

Motion produces frictions. These have the potential to stall, inhibit or halt shifts. But frictions also release energy, thus producing new movements. Whether in large-scale tectonic shifts or micro-level encounters, interactions between people, technologies, ideas, natural conditions, and the flows of capital and goods shape the diverse, long-term and often contradictory processes termed globalization. It has become apparent that globalization is neither a smooth nor unidirectional process;  but rather it is something that undergoes constant challenges, re-direction, and re-appropriation so that its course is neither predictable nor controllable. Nor, for that matter, has globalization led to convergence; rather it has given rise to new divergences across and within countries and continents.

This lecture series focuses on three interlinked elements that are crucial to understanding globality in its diversity across multiple spaces and throughout history: the environment, migration and labor. Drawing on the expertise of colleagues in Regensburg and around the world, the lecture series will offer interdisciplinary perspectives informed by area studies that combine macro-perspectives and critical place-oriented scholarship, in order to highlight the intersections between different scales. Rather than posit a seamless globalization, the speakers highlight the productive and destructive frictions emerging from the interaction and interdependencies between local action and large-scale forces. In this story, natural resources, mobility and human labor are paramount.

The lectures will offer insights on Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, indicating connections to other world regions and worldwide institutions, as well as highlighting how the global condition is made and remade in local sites and through translocal connections.

Speakers include academics from Regensburg, visiting fellows of the Leibniz ScienceCampus from the USA and Spain, as well as invited guests from Germany and abroad.

Program

click the links for more details

25.04 – Ulf Brunnbauer (IOS Regensburg) – Introduction;  Presentation of the award-winning students in the 2021 Area Studies Master’s Prize
02.05 – Jean-Marc Moura (Paris Nanterre) - Francophone literatures as migrant literatures. Between a postcolonial and a global history of literature.
09.05 – Ronald Suny (U Michigan, Ann Arbor) - Forging the Nation: The Making and Faking of Nationalisms in Our Own Times
16.05 – Kate Wroblewski (U Michigan, Ann Arbor) - Fit For Citizenship?: Polish Migration and the Politics of Respectability in the Early Twentieth Century
Thursday 19.05, 16:15 via Zoom –   Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein (University of Pennsylvania) - Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions.
30.05 – Sinem Ayhan (IOS Regensburg) - Distributional effects of climate policies and decarbonization challenges in low- and middle-income countries
13.06 – Ben Chappell (U Kansas) - What is the "American Model"? Learning Management and Knowledge Ideologies in a “Moment of Danger” for Universities
20.06 – Attila Melegh (Corvinus U, Budapest) - Globalization and the migration turn. Why migration has become a polarizing issue
27.06 – Nishani Frazier (U Kansas) - The Sounds of Blackness: How Gentrification Silences and Displaces Belonging
04.07 – Ger Duijzings (UR) - Between Europeanisation and waste colonialism: Dirty dumping at the periphery of Europe
11.07 – Hartmut Lehmann (IOS Regensburg) - Globalization, inequality and the labor market - 1970 to 2010
18.07  – Celia Torrecillas Bautista (Complutense, Madrid) - Exports and outward Foreign Direct Investment as drivers of eco-innovations. An analysis based on Spanish manufacturing firms.
25.07 – Exam / Klausur

Coordinators: Prof. Dr. Anne Brüske und Joanna Moszczynska

Area Studies is a per se interdisciplinary research field that can contribute fruitfully to understanding societies and cultures in the context of both historical and ongoing globalization processes. Nevertheless, owing to their specific genealogy, area studies have also faced critique in respect of their methods, theories and thematic foci. Even if there has been a turn towards critical self-reflection in area studies, leading to increasing recognition of the field’s imperial and colonial legacies, voices from the different world regions constituting its focus nevertheless remain underrepresented – those from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and East and Southeast Europe in particular. In order to better understand cultures and societies in respect of their glocal power relations, it is necessary to explore how area studies and space can be contextualized through the perspectives of the ”Global South” and what role, for example, virtual spaces (could) play in this.

This interdisciplinary lecture series therefore offers a multiperspectival reconceptualization of area studies and relevant concepts of space in dialog with the ”Global South”. The series seeks to demonstrate the necessity of revising certain scholarly and cultural paradigms, while pointing towards ways of achieving dialogic reconfigurations of knowledge production.

The interdisciplinary and transcultural lecture series features (inter)national experts with case studies and theoretical contributions from fields including social anthropology, museum studies, history, sociology, linguistics, cultural studies, literary studies and media studies. Alongside specialists from Regensburg, there will also be contributions from Ciraj Rassool (University of the Western Cape, South Africa), Sérgio Costa (Lateinamerika-Institut Berlin), Sinah Kloß (Dependency and Slavery Studies, Universität Bonn), Silke Jansen (FAU Erlangen), Ana Nenadovic (Lateinamerika-Institut Berlin) and Johannes Bohle (Europa-Universität Flensburg).

Program

15.04.21 | Sinah Kloß (Bonn)
Un-Mapping the 'Global South': Reflections on a Heuristic Concept

22.04.21 | Ciraj Rassool (Cape Town)
Public History as Counter-Museology: Journeys through Museum Transformation in Africa and Europe

29.04.21 | Anna Steigemann (Regensburg)
The City of the 21st Century, Mobile Spatial Practices, and Glocal Spatial Knowledge: A Spatial Sociology for Multi-Scalar Area Studies

06.05.21 | Silke Jansen & Lucía Romero Gibu (Erlangen)
"Wir" und "Ihr": Sprachwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf den sozialen Raum im Migrationskontext

20.05.21 | Isabella von Treskow (Regensburg)
Oran, Alger, Sétif: Raumsemiotik bei Hélène Cixous, Kateb Yacine und Mohammed Dib

27.05.21 | Mirja Lecke & Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg)
Wie Russland seinen Süden entwarf

10.06.21 | Johannes Bohle (Flensburg)
'Follow-the-Hurricane-Geographies': Geographische Impulse für Area Studies am Beispiel der Karibik

17.06.21 | Ulf Brunnbauer (Regensburg)
Balkan und Südosteuropa, und Beyond: Wie eine Region sich selbst sieht

24.06.21 | Sérgio Costa (Berlin)
'Entangled Inequalities': Transregionale Perspektiven auf soziale Ungleichheiten

01.07.21 | Ana Nenadović (Berlin)
Das Internet schlägt zurück: Das Internet als Raum feministischen Widerstands aus dem Globalen Süden

08.07.21 | Andreas Sudmann (Regensburg)
KI Area Studies und der Globale Süden

15.07.21 | Jochen Mecke (Regensburg)
'The Global South goes North': Von "négritude" (Césaire, Senghor) zur "raison nègre" (Mbembe)

The lecture series "Special Relations Revisited" examined European-American entanglements in topics such as foreign affairs and security policy, diplomacy and migration policy, and more. Moving in a mostly chronological order, the talks shed light on two centuries of transatlantic connections and covered a variety of issues and fields such as popular culture, the fight against slavery, and European migration to the US.

An interdisciplinary group of scholars from the University of Regensburg and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) was joined by renowned researchers from German and international institutions. This event was organized in collaboration with CITAS.

2 November | Hedwig Richter (Bundeswehr Uni, München)
Demokratiegeschichte als nationale Erzählung und transnationaler Prozess. Frankreich, die USA und Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert

9 November | Ulf Brunnbauer
Amerika-Auswanderung und (ost)europäische „Diasporen” vor dem 1. Weltkrieg

16 November | Volker Depkat
Amerikanische Demokratie als politisches Ordnungsmodell von 1789 bis 1848/49

23 November | Pia Wiegmink
The 'Freedom-Loving German' in America: Negotiating Gender, Antislavery and Immigration in 19th Century German American Women’s Literature

30 November | Dagmar Schmelzer
L'Autre Amérique. Die europäische Wahrnehmung Québecs und des quebecer Separatismus als Alternative zu US-Amerika

7 December | Friederike Kind-Kovács (TU Dresden)
Cotton, Shoes and Milk Powder: Transatlantic Child Relief in post-World War I Central Europe

14 December | Mathias Häußler
Wie amerikanisch war Elvis? Die Entstehung einer transatlantischen Popkultur im Kalten Krieg

11 January | Klaus Buchenau
Ex occidente lux(us). Religiöse Impulse aus den USA im östlichen Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

18 January | Katharina Gerund (FAU Erlangen)
Unofficial Ambassadors? Military Spouses in the Transatlantic World

25 January | Gerlinde Groitl
Vom amerikanischen Frieden zum Rosenkrieg? Die sicherheitspolitische Beziehungskrise zwischen Europa und den USA

1 February | Marlene Laruelle (George Washington University)
Looking at post-Soviet Eurasia from Europe and the US: Divergences of perspectives and shared visions

8 February | Abschlussdiskussion / Concluding Panel Discussion
Europa und Amerika 2021 - wohin?
Mit Beiträgen von Prof. Dr. Lora Anne Viola (JFK Institute, Berlin) und Dr. Jana Puglierin (European Council on Foreign Relations - ECFR, Berlin)
Chair: Dr. Gerlinde Groitl (UR)

15 February | Exam