LIAS Kolloquium Winter 2026/27

Wednesday, 14 Oct 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Senior Fellow Gertrud Koch
Animation – On the Relationship between Technology and Aesthetics 
Campus | Central Building C40.704

In the renewed explication of the concept of animation, the project attempts to divert the gaze between the hardened fronts of dystopian technophobia ('soulless mechanics') and romantic technophilia ('machine god'; vs. nature-decaying defective human being) to areas in which technology is placed in a practical relationship and is able to sharpen an aesthetic sense of possibility through playful experimentation. Between work, exploitation and play, technology in art and as art unfolds its own field of activities that do not have to subordinate themselves to the post-human or stand in a mere expressive relationship to man. This interrelationship between human practices and technical objects (machines, instruments, screens, PCs, etc.) is what I encompass under the term animation. We let ourselves be animated by technical media and practices and we animate them by giving them human attributions (intelligence, etc.) and anthropomorphic designs.

Wednesday, 21 Oct 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Artist Fellow Chepape Makgato
Reconfiguration, Recalibration and Redress of WHAG's Collection: Africa in Conversation with Europe 
Campus | Central Building C40.704

The exhibition of the same name emerges from a critical re-engagement with the historical foundations of the William Humphreys Art Gallery collection. Originally conceived as Reconfiguration of WHAG’s Founding Collection, the exhibition has evolved into a more expansive and reflexive curatorial proposition that not only rehangs the collection but interrogates its epistemological and ideological underpinnings. By bringing works out of storage into renewed visibility, the exhibition performs both an institutional and symbolic act of awakening.
At its core, the exhibition is structured around contrast, juxtaposition, and dialogic encounter. It stages conversations across temporalities, geographies, and aesthetic traditions, positioning European canonical works alongside African artistic practices to reveal both tension and resonance. These curated vicinities invite viewers to reconsider how meaning is constructed, contested, and re-authored within the museum space.

Wednesday, 28 Oct 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Justyna Aniceta Turkowska
„Forward Ever, Backward Never“: Ghana’s Triangular Scientific-Technical and Material Entanglements in the Cold War 
Campus | Central Building C40.530

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when African countries were gradually gaining independence and (small) Eastern European countries were seeking greater autonomy from the Soviet Union, emancipation from any form of imperial exploitation, together with scientific modernity, became an imperative for both regions. In this context, Ghana, like many other African states, viewed science and education as the ultimate drivers of development, nation-building projects, and international recognition.

This talk first uncovers the often-overlooked sparks of knowledge creation that crossed political lines, showing how deeply so-called socialist expertise was rooted in the West—more than either Ghanaian or Eastern European actors cared to admit—and how these exchanges left their mark on Western thought as well. In the second part, it turns to the material dimension of this knowledge flow, since every collaborative project and scientific partnership relied on specific tools and practical know-how. These material elements shaped the very character of cooperation, weaving a dense network of material references and personal relations used to facilitate globalised connections and formulate delocalised power claims that were not always in line with the envisioned ‘socialist modernity’ or scientific independence. Discussing internal dynamics and practices of people, knowledge and objects on the move within the West-East-South framework of the Cold War allows us to move beyond labels such as “Western,” “Eastern European,” or “African post- colonial” knowledge, revealing on the one hand the complex, networked nature of knowledge and object transfer across political boundaries, and on the other hand, the relevance of objects’ movement for the creation of liabilities and global relationality.

Wednesday, 11 Nov 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Faculty Fellow Natascha Zaun
The Effect of Judicial (In)Dependence on Asylum Status Determination
Campus | Central Building C40.530

This talk presents a developing research project intended as the basis for an external funding proposal. Previous research has shown that judicial independence can shield asylum decision-making from political and public pressures, but we know considerably less about the causal mechanisms underlying this relationship. The project therefore asks how changes in judicial independence affect the behaviour of judges and asylum administrations, and under what conditions courts can insulate asylum decision-making from political pressure. Drawing on neo-institutionalist approaches to judicial behaviour, it examines both strategic responses to changing incentives and sanctions and the role of professional norms and understandings of judicial independence. Empirically, the project combines comparative and longitudinal analyses of Poland and Austria with document analysis, expert interviews and process tracing to investigate how changes in judicial independence translate into changes in asylum decision-making.

Wednesday, 18 Nov, 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Senior Fellow Ranabir Samaddar
Urban Futures in the South
Campus | Central Building C40.530

The idea of an urban future impels speculation about time, but it also leads to struggles to imagine and act collectively on a desirable future. Therefore, the idea of urban future does not mean that we are seeking to predict the future, grip it in our hands, or despair of the time ahead. Urban future is an idea that offers a vital way to understand how our cities exist, thrive, and struggle to overcome difficulties, negotiate fault lines, and occasionally perish. It is not only the sign of the uncertain, but a critical reflection on temporality. This means there cannot be one single future in store for our cities, but multiple futures. We do not wait for the future; we work on it in the present. Future in this way becomes something more than a temporal issue, it becomes a practice. The future marked by varying future-making practices is thus a contentious field. It has multiple registers. This is even more true for cities of the South with their colonial histories, variegated paths to decolonisation and subsequent developments, and new logistical and ecological interfaces. Urban future thus invites thinking of future-making practices in cities, such as: literary, artistic, and cultural imagination about a desirable city; political history of the subaltern classes and their demands for a ‘humane’ and ‘just’ city; history of public disasters including climatic and epidemiological disasters and the role of urban solidarities (based on an ethos of mutual care and protection) in coping with such disasters – in the process, the city turning a new chapter of its life; planners’ and administrative visions linked with intergovernmental aid, investment, and public-private partnership; refugees, migrants, and aliens in the city lending it a plural/cosmopolitan character, and the contest between a nativist and plural/cosmopolitan future; and finally, evolution of an ‘urban economy’ in place of an ‘industrial economy’ and the role played by informal economy and public finance.

Wednesday, 25 Nov, 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Liz Schoppelrei
Fan Edits as Queer Insistence 
Campus | Central Building C40.530

This project takes up viewer/creator agency in speculating queer possibilities in the absence of explicit canonical confirmation. Building upon remix studies, I analyze several TikTok “fan edits” of the American police procedural dramas Criminal Minds and Criminal Minds: Evolution. These short-form video montages imagine a romantic relationship between the characters Emily Prentiss and Jennifer Jareau. Fan edits serve as a crucial site of queer insistence and queer speculation. Unlike fan fiction, fan edits are far more restricted in the raw materials a creator might draw upon—after all, there are only so many clips from the TV show to work with. Yet, within these limitations, creators carefully curate queer, lesbian, and/or bisexual versions of this romantic relationship as well as diverse relationship dynamics and possible backstories.

Wednesday, 2 Dec 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Prerna Agarwal
Labour politics and Muslim Nationalism in Late Colonial Calcutta 
Campus | Central Building C40.530

As the dockworkers, seamen and boatmen in colonial Calcutta were largely Muslim, this presentation is about the significance of popular mobilisation of the urban poor (and with a ‘socialist’ programme) by the Muslim League in the run-up to Direct Action Day in 1946. The chapter offers a new reading of this key event.

The main argument is developed along these lines: labour politics existed within an anticolonial movement, and in a tense relationship with not one, but two kinds of nationalisms. We often take into account the Congress one, but in fact Muslim nationalism was as significant for the shaping of labour politics. In the 1940s, these two nationalisms emerged as rival forces and vied for hegemony over mass politics, drawing the workers’ movement into their vortex.

Tuesday, 8 Dec 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Mehmet Celil Çelebi
The Narcissistic Grammar of Populist Nationalism across Cases
Campus | Central Building C40.530

A critical theory approach to the rise of populist nationalism suggests that its appeal involves more than a search for freedom from the anxieties produced by globalization. Populist nationalism offers a narrative that invites its audience to identify with a collective subject imagined both as strong and as under threat. Yet the sources of these threats are not simply to be neutralized to free individuals from anxiety: they are constructed as deserving punishment. Focusing on a set of authoritative programmatic texts from populist-nationalist movements across hemispheres, the paper explores whether these narratives share a narcissistic grammar of injury, identification, and retribution. It constitutes the empirical leg of a broader book project that seeks to develop a critical theory of the psychic dynamics underlying the contemporary rise of the far right.

Wednesday, 9 Dec 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow María Laura Mazzoni
Divorce as a Privilege? Reflections on Subaltern Women and Their Strategies in the Judicial Arena
Campus | Central Building C40.530

This presentation offers an exploratory approach to the strategies employed by lower-class women in Córdoba del Tucumán at the end of the colonial period to petition for separation on the grounds of marital violence. To what extent were women from the popular sectors able to access the justice system? What was the scope of their representation in proceedings concerning petitions for divorce? Were these women able to employ the same strategies as their counterparts from the upper classes? Did the political revolution, with its rhetoric of freedom and equality, constitute a turning point or bring about a transformation in the experiences and strategies of women from the popular sectors?

Wednesday, 16 Dec 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Kirsten Kamphuis
The Archival Gap: Methodological Reflections on Leftist Women’s Internationalism during the Cold War 
Campus | Central Building C40.530

In November 1960, two delegates of the Indonesian leftist women’s organisation Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement) arrived in freezing East Berlin. Marwani Pardede and Mastiti Soeprapto were both leading Gerwani figures. They had travelled all the way from Southeast Asia to attend the seventh congress of the DFD (Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschland, Democratic Women’s League of Germany), the women’s mass organisation of the German Democratic Republic. In my presentation I will take this encounter between East German and Indonesian leftist women activists as a point of departure for a methodological reflection on a transnational approach to women’s leftist activism during the Cold War.
In particular, I will focus on the challenges related to the availability and accessibility of source material about the DFD and Gerwani. For the DFD, sources are abundantly available in the German Federal Archives as well as in several library collections across Germany. The case of Gerwani is completely different. The Indonesian leftist movement was violently destroyed in 1965–1966 in the wake of a military coup. In the wave of anti-leftist violence that swept the country, much historical evidence was lost. This means that there is a vast imbalance between the two bodies of sources, not only in terms of the amount of historical evidence that is available, but in terms of source typology as well. In my talk, I will ask which approaches gender historians might use to come to terms with such imbalances when working on North-South activist interactions.

Wednesday, 13 Jan 2027, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Senior Fellow Paula Banerjee
The City and its Intimate Labour: Women in the Informal Sectors 
Campus | Central Building C40.530

Wednesday, 20 Jan 2027, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Koyal Verma
Decolonizing African Identity and History: Locating State Interventions, Institutional Practices, Commercialization and Artistic Sovereignty in India
Campus | Central Building C40.704

How does the Indian state position the African-Indian community and its cultural heritage? How does the commercialization of the ‘Dhamal dance’ affect cultural heritage and art forms? Global discussions of the African diaspora often overlook South Asia. Even the Indian textual archives have kept Siddi history at the margins. This research attempts to decolonize African identity by shifting the focus to the Siddi practitioner. Dhamal, as a dance form, symbolizes embodied cultural memory and descent. However, the African-Indian community (Siddi) is recognized as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) by the Indian state. These categories overlook the Siddi’s enslavement, military service and spiritual authority. This suggests a loss of heritage. But traces of Siddi history appear in the Tribal Research Museum (Ahmedabad), Kutch Museum (Bhuj), Darbar Hall Museum (Junagadh), and the National Museum (New Delhi). The museums are entangled with the colonial gaze through their anthropological taxonomies. In this context, this research first outlines the taxonomies the Indian state uses to represent the Siddi community and its cultural heritage. Second, it outlines the anthropological frameworks used by the ethnological museums to represent Siddi identity and history. Third, it outlines the changes in the art form due to commercialization and marketisation of Dhamal. It outlines how commercialization leads to the loss of cultural heritage. Fourth, it outlines the ritualistic interpretations and cultural meaning of Dhamal dance for the Siddi community. It revisits the African-Indian heritage positioning in Dhamal. This research argues that the colonial construction of race and tribe has influenced the post-colonial identity of the African diaspora. It also outlines how Dhamal dance can contribute to decolonization by recentering on South Asian Siddi practitioners. Dhamal dance serves as a site for producing counter-archives and counter-narratives of African identity and history.

Wednesday, 27 Jan 2027, 12:15-1:45 p.m.

LIAS Fellow Maddalena Fragnito
Luxury Bunker Theory 
Campus | Central Building C40.530

By reading contemporary technology elites’ political thought through feminist social reproduction theory, Luxury Bunker Theory asks what politics of life emerges when future survival is imagined through separation rather than interdependence, and when the conditions that sustain life are increasingly organised through private, fortified infrastructures rather than collective provisions. The presentation will provide an overview of the current state of the project and outline its next stages of development.