Dear colleagues and friends,
we are pleased to inform you about and invite you to our weekly lecture series at the Institute for European Ethnology at HU, Berlin during the winter semester 2018/19.
Feel free to share. No registration required. All are welcome to attend.
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Ethnographies of the Contemporary –
Perspectives and Positions on an Anthropology of the Political
Institutskolloquium, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-University, Berlin
winter semester 2018/19
Tuesdays 2-4pm
Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, room 0007
Events will take place variously in German and English.
Events with * will take place at deviant times, days or locations - Check the programme below.
Organisers: Jens Adam & the research laboratories at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-University, Berlin,
in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Center for transnational Border Research "Border Crossings – Crossing Borders“, Berlin
More Information: www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de
Programme
16.10.18
Desire for the Political: Ethnography and Politics After the Cold War
Dace Dzenovska (University of Oxford)
23.10.18
Badiou out of Place: Multiplicities, Ontologies, and the Lived Experience of Forced Migration
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn (Indiana University, Bloomington)
30.10.18
Archives of Refuge
Roundtable with Arjun Appadurai (New York University), Regina Römhild (IfEE, HU Berlin), Mohammad Sarhangi (HKW, Berlin), Marcia C. Schenck (FU Berlin), Nadiye Ünsal (Labor Migration Berlin)
06.11.18
Konjunkturen der Moralismus-Kritik: agonale Bestimmungen des Politischen zwischen Zeitdiagnostik und Ethnografie
Moritz Ege (Kulturanthropologie/EE, Universität Göttingen)
13.11.18
Queering Europe: On the Sexual Politics of Europeanisation
Monika Baer (University of Wrocław), Paul Mepschen (University of Amsterdam) & Patrick Wielowiejski (IfEE, HU Berlin)
20.11.18
The Politics of Life at the Margins: Truth, Power and Collective Conduct
Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield)
27.11.18
Doing Gender in a Refugee Camp: Politics and Ethics beyond a Subject
Čarna Brković (Kulturanthropologie/EE, Universität Göttingen)
4.12.18
Aus den Tiefen der Fernseharchive – eine Rekontexualisierung der Filme und Moderationen von Navina Sundaram
Merle Kröger (Berlin) und Mareike Bernien (Berlin)
11.12.18
Of Politics and Personhood. Considerations from Slovenia
Gretchen Bakke (IRI THESys, HU Berlin)
18.12.18
The Materiality of "Transition": Infrastructure as a Political Terrain in South Africa
Antina von Schnitzler (The New School, New York)
*10.01.19
Forced Exile as a Form of Life
Didier Fassin (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
(Thursday instead of Tuesday, evening lecture 18h c.t.)
15.01.19
On Political Refusal: Sayasat and Democratic Disavowal in Post-Revolutionary Kyrgyzstan
Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester)
*22.01.19
Data natures: of Ethnographies, Troubles and Bridges (inaugural lecture/Antrittsvorlesung)
Tahani Nadim (Museum für Naturkunde und IfEE/CARMAH, HU Berlin)
(evening lecture 18h c.t., room 408, followed by reception)
29.01.19
The Only Game in Town? Anthropology and the Housing and Real Estate Markets in Berlin
Präsentation des MA-Studienprojektes
Studierende, Tomás S. Criado & Ignacio Farías (IfEE, HU Berlin)
*1.2.19
Ambivalenzen in den Verflechtungen von Migration, Gender und Care
Präsentation des MA-Studienprojektes „Migration, Gender und Care“ im Rahmen der internationalen Tagung “Care – Migration – Gender. Ambivalent Interdependencies”
Studierende & Urmila Goel (IfEE, HU Berlin)
(Sondertermin, Freitag, 11:15-12:45 Uhr, Hauptgebäude der HU)
05.02.19
Beyond Swamps: Mess as Politics, Mess as Resistance
Martin F. Manalansan
(University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
concept note
How can we make sense of the political moment we are currently traversing? “The end of liberal democracy”, “refugee crisis”, “fortress Europe” and “impending state failure” are just some of the currently circulating, prominent catch words that point to how the foundations and basic terms of political life and societal self-understanding are in a process of transformation, even disappearance. These developments pose challenges not only to the political establishment, but also to our analytical concepts and approaches.
This lecture series centres on the following questions: What conceptual and methodological equipment can contemporary anthropology offer to analytically dissect the present political moment? What is the potential of distinguishing ‘politics’ from ‘the political’ for both disciplinary concept formation and ethnographic research? And can precisely an ethnographic approach successfully take into account the blind spots of hegemonic debates, alternative political histories and visions of the future, or the everyday life and practices of those ‘without names’ as constitutive elements of the political?
By asking these questions, we are also engaging with interdisciplinary debates that have discussed ‘the political’ as a form-giving foundational dimension of the social (Marchart 2010). The political can thus be understood as an elementary field, out of which politics as an institutional location for the exercise of power and the regulation of conflicts emerges, but which retains the potential for radically different conceptions and arrangements of living together. In the moments when the regularity of social life becomes fragile and routine, administrative procedures reach an impasse – as in the context of unexpected events, frictions, crises or revolutions – the political comes to the fore and becomes empirically palpable.
Different theoretical perspectives intersect in these debates and are repositioned in relation to each other. We might differentiate between an ‘associative’ and a ‘dissociative’ tradition (Marchart 2010). The first school of thought conceives of the political as an (intermediary) space of freedom, assembly and public deliberation, emerging from social interaction. The second perspective emphasises primordial antagonisms, erratic effects of power and social struggles as elementary principles of the political.
The colloquium will provide a space to bring into dialogue various conceptions of the political – as developed, for instance, by Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler or Bruno Latour – and to discuss their usefulness in relation to contemporary anthropological problems and questions. Of particular interest here are the ethnographic potentials that arise from a respective focus on the political. The papers will enquire into this nexus through conceptual interventions and research on humanitarian projects and border regimes, the political life of infrastructures and queer politics, migration movements and the current reconfigurations of Europe. Our aim is also to gauge the contemporary moment, bereft, as it seems, of progressive utopias and visions of the future. In the context of conflicts, diverse social movements or the collective preoccupation with ‘matters of concern’ (Bruno Latour), the political comes to the fore ever more forcefully as a source of different forms of hoping and yearning, mobilisation and disillusion (Dzenovska & De Genova 2018).
References
Jens Adam & Asta Vonderau: (Hrsg.): Formationen des Politischen. Anthropologie politischer Felder. Bielefeld 2014.
Pierre Bourdieu: Über den Staat. Vorlesungen am Collège de France 1989-1992. Berlin 2014.
Dace Dzenovska & Nicholas De Genova: Introduction. Desire for the political in the aftermath of the Cold War. In: Focaal. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 80 (2018), pp. 1-15.
Bruno Latour: From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public. In: Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel: Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge 2005, pp. 4-31.
Oliver Marchart: Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin 2010.
Yael Navaro-Yashin: ‘Life is dead here’. Sensing the political in ‘no man’s land’. In: Anthropological Theory, 3,1 (2003), pp. 107-125.
Johanna Rolshoven & Ingo Schneider (Hrsg): Dimensionen des Politischen. Ansprüche und Herausforderungen der Empirischen Kulturwissenschaften. Berlin 2018.
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Best wishes
Jens Adam
Dr. Jens Adam
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie
Mohrenstraße 41
10117 Berlin
tel.: 030 2093 70870
mail: [log in to unmask]
www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de
http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-4262-9/ordnungen-des-nationalen-und-die-geteilte-welt
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