Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat • Arjun Appadurai • Ayşe Zarakol • José Benjamín Inuca Lechón • Clio Nicastro • Jaye Austin Williams • Julio Prieto • Katerina Teaiwa • Mario Bellatin • Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro • Patricia Kaersenhout • Rosa Barotsi • Saima Akhtar • Tony Birch • Vivian Price • Delfina Cabrera • Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor • Xu Ruotao • Sikho Siyotula • Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss • Mariya Nikolova • Oduor Obura • Lucy Gasser • Linda Gabriel • Isaiah Lopaz • Mary Jirmanus Saba • Sebastian Conrad • Dalia Othman • Sara Abu Ghazal • Walid El-Houri • Huang Ya-Li • Dong Bingfeng • Keith L. Camacho • Miguel Vale de Almeida • Hinemoana Baker • Ingrid Hotz-Davies • Regina Römhild • Quentin E. Williams • Eavesdrop (aka Monishia Schoeman) • Bradley Lodewyk • Adam Haupt • Ananya Jahanara Kabir • Marcus Boon • Kidlat Tahimik • Julian Henriques • Susanne Zepp • Gero Bauer • Filipa César • Marina Camargo • Elnathan John • Rasha Chatta • Kathy-Ann Tan • Jorge Estrada • Noa Hagesh • James Miller • Tom Holert • Vincent Van Gerven Oei • James Burton • Michelle Wright • Gloria Careaga Peréz • Manthia Diawara • Yonel Castilla Serrano • Sundar Sarukkai
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[GDC_column size=”two-thirds”]Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat
is a performance and visual artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her work focuses on the dimensions of sound, language, and voice in the transmission of knowledge and memory, as well as on the relationship between voice and body within the context of social and political activism. [/GDC_column]
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Arjun Appadurai
is a professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and visiting professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University. He is a recognized authority on cultural globalization, violence, cities, and media, with a special interest in South Asia. His books, Modernity at Large (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and The Future as Cultural Fact (Verso, 2013) have contributed ground-breaking ideas on the dynamics and effects of cultural globalization. Currently, Dr. Appadurai has turned his attention to issues of sovereignty, migration, finance and cultural property in the European context. He has served as a consultant or advisor to a wide range of public and private organizations, including many major foundations (Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller); UNESCO; UNDP; the World Bank; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the National Science Foundation; and the Infosys Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Asian Art Initiative at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Forum D’Avignon in Paris.
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Ayşe Zarakol
is a reader in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a politics fellow at Emmanuel College. Dr. Zarakol works on the evolution of East and West relations in the international order, stigmatisation, declining and rising powers, and politics of non-Western regional powers. She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and has written scholarly articles that have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Theory, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, among many others. Her most recent book is Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Dr. Zarakol is a member of and a regular contributor to the PONARS Eurasia international network which advances new policy approaches to research and security in Russia and Eurasia. She is currently an Associate Editor at the Journal of Global Security Studies and a Series Editor for the Palgrave Studies in International Relations.
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José Benjamín Inuca Lechón
is the director of the District of Cayambe-Pedro Moncayo of the Province of Pichincha. Self-identified as Kichwa Kayampi, he formerly held positions as a teacher, director, and researcher in Ecuador’s Intercultural Bilingual Education System and had presidency of the Kichwa Peoples of La Sierra. Dr. Lechón holds a Ph.D. in the History of the Andes from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Quito and has published articles on Kichwa thought; the history of intercultural bilingual education; the genealogy of sumak kawsay and interculturality, as conceptualized by peoples of the Kichwa nationality from the mid-twentieth century; and on the pacha (time-space in Kichwa).[/GDC_column]
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Clio Nicastro
is an affiliated fellow at ICI Berlin and former stipendiary fellow 2016-2018 within the core project Errans in Time. She studied at the University of Palermo, where she completed her Ph.D. in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts on Aby Warburg. Continuing her work in Berlin as a DAAD Fellow, she is researching the work of Harun Farocki. Her focus is on the cinematic representations of eating disorders as well as the In Front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour research project she has been working together with Rosa Barotsi and Saima Akhtar since 2016.[/GDC_column]
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Jaye Austin Williams
is a professor of Africana Studies and a C. Graydon and Mary E. Rogers Fellow at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, where she specializes in the melding of drama theory and performance with critical Black studies. She has worked for thirty years in the professional theatre as director, playwright, actor and consultant regionally and on Broadway. Dr. Williams teaches and lectures interdisciplinary seminars on the analysis of structural racism(s) and their myriad of performances, both subtle and overt, regarding modernity. Her publications include the essay, „Radical Black Drama-as-Theory: The Black Feminist Dramatic on the Protracted Event-Horizon,” in Theory & Event (Johns Hopkins University Press) and „On the Table: Crumbs of Freedom and Fugitivity – A 21st Century (re)reading of Crumbs from the Table of Joy,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (Routledge). She is currently at work on a monograph entitled, Black Drama Theory-in-Practice: Staging Slavery, Post-Coloniality and Modernity.[/GDC_column]
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Julio Prieto
is a writer and professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Potsdam, Brandenburg. He studied Spanish and Latin American Literature at New York University, where he received his Ph.D. degree. He is the author of several volumes of poetry and literary criticism, as well as of numerous essays on Latin American culture and literary theory. Among his recent publications are a collection of prose poems, Marruecos (Amargord, 2018) (in Spanish), Poéticas del presente: Perspectivas críticas sobre poesía hispánica contemporánea (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2018) co-edited with Ottmar Ette, and La escritura errante: ilegibilidad y políticas del estilo en Latinoamérica (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2016) which won him the Ibero-American Prize of the Latin American Studies Association. He is currently working on a book on the dialogue between literature and the visual arts in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.[/GDC_column]
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Katerina Teaiwa
is Associate Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language at the, Australian National University. Her research is on histories of imperial phosphate mining in Kiribati and the ensuing displacement and creative survival of Banabans on Rabi in Fiji. She has also been a consultant with UNESCO and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community on cultural mapping, planning and policy in Oceania. She was President of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies 2012-2017 and is currently Vice-President. Katerina is author of Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (2015) and editor with Polly Stupples of Contemporary Perspectives on Art and International Development (2017). She has a background in contemporary Pacific dance and in November 2017 held her first solo visual arts exhibition, Project Banaba, at Carriageworks in Sydney, curated by Yuki Kihara. Katerina is of Banaban, I-Kiribati and African American descent.[/GDC_column]
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Mario Bellatin
is a writer based in Mexico City. With over 40 books published , some translated into 15 languages, he is the recipient of the Xavier Villaurrutia, The Barbara Gitiings Literature, Antonin Artaud Award, and José María Arguedas Awards. This year, he was awarded the Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso. In 2012, he was a curator and member of the Honorary Advisory Committee of the art exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. Apart from writing, he is the director of the Dynamic School of Writers and is directing a documentary, Bola Negra: El Musical de Ciudad Juárez.[/GDC_column]
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Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro
is a conceptual artist from the region of Woleu-Ntem in North Gabon based in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practices incorporate a synthesis of collaborative engagements, the development of international community dialogue, and body politics through a merging of conceptual responses in live art performance, film, archaeology, guerrilla architecture, literature, and archives. Her critical process is informed by discourses of histories, archives and theories on postcolonialism, diaspora, migration, identities, afro- and alter- modernism and culture.
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Patricia Kaersenhout
is a visual artist, activist, and womanist. Born in the Netherlands to Surinamese parents, Kaersenhout developed an artistic journey in which she investigates her hereditary background in relation to her Western European upbringing. The political thread in her work raises questions about African diasporic movements and their relation to feminism, sexuality, racism and the history of slavery. She recently gave a TEDxAU Talk entitled „The Language of Imagination“. An organic intellectual, she considers her art practice to be a social one, with projects empowering (young) men and women of color.
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Rosa Barotsi
is a film scholar trained at the University of Cambridge, where she received her Ph.D. in 2014. Her research focuses on the intersections between film, gender and work, with an emphasis on Greek and Italian cinema. She has previously held a postdoctoral position at the ICI Berlin, where she developed a project on the genre of slow cinema and debt. Along with Clio Nicastro and Saima Akhtar, she co-founded the In Front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour research project in 2016.[/GDC_column]
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Saima Akhtar
is a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, where she works on digital humanities projects that aid in the documentation, study, and preservation of the built environment. She is an urban historian and architect by training with a research focus on the relationship between labor immigration, planning, and the rise of industry in early-twentieth century US cities – in particular, Detroit.[/GDC_column]
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Tony Birch
is a senior research fellow in the Moondani Balluk Academic Centre at Victoria University, Melbourne. An award-winning author, respected curator, and renowned Indigenous activist, Dr. Birch increasingly utilises his grounding in the humanities to approach climate change research, an area he says many people believe is the exclusive domain of hard science. From his Indigenous perspective, this activism “is essentially about the relationship between climate change and what we now call protection of country”. Next to his role as public intellectual, Dr. Birch is the author of four books of short stories, a book of poetry, and three novels, many of which foreground questions of class. In 2017, he won the Patrick White Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.[/GDC_column]
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Vivian Price
is a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and coordinator of Labour Studies at California State University. She is active in community and labour issues focusing on social justice unionism and the struggle against environmental racism. Dr. Price is a filmmaker whose award winning work includes Hammering It Out (Women Make Movies, 2000), Transnational Tradeswomen (WMM, 2006), Harvest of Loneliness (Films Media Group, 2010), and has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on gender, labour, visuality and pedagogy. She was a Spring 2018 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Liverpool as a lecturer and researcher on labour and climate change.[/GDC_column]
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Delfina Cabrera
is a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Perpignan Via Domita (in conjunction with the University of Bergamo) under the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate programme Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones. Her research engages a wide range of fields that includes contemporary Latin American literatures, translation studies, genetic criticism, gender studies and the visual arts. Prior to joining the ICI Berlin, she was a research fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Universidad de La Plata-CONICET). She has conducted research as a Visiting Scholar at both the University of Potsdam and the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (ITEM / CNRS-ENS). She is the author of Las lenguas vivas: Zonas de exilio y traducción en Manuel Puig (Prometeo Libros, 2016).[/GDC_column]
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Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
is a writer from Nairobi, Kenya. She studied English and History at the Kenyatta University and earned her M.A. degree at the University of Reading,and later an M.Phil. in Creative Writing from the University of Queensland, Brisbane. Her story The Weight of Whispers (Kwani Trust) won her the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003. She has had several short stories published in various publications worldwide. Her debut novel Dust (Granta, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize and the winner of the 2015 Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Her second book, The Dragonfly Sea (Knopf, 2019), a coming-of-age contemplation on impacts on intimate histories with regard to China’s return to Eastern Africa. She is working on her next novel, (working title) The Long Decay, at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.[/GDC_column]
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Xu Ruotao
is an artist working in Beijing whose works include painting, film and other genres. His major exhibitions include FRONTIER : Re-assessment of Post-Globalisational Politics at the OCAT Institute;燃 Burning: Works by Xu Ruotao at the Hongkun Museum of Fine Art; 叙事 Narrative at Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum; and I Have No Enemies And No Hatred at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery in New York. He has participated in exhibitions and international film festivals such as the Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Berlinale; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York‘s event, titled Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions.[/GDC_column]
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Sikho Siyotula
is a doctoral fellow of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam Germany and the University of Pretoria South Africa. She is currently researching the visualisation of Southern African Later Iron Age Settlements in The Digital Age. Siyotula is informed by her training as a visual artist, practices of blackness in contemporary visual arts, as well as her research interests in intercultural relations. She is committed to the practices of making – particularly the making of visual images – as research within academia.[/GDC_column]
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Hinemoana Baker
is a New Zealand poet, performer, and writer currently living and working in Berlin. She writes and performs in English, Māori, and more recently, German, in collaboration with Ulrike Almut-Sandig. In these poetic duets, each performer sings and speaks her own and the other’s texts in an audio jigsaw that pushes the concept of translation into new shapes. Her stage shows pivot around sonic art, collaged language, lyric poetry and family storytelling – as well as what she calls „bad jokes and good times“. Hinemoana traces her mixed ancestry from several Māori tribes and also from England and Oberammergau. Many cultures converge and challenge each other in this writer’s work – most obviously, her parents’ Māori and Pākehā ancestries, but also her sexuality, her takatāpuitanga, which she defines as „indigenous queerness“. The need to belong to the extended and nuclear group, the whānau as well as the family, is at odds with the equally pressing need to be an individual in the world. Hinemoana has travelled and performed extensively in the last 20 years, has published three poetry collections, edited several more collections, and produced five albums of her original music and poetry.
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Ananya Jahanara Kabir
is a literary and cultural historian with interests spanning music, dance, film, the visual arts, academic discourse, and literature, and invested in examining what these forms of cultural production can tell us about global modernity. She joined the Department of English at King’s College in April 2013.
Between 2005 and 2011, Professor Kabir was co-investigator or lead investigator in collaborative projects funded through the AHRC and ESRC’s large research programmes (Diasporas and Migrations: Religion and Society). As one of the first AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellows, she co-curated the multi-sited art exhibition ‘Kismet and Karma: South Asian Women Artists Respond to Conflict’. In 2011, she was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship to complete a monograph on the Partition of India. During 2013-18 she will lead a research project on Afro-Diasporic rhythm cultures and modernity (www.modernmoves.org.uk), funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant.[/GDC_column]
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Adam Haupt
is a Professor in the Centre for Film & Media Studies and Deputy Dean of Staffing in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town. Haupt is the author of Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film(HSRC Press, 2012) and Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip Hop Subversion (HSRC Press, 2008). He recently edited a special double issue on Hip Hop activism for Journal of World Popular Music (5.1 and 5.2, 2018) with Quentin Williams and H. Samy Alim.
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Quentin E. Williams
is a Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at UWC. He has published papers on Hip Hop, marginality, linguistic citizenship, performance and multilingualism. He recently published Remix Multilingualism(Bloomsbury Press, 2017), and Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes(Bloomsbury Press, 2018) with co-edtied with Christopher Stroud and Amiena Peck. He is currently completing an anthology on Linguistic Citizenship and Multilingualism (Multilingual Matters, 2019) with Tommaso Milani and Ana Deumert. Eavesdrop (aka Monishia Schoeman) is a social activist and Hip Hop lyricist from Parkwood, a Cape Flats working class township in Cape Town, South Africa. She has been recording and as a solo artist, since 2002. Her work has cut across disciplines, such as theatre performance, script writing/workshopping, and social activism. She released her EP, Scrolls of the Unseen, in 2018.[/GDC_column]
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Kidlat Tahimik
is an artist who grew up in Baguio (the American colonial Hillstation). In his 70s, he still rebels against his elite upbringing in “a cocoon of American Dreams”. His films, installations, performances, (and primitive architecture) deconstruct the nature of his colonized mind. Freeing our inner Duwende (our esprit’s voice) we escape the straitjacket of a copy-cat culture. “Trust inner the Force of your Duwende” is the mantra KT passes on to young artists who visit Baguio. During the last two decades, KT immersed in Ifugao culture. He was mentored by an Ifugao elder– discovering in the indigenous tribes the “indio-genius” of a pre-colonial culture. Citing his impact on the creativity of Asian artists, the 2012 Fukuoka Prize (Japan’s mini-Nobel awards) named KT as Laureate for Arts and Culture. Kidlat gives out Bamboo Camera Awards to young filmmakers– to boost the “indie-genius” spirit in their scripts (free of Hollywood’s major cosmopolitan formulas.) [/GDC_column]
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Miguel Vale de Almeida
is a Portuguese anthropologist, novelist, op-ed writer, LGBT activist, and a former Member of the Portuguese Parliament. He is a professor of Anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE), where he is the director of the Master‘s program. His areas of research are gender, sexuality, and body; ‘race’, ethnicity, and ethnopolitics; postcolonial studies and creoleness; Portugal, Brazil, and Afro-Diaspora; and Israel/Palestine. Among many other titles, his book publications include A Chave do Armário: Homossexualidade (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2009), An Earth-Colored Sea: ‘Race’, Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World (Berghahn Books, 2004), and The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town (Berghahn Books, 1996). He is the current Editor-in-chief of the journal Etnográfica.
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Julian Henriques
is convenor of the MA Scriptwriting and the MA Cultural Studies programmes, director of the Topology Research Unit and a co-founder of the Sound System Outernational practice research group in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to this, Julian ran the film and television department at CARIMAC at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. His credits as a writer and director include the reggae musical feature film Babymother and We the Ragamuffin short. Julian researches street cultures, music and technologies and is interested in the uses of sound as a critical and creative tool. His sound sculptures include Knots & Donuts (2011) at Tate Modern and his books include Changing the Subject (1998), Sonic Bodies (2011) and Sonic Media (forthcoming).
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Marcus Boon
is a writer and Professor of English at York University in Toronto. He is the author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Harvard, 2002), In Praise of Copying (Harvard, 2010) and The Politics of Vibration (Duke UP, forthcoming) as well as co-author with Timothy Morton and Eric Cazdyn of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (U. Chicago, 2015). He co-edited a collection of writings on Practice for the Visual Arts with Gabriel Levine (MIT/Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Arts series, 2018) and is currently working on a book entitled Practice: Aesthetics After Art. He writes about music for The Wire and collaborates in making immersive vibratory environments with Christie Pearson as The Waves.
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Lucy Gasser
is a doctoral fellow of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam. After a B.A. majoring in English Literature, French Literature and Film Studies, she completed a two-year coursework Masters in English Language, Literature and Modernity at the University of Cape Town. In her MA dissertation, she explored issues of (cultural) translation in the Anglosphere of America and Britain within the context of the Cold War. During this time, she also taught in the English, Film and Philosophy departments of UCT, as well as working as a research assistant and academic writing tutor. In 2014, she moved to Berlin to begin work on a PhD project at the Freie Universität, where she also taught a number of seminars in the English Institute.
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Linda Gabriel
is a performance poet and lecturer based in Zimbabwe. Her work celebrates womanhood and the many facets of her challenges, and she uses the stage to orate about taboo subjects and untold stories. Her brilliant poems showcases her linguistic versatility in either English or Shona, depending on which language effectively expresses what issue. She has performed and given lectures at universities and colleges in southern Africa and Europe. Born in 1985, Linda has been passionate about performance poetry since high school. She completed her B.A. Honors in Applied Drama and Theatre at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and is one of the prominent female performance poets emerging out of Zimbabwe. While performing, Linda conducts workshops on creative writing and the art of poetry performance in schools. Among her talents, she is a fashion designer, festival curator, event manager and a community developer.
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Isaiah Lopaz
is a writer and artist whose work addresses race and racism, while also highlighting the histories and perspectives of people of Black African descent, through a variety of different mediums including performance, collage, photography, and installation. He was born in Inglewood California in 1979. His mother often reminded him that his dream was to tell the stories of Black people.
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Mary Jirmanus Saba
is a filmmaker and geographer based in Beirut who uses film and other media to explore the histories of labor movement in the Arab world and its connections to Latin America, feminist internationalism, and new transformative possibilities. Her feature debut, A Feeling Greater Than Love (Tricontinental Media, 2017) won the Critics Prize at the Berlinale Forum.
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Dalia Othman
is the project manager of Jeem.me, a website in Arabic on topics related to gender, sex and sexuality. Prior to that, she spent her time working on the intersection between Gender and Technology, while researching online harassment at Tactical Tech. Between 2013 and 2015, Dalia was a Research Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Center for Civic Media. During her time there, she researched online activism in the Arab World and explored novel ways of digital civic engagement and storytelling. She has an M.A. from NYU’s Media and Culture and Communication programme.
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Walid El-Houri
is a researcher, journalist, and filmmaker working between Berlin and Beirut. His work deals with protest movements, the politics of failure, and the new geographies of war and protest in the Middle East. He is lead editor of openDemocracy’s „North Africa West Asia“ section, managing editor of Jeem.me, and a lecturer at Bard College, Berlin. He completed his Ph.D. in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam exploring the transformation of Hezbollah’s media strategies and the articulation of the notion of “resistance” as a political identity in Lebanon. He holds an M.A. in Journalism from the Lebanese University and the Paris II University and an M.A. in Film Studies from the University of Amsterdam. He has taught media studies and political communication at the American University of Beirut and the University of Balamand in Lebanon before moving to Berlin in 2013 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and later at the Berlin ICI.
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Dong Bingfeng
is a curator, producer, and research fellow in the School of Inter-Media Art of the China Academy of Art. Based in Beijing, he has curated the Guangdong Museum of Art and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and is the deputy director of the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Li Xianting’s Film Fund, and of the OCAT Institute. Dong Bingfeng has been awarded the CCAA Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award, the Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award of Yishu,,and the Robert H.N.Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant.
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Ingrid Hotz-Davies
is chair of English Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Tübingen, and one of the co-directors of the university’s Center for Gender and Diversity Research. Her research interests include Gender and Queer Studies, women’s writing from the early modern period until today, and New Materialisms.Together with Gero Bauer and Regina Ammicht Quinn, she recently edited a colelction of essays on the naturalisation and persistence of gender binaries in the context of and beyond ‘anti-genderist’ polemics.
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Regina Römhild
is a professor at the institute for European ethnology at HU Berlin. She co-directed the transdisciplinary research project Transit Migration (2003 – 2006) and co-curated the related collective exhibition Projekt Migration (2005, Cologne), both funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. The project and the exhibition addressed Germany from the perspective of post-war migration movements challenging national and newly emerging European border regimes. Besides her work at the RTG Minor Cosmopolitianisms, she is also a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Centre of Transnational Border Studies at Humboldt-Universität and the related Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium on Border Studies and Critical Migration Research. She is also a co-founding member of the Berlin Institute of Empirical Migeration Studies (BIM). And, in cooperation with Sharon Macdonald and the Centre of Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, she currently contributes as a PI to the H2020 project “TRACES. Transmitting Cultural Heritages with the Arts. From Intervention to Co-Production.”
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Susanne Zepp
is a Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and French Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Director of the Gulbenkian Doctoral Program for Portuguese Literature and Culture. She has written on Michel de Montaigne, José Maria de Eça de Queirós, Clarice Lispector, Péter Szondi, and Early Modern Jewish Literatures. Her books explore the reception of Skepticism in modern literatures and different aspects of Jewish belonging, theories of authorship and autobiography, and their relation to issues of language and knowledge. Recent publications include an Introduction to Portuguese and Brazilian Literary Studies (UTB) (in German) and An Early Self: Jewish Belonging in Romance Literature, 1499-1627 (Stanford University Press). She received her Ph.D. on Jorge Luis Borges and Skeptic Thought in 2002 at the Freie Universität, where she was an Assistant Professor for the Institute for Comparative Literature and the Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures. From 2003 – 2015, she served as the Deputy Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. During that time, she completed her Habilitation (Venia Legendi: Romance Literatures and Cultural History) at the University of Cologne. Dr. Zepp is currently working with Professor Klaus Hoffman-Holland (Chair of Criminology and Criminal Law, FUB) on research of the historical semantics of key legal concepts in literature and law.
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Filipa César
is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of documentary, the porous borders between cinema and its reception, and the politics and poetics inherent to moving image. Her praxis takes media as a means to expand or expose counter narratives of resistance to historicism. Since 2011, César has been looking into the origins of cinema in Guinea-Bissau as part of the African Liberation Movement, its imaginaries and cognitive potencies, developing that research into the collective project Luta ca caba inda (“The struggle is not over yet”). She was a participant of the research projects Living Archive and Visionary Archive both organised by the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin.
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Noa Hagesh
is a historian of Sound with an interest in Musical Thought and sound as technology in early Medieval China (3rd Century B.C. to 6th Century A.D.). Her research explores ways in which people conceptualized sound, shaped the theories of tuning, and led to developments in Music Theory and acoustics. More specifically, her research focuses on sound and tuning calculations used outside of musical performance, such as the calendar, weights and measures, divination, and the relation between sound and cosmology. Noa is a postdoctoral fellow at the Man Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she is a member of Department III: Artifacts, Action and Knowledge, and the research group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics”. Her project at the MPI focuses on the period of division in China (4th to 6th centuries), when deep social, political, and cultural changes shaped, reshaped and challenged the discourse about sound and its uses.
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Sebastian Conrad
is a professor of History at the Free University of Berlin. He is currently interested in trans-national and global history and their approaches to understanding the interactions and entanglements of the past. He has a background in both modern Western European and Japanese history, and has worked extensively on issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, transnationalism, intellectual history, memory, and historiography. His most recent publications include What is Global History? (Princeton University Press, 2016) and “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique” in American Historical Review (Volume 117, No. 4). Most recently, he has co-edited the book series A History of the World titled An Emerging Modern World, 1750-1870 (Harvard University Press, 2018).
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Marina Camargo
is a Brazilian visual artist based in Berlin. She studied visual arts and holds a Diploma from Akademie der Bildenden Künste München (Germany), a Bachelor and a Master degree from Instituto de Artes / UFRGS, Porto Alegre (Brazil), and studied Visual Culture at Universitat de Barcelona (Spain).
In Camargo’s work, a notion of displacement defines a modus operandi to deal with an established order of World: whether as a physical displacement through space and places or by conceptual shifts. Cartographic and geographical references are often the basis of her projects.
We’d like to thank Marina Camargo for allowing us to use her work “Notes on the Universal History” as one of our official promotional images for the Minor Cosmopolitan Weekend.
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Keith L. Camacho
is an associate professor in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). His new book on indigeneity and war crimes, Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
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James Miller
is a professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University, China, where he co-directs the Humanities Research Center and the Planetary Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (PETAL) research laboratory. He is a worldwide renowned scholar of China’s indigenous religion, Daoism, and has published six books relating to Chinese religions, most recently, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (Columbia University Press, 2017).
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Tom Holert
is an art historian, writer, curator and artist in Berlin who co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut. During the 1990’s, he was an editor wuth Texte Zur Kunst and a publisher of Spex Magazine in Cologne. Since then, Holert has taught and conducted research at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, the Zurich University of the Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the Free University of Berlin, among others, Recent publications include Marion von Osten: Once we were Artists (Valiz & Bak Utrecht, 2017) co-edited with Maria Hlavajova, Troubling Research, Knowledge in the Arts (Sternberg Press, 2014) with Joanna Schaffer among others, and Übergriffe: Zustände und Zuständigkeiten der Gegenwartskunst (Philo Fine Arts, C. 2014). In 2018 he curated with Anslem Franke, the exhibition Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, C. 1930 at HKW. Currently, Holert is finishing book manuscripts on contemporary art’s politics of knowledge and the intersections of art, knowledge production, and pedagogy.
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James Burton
is a lecturer in cultural studies and cultural history at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research concern the philosophy and cultural politics of science fiction, memory, post-humanism, ecology, and error. A former research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry and postdoctoral researcher at the Ruhr University, Bochum, he is the author of The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson an the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (Bloomsbury 2015), and co-editor with Erich Hörl of General Ecology: the New Ecological Paradigm (Bloomsbury, 2017).
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Michelle M. Wright
is the Augustus Baldwin Longstreet professor of English at Emory University. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (2004) and Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015). Writing through gender studies, queer studies, science studies, time studies, black European studies, African American studies, and African diaspora studies, her work focuses on black identity formation in both creative and academic discourses.
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Gloria Careaga Peréz
was co-founder of the of the university program of gender studies at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónama de México) where she has served as academic coordinator for more than 10 years. She participates actively in feminist and LGBT movements. She co-founded, among others, “Closet de Sor Juana” a lesbian feminist space for the defense of lesbian rights in 1992; “Fundación Arcoiris” an organization dedicated to the defense of sexual rights. She is now coordinating this organization. From 2008-2014, she was one of the general secretaries of ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Trans, and Intersex Association). She has participated in numerous conferences at the United Nations and is member of the Scientific Committee of the International Conference on AIDS, and member of the Directory Committee of the SPW (Sexuality Policy Watch), as well as the Global Net for the Studies of Religion, Politics, and Sexuality. Among other awards, she has been given the Omecíhuatl Medal of the Institute of Women (Mexico City) and the Hermelinda Galindo Prize of the Commission of Human Rights (Mexico City).
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Manthia Diawara
was born in Mali, West Africa. He is a distinguished professor of Comparative Literature and Film at New York University. Diawara was educated in Conakry (Guinea), Bamako (Mali) and Paris (France), before migrating to the United States to pursue his studies. Manthia Diawara is a prolific writer an filmmaker . His essays on art, cinema, and politics have appeared in the New Times Magazine, LA Times, Libération, and Artforum. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs: In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 2000) and We Won’t Budge: An African in the World (Basic Books, 2008). He has published several books on African and African American Cinema. Diawara’s notable films include: An Opera of the World (2017), Negritude: A Dialogue Between Soyinka and Senghor (2016), Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010), Maison Tropicale (2008), and Rouch in Reverse (1995).
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Sundar Sarukkai
is a professor of philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore. From 2010 to 2015, he was one of the founder-directors of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University, Manipal. Some of his most notable publications include Translating the World: Science and Language (2002), Philosophy of Symmetry (2004), and Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science (2005). He is a series editor at Science and Technology Studies, and an editorial board member at Leonardo Book Series.
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Yonel Castilla Serrano
is a dancer, choreographer and teacher and was born in Havana in 1975. He completed his studies in the National Dance School of Cuba (ENA) and studied Martial Arts at the Provincial School of Sport of Havana. He worked with the companies Danaza Teatro Retazos, Companhia Nacional, Comtemporanea de Cuba, Companhia Danza Combinatória, Trash Company, Stationzuid, Meekers Uigesproken, United-C, and with the choreographers André Gingras, Angelika Ui, Sylvain Emard, Companhia Olga Ruiz e Marina Nabais. He is teacher of Cuban Salsa, Afro-Cuban dances and contemporary dance as well as Chi-Kung and yoga.
Jorge Estrada
Jorge Estrada B. is a doctoral candidate at the Peter-Szondi Institut of Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a Licentiate degree in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México obtained with a thesis on Fernando del Paso’s Palinuro de México (1977). In his dissertation, he explores how Tristram Shandy (1767) by L. Sterne and The Man without Qualities by R. Musil (1933) discuss ethics of inaction and aim at grasping an actual experience of ethics through a relentless character construction. His current project concerns itself with fictional narratives about exceptional crimes and the ethic-aesthetic consequences of their persuasive style.
Kathy-Ann Tan
Kathy-Ann Tan is a Berlin-based academic in American Studies currently teaching at Bard College Berlin. Her interests lie in the fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies, gender and queer studies, visual cultures, performance and poetry. She has published two monographs, including one on forms of citizenship in the North American literary imagination. Her current research project, “The Aesthetics of Decoloniality: Performance, Affect and Perception”, explores how dominant narratives of western modernity are unhinged and challenged in visual art, performance and museum interventions.
Rasha Chatta
Rasha Chatta earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from SOAS, University of London, with a dissertation on contemporary Arab migrant literature. She holds an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS and a BA in History of the Middle East and North Africa from Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I) and “Classes préparatoires” in Humanities. Currently, Rasha is a Fellow based at EUME, Forum Transregionale Studien where she is carrying out research on war and migration in Arab comics. Rasha’s interests include visual aesthetics and memory, approaches to world literature, migrant and diasporic literatures, and war literature with a focus on Lebanon and Syria. Among her publications is the chapter “Mutations of the Trans-Migrare: Reflections on Individuation and Un-Homing on the Other Side of Belonging”, in: Kläger, F. and Stierstorfer, K. (eds.), Diasporic Constructions of Home and Belonging (2015).
Elnathan John
Elnathan John is a Nigerian novelist, satirist and lawyer. His fiction was shortlisted twice for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and 2015. He was the recipient of the Civitella Ranieri fellowship in 2015. His novel, Born on a Tuesday won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. It has also been translated into German and French. Elnathan writes a weekly satire column for Daily Trust newspapers and is one of Nigeria’s most well known contemporary satirists. He is a recipient of the 2018 Miles Morland Writing Scholarship and was appointed one of the judges of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. He has two books — a collection of satire (Be(com)ing Nigerian) and a graphic novel (On Ajayi Crowther Street) —forthcoming from Cassava Republic Press in 2019.
Eavesdrop (aka Monishia Schoeman)
is a social activist and Hip Hop lyricist from Parkwood, a Cape Flats working class township in Cape Town, South Africa. She has been recording and as a solo artist, since 2002. Her work has cut across disciplines, such as theatre performance, script writing/workshopping, and social activism. She released her EP, Scrolls of the Unseen, in 2018.
Bradley Lodewyk
is a breakdancer and musician from Cape Town, South Africa. He is a former member of Crazy Hip Squad and Brasse vannie Kaap and performed at major national and international music and arts festivals. Lodewyk has obtained major breakdance titles and participated in the 2008 R16 international bboy championships in South Korea.
Gero Bauer
teaches English Literature and is the managing director of the Center for Gender and Diversity Research at the University of Tübingen. In his current research, he focusses on intersections of theories of hope, kinship, and queerness in contemporary Anglo-American fiction.Together with Ingrid Hotz-Davies and Regina Ammicht Quinn, he recently edited a colelction of essays on the naturalisation and persistence of gender binaries in the context of and beyond ‘anti-genderist’ polemics.
Huang Ya-Li
is an independent filmmaker from Taiwan and is interested in the linkage between and extension of images and sounds. In recent years, he has been involved in documentaries concerning Taiwan during Japanese colonial rule, and hopes to explore the possibility of interpreting reality in the form of documentaries through historical research and examination, and also reflect on the relationship between Taiwan, Asia, and the world. His experimental works include The Unnamed (2010) and The Pursuit of What Was (2008). His first feature-length documentary Le Moulin (Presents Roots Films, 2015) has won in the 53rd Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary, and was nominated for Best Sound Effects. It was also selected in International Film Festival Rotterdam 2016.
Sara Abu Ghazal
is a Palestinian feminist writer and organizer who lives in Lebanon. She is the regional coordinator of the Women Human Rights Defenders Coalition in the Middle East and North Africa. She is also the co-director of the Knowledge Workshop, a feminist (re)search organisation in Lebanon. Sara is also a founding member of the most amazing feminist collective ever, صوت النسوة / “Sawt al’ Niswa”.
Vincent Van Gerven Oei
received his Ph.D in Media & Communications from the European Graduate School and Ph.D in Modern Thought from the University of Aberdeen. He is a Philologist and co-director of independent open-access publishing platform Punctum Books. He is a specialist of the old Nubian Language and co-editor-in-chief of Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies. He also directs Project Bureau for the Arts and Humanities, the Department of Eagles and is Editor of the New Wold Summit.
Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss
is a PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam, where she is working on her dissertation titled ‘Subverting spaces: Politics of solidarity and embodiment in a condition of digital ubiquity’. Her research concentrates on the digital conditions for transnational feminist activism to circulate as embodied and networked knowledge production before a backdrop of increasingly securitized politics of control, and how these practices (per)form new digital and transnational solidarities.
Mariya Nikolova
is a doctoral candidate of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms with a joint PhD fellowship at the University of New South Wales (Australia) and Potsdam University (Germany). She is a member of the doctoral network Perspectives in the Cultural Analysis: Black Diaspora, Decoloniality, and Transnationalism.
Oduor Obura
is a PhD candidate in the University of Potsdam. He holds a DAAD scholarship award as well as being an associate fellow of Research Training Group, Minor Cosmopolitanisms. His current research interest in childhood in eastern Africa. He is also a self-published writer of fiction.
Independent Observers
Camila Gonzatto has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communication, a Master’s degree in Theory of Literature/Creative Writing at PUCRS (Brazil) and a Phd in Theory of Literature/Creative Writing at PUCRS, with a 3-semester exchange at Freie Universität Berlin (Latin American Institute). Camila also attended the Advanced Screenplay workshop at the International School of Cinema in San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, the creative writing workshop “Writing the City” at Humboldt Universität in 2013, and the workshop “The Art of Writing” at Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts. She has more then 10 years of experience working with films and TV series. In 2014, she was selected to take part in the Berlinale Talents’ Script Station. Among her publications, she co-edited the books Literatura e Psicanálise and A Escrita Criativa: Pensar e Escrever Literatura.
Fatin Abbas’ first novel, The Interventionists, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co. Her short fiction has appeared in Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on Arrival, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism and review essays have appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Zeit, The Nation, Africa is a Country, Bidoun, African Arguments and Opendemocracy, among other places. She is a recipient of the Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship, and is a forthcoming Jan Michalski Foundation writer-in-residence. She has been awarded residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Villa Sarkia (Finland), Arc Artist Residency (Switzerland), and an alumni award granted by the Iceland Writers Retreat. Born in Sudan and raised in New York, she gained her Phd in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her Mfa in Creative Writing (fiction) from Hunter College, the city university of New York.
Sarnath Banerjee is a writer and artist. He has written four books of graphic fiction: Corridor (Penguin, 2004), The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (Penguin, 2007), The Harappa Files (Harper Collin, 2011) and All Quiet in Vikaspuri (Harper Collins, 2015). Through these books, he has explored the nature of the Indian middle-class and its transformation from Nehruvian socialism to full-fledged neoliberalism. The themes in these books include power, masculinity, bureaucracy, rumour, scandal, trade, class-system, urban sprawl, meritocracy, religion and the uncanny.
His billboard series, Gallery of Losers, commissioned by Frieze Projects East, for the 2012 London Olympics, was widely displayed in East London. In 2016, he was commissioned over 80 murals by Deutsche Bank, for their new office in Canary Wharf.
In 2008, Banerjee co-founded the award-winning publishing house Phantomville that brought together reporters and comic-book artists to produce works of visual journalism. He also had a column, The Enchanted Geography, for a national newspaper in India.
Nik Neves is a Brazilian comic author and illustrator that has travel as a major influence. Much of his work is related with the travel experience, from illustrated maps, sketchbook, as well as comics and visual diaries. His work can be seen in the books Illustration now! 5 and Mind the Map from the Taschen and Gestalten among others.
Personal website: www.nikneves.com and www.inutilproject.com