News

Lecture, 25^th march 2019, 19 p.m., Uni Freiburg KG I 1015, 

Prof. Dr. Laleh Khalili

Professor of Middle East Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies and Founding Member of the Centre on Conflict, Rights and Justice at SOAS, University of London.

Tankers, Tycoons, and Radical Transformations. The Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance

Excellent recent research on the politics of containerisation and the logic of logistics (Levinson; Cowen; Sekula) has shown the transformations these new modalities of disciplining trade have wrought not only on the circulation of goods but also the processes of production, since the 1950s when containers were invented, and especially after the 1960s, when their usage was normalised during the Vietnam war. However, many of the practices we now associate with containerisation – foremost among them the automation of processes of maritime circulation, and the transformation of urban landscapes around the ports – go back at least two decades before the 1950s, to the legal, engineering, and financial innovations around petroleum tankers. By focusing on the tanker terminals of the Arabian Peninsula since the 1930s and the subsequent burgeoning of tanker-ships plying the trade between the Peninsula and the rest of the world, I will illuminate the radical transformations the particularities' of tanker trade has wrought. This includes early instances of automated workplaces; terminals far enough from port-city centres to isolate them from public scrutiny; and disciplining of workers aboard tanker-ships. Further, the shift in ownership structures and financing of tanker trades over the last one-hundred years either foreshadows or dramatically illuminates the transformations in financial capital itself. Finally, much of lex petrolea, the legal and arbitral corpus that sets the parameter of extraction and circulation of oil, itself provides the ground on which late capitalist legal property regimes are founded.

https://www.arnold-bergstraesser.de/en/news/tankers-tycoons-and-radical-transformations-the-making-of-modern-regimes-of-law-labour-and

https://www.facebook.com/events/341589993124589/

Article about Manuela Boatca's interview with the Online Magazine here

April 11-14, 2019 - Conference Theme: De-Linking: Critical Thought and Radical Politics

Delinking as a counterstrategy in a structurally unequal world-system has featured prominently in different social science approaches to radical emancipatory  politics, from dependency theory and world-systems analysis to decolonial thought. Understood as self-reliance or autonomous development of the peripheries (Amin 1992), as anti- or deglobalization (Bello 2004), as a choice between dewesternization and decolonization (Mignolo 2007) or, more recently, as a comprehensive move to “depatriarchalise, de-racialise, de-tribalise, decolonise, de-imperialise and democratise” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017), the notion of delinking has mobilized critical thought and political imaginations alike. At the same time, an overemphasis on delinking entails the risk of overlooking linkages and multi-directional interactions beyond the modern world-system, or the uneven dynamics of inter-imperiality (Doyle 2014). The 43rd annual conference on the Political Economy of the World-System revisits approaches to (de)linking and the concept’s past and present (re)formulations as economic, sociopolitical, epistemic and cultural paths to pluriversality and a polycentric world. It welcomes both theoretical and empirical treatments of processes of linking and delinking as well as methodological reflections on the terms’ potential for the political economy of the world-system.

Conference organization:
Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

Further information here.

The Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) host a livestream of the keynote speech of Prof. Andreas Eckert which will be held in the context of the workshop ‘Restitution and Repatriation of Looted and Illegally Acquired African Objects in European Museums’ at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana, Accra.

This event will be shown at FRIAS (Albertstraße 19, 79104 Freiburg) in the Lecture Hall (‘Pathologie’) on 13 December 2018 at 4:45 p.m. and will be followed by a short reception.

The restitution of looted art from Africa sent or sold to European museums by agents of European colonizing missions is the black box at the centre stage of the MIASA workshop on ‘Restitution and Repatriation of Looted and Illegally Acquired African Objects in European Museums’ that needs to be interrogated to garner frameworks for resolution. Processual stalemates and the continuing bid by European museums to erase and deny African people’s human rights and direct access to the looted creative and spiritual works of their ancestors, begs for continuous scholarly debates on these issues on the African continent by both African and international professionals and stakeholders. Such a quest is at the core of this workshop being hosted by MIASA in partnership with the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Ghana, Accra. For more information on the workshop and for a detailed workshop programme, please refer to http://www.mias-africa.org/events

Prof. Andreas Eckert is a renowned and popular scientist for history, particularly Africa. From 2002 to 2007, he was professor for contemporary history with a focus on the history of Africa at the University of Hamburg. In 2007, he took over the chair of African history at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he also served for some time as the institute’s director. He has undertaken research as a guest professor at various international universities such as Maison des Sciences de l' Homme, Paris, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is currently the director of the Forum for Transregional Studies and of the International Research Centre “Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History” at the Humboldt University, Berlin. 

MIASA (Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa) is an international research centre at the University of Ghana in Accra. The institute facilitates the cooperation of Ghanaian scientists with their international peers beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries. MIASA is committed to reducing global asymmetries in the production of knowledge and aims to facilitate stronger cooperation among and between researchers in both Anglo- and Francophone Africa. For more information on MIASA, please refer to http://www.mias-africa.org/

The conference will be in charge of leading international academics.

Riccardo Petrella
Professor Emeritus of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
"The three pillars for the construction of a new planetary common home"
September, 17th - 6 p.m. (presentation in English)

Fernando Calderón
Director of the Innovation, Development and Multiculturalism Program of the National University of San Martín (UNSAM)
"Modernity as an intercultural network. Uncertainty and new challenges in a global Latin America"
October 9th - 6 p.m. (presentation in Spanish)

Ulrich Brand
University of Vienna, Austria
"How capitalism affirms its hegemony: The imperial mode of living and implications for Latin America"
November 16th - 6 p.m. (presentation in English)

The three meetings will be held at FLACSO Argentina, located in Tucumán 1966, Buenos Aires.
Reports and registration: jornadasgsp2018@flacso.org.ar

For more information please visit http://flacso.org.ar/noticias/diez-anos-del-gsp-en-flacso-argentina/ (Spanish).

Background reading available: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-7109-0_601.pdf
When: Tuesday, May 29th from 12-2 pm
Where: Institut für Soziologie, Übungsraum 1 - KG IV

New cleavages and opportunities define the complex political landscape of Latin America in 2018: In Mexico, presidential elections will take place in a climate of distrust, where many accuse political institutions of collusions with crime. In Venezuela, the news suggest a polarization becoming more acute by the week, and political and economic turbulence coincide. Colombian society, while having ended a 60 years armed conflict between the state and the FARC Guerrilla at least on paper, and having destroyed large numbers of weapons, is now pitted between two presidential candidates with very different ideas of peace. What does the altered political panorama mean for Social Movements in Latin America? In which ways does this change their relation with the state? What democratic potential lies in political challenges? Which problems arise for the democratic negotiation of conflict?

The series aims to provide perspectives on the current political challenges in Latin America and their impacts on political actors, institutions and mechanisms.

The series will be held in English. Mondays, 8 pm.

For Detailed Information please check https://www.studiumgenerale.uni-freiburg.de/col-politicum/vortragsreihen/lateinamerika.

For the complete article follow http://www.pr.uni-freiburg.de/pm-en/online-magazine/connect-and-create/jettisoning-old-knowledge-for-new?set_language=en

To find out more about Prof Manuela  Boatcă and Prof. Anca Parvulescu's research project follow: http://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=106fc6a3-fa05-e811-80d3-000c299476de

Public Guest Lecture

"Thinking through relations of belonging:
Ambivalence, marginalization, and
exclusion"

Prof. Shelley Feldman
(Cornell University, USA)

 Monday, 13th November, 6:00 pm (c.t.)
Sociology Institute (Übungsraum I, KG IV, 5th floor)

The multiple ties that bind the Caribbean and Europe are the main focus of the conference marking 30 years since the Society for Caribbean Research (Socare) was founded. The Caribbean was the first region to be colonized by European powers in the 16^th century and the last one to be (incompletely) decolonized in the 20^th century. It received more than one-third of all Africans trafficked in the European trade in enslaved people between the 16^th and 19^th centuries as well as significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers during much of the same period, followed by indentureship and contract labor from Asia. It experienced the genocide of thousands of indigenous groups at the hands of European colonists as well as some of the most intense economic exploitation among Europe’s colonies. After World War II, European states compensated for their domestic labor shortages by recruiting large numbers of workers from their Caribbean colonies. This also prompted changes in the citizenship policies that European colonial powers directed at these migrants.

Today, more than one-third of Europe’s remaining colonial possessions are located in the Caribbean, and the CARICOM Reparations Commission, established in 2013, states that it “finds European colonial rule as a persistent part of Caribbean life.”[1] Nevertheless, historiography, geography, as well as social, literary, and cultural theories tend to conceive of Europe and the Caribbean as separate, even antithetical regions. For social sciences focused on modern industrial societies, the Caribbean’s legacy of enslavement made it appear as paradigmatically backward, inefficient, and underdeveloped. As such, it constituted the opposite of the notion of the free, modern, and efficient wage-work which Europe claimed to have pioneered. Having been shaped by an influx of African, European and Asian populations, the Caribbean has come to represent racial and ethnic diversity par excellence, as also evidenced in Caribbean thinkers’ theorizations of transculturation, hybridity, and creolization. In contrast, Europe – following centuries of mass emigration, nation-building processes, expulsions, and waves of ethnic cleansing – stood for high levels of ethnic homogenization. The reversal of the migration pattern since the mid-20^th century in the direction of Europe, among other regions, triggered large-scale debates on race on the continent and increasingly framed immigration as a threat to European societies. In the context of literary studies, the canonical status of European ‘national’ literatures still tends to be juxtaposed to ‘postcolonial’ Caribbean literary production. Notions of postcoloniality similarly focus mainly on the former colonies, while only recently debates across Europe have begun to address the question of Europe’s postcoloniality.

In the wake of the humanitarian crises following the most recent hurricanes and earthquakes in the Greater Caribbean, limited and discrepant disaster relief efforts have again raised questions about political and economic relations between Western powers and the Caribbean. Facing public health disasters and waves of out-migration, island economies are further challenged through current citizenship regimes, fragmented political accountability and exploitative economic arrangements, which highlight the ambivalent geopolitical status of many Caribbean territories vis-à-vis European and U.S.-American interests.

Against the backdrop of these and related aspects, the conference focuses on the legacies and continuities of European colonialism in the region and on transregional entanglements between the Caribbean and Europe. Examining languages, (post)colonial histories, socioeconomic trajectories, and aesthetic practices in the Caribbean in their relations to Europe also provides a basis for rethinking Europe from the Caribbean. The conference aims to challenge the hypervisibility of Western Europe by highlighting Caribbean entanglements with othered and racialized Southern and Eastern Europes, as well as through the frequently ‘forgotten Europes’ still claimed as overseas territories and regions in the Greater Caribbean. What can Caribbean perspectives contribute to a different and more nuanced understanding of Europe(s) today?

We invite contributions from different research fields including, but not limited to, literary and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, history, geography, and political science. Inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives are particularly welcome, as are poster presentations of PhD projects. We welcome contributions in English, French or Spanish and encourage handouts or presentation material in one of the languages other than that of the oral presentation. Possible topics include:

• The Caribbean as a laboratory of European modernity

• The political economy of race and racialization of the Caribbean in Europe

• Migration flows linking Europe and the Caribbean

• Coloniality, incomplete decolonization, and European Caribbean territories today

• Capitalism and non-wage labor in Europe and the Caribbean: enslavement, second serfdom, indentureship, apprenticeship

• European economic interests in today’s Caribbean: e.g., resort tourism, tax havens, land ownership and free-trade zones

• European and Commonwealth citizenships in the Caribbean as well as Caribbean citizenships in Europe

• Climate change, humanitarian crises, and disaster relief in the context of geopolitical ambivalence and fragmented sovereignties in the Caribbean

• The Caribbean in European politics of memory: e.g., native genocide, enslavement, CARICOM’s call for reparations from European countries

• Rethinking Europe(s) through Caribbean notions of transculturation, hybridity, and creolization

• Aesthetic entanglements between the Caribbean and Eastern or Southern Europe in literature, film, or visual arts

• Linguistic practices, interrelations, and language policies

Proposals for papers or posters (please state your choice) should include the author’s name and affiliation, presentation title, an abstract of around 300 words, as well as a short paragraph with biographical information.

Please submit proposals via e-mail to both conveners by 15 November 2017

Manuela Boatcă: manuela.boatca@soziologie.uni-freiburg.de Annika McPherson: annika.mcpherson@philhist.uni-augsburg.de

September 1, 2017

Head of Global Studies Programme, Prof. Dr. Manuela Boatcă is awarded "Sociologist of the Month" by Current Sociology, one of the oldest sociology journals in the world. Current Sociology is a fully peer-reviewed, international journal that publishes original research and innovative critical commentary both on current debates within sociology as a developing discipline, and the contribution that sociologists can make to modern societies in a globalizing world.

From the Current Sociology Facebook Page: 

Meet Manuela Boatcă, our #SociologistOfTheMonth for September. She is a Professor of Sociology at the Institut für Soziologie of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Head of School of the Global Studies Programme, and President of ISA's RC 56 (Historical Sociology). Here she tells us how she came to the field of sociology:

“I grew up in a white middle-class Romanian household during the last decade of Ceaușescu’s reign. My parents, who had come to Bucharest from rural parts of Moldavia to study, were teachers of Romanian literature and lovers of grammar and history who had had little to no opportunity to travel abroad. I got a degree in English and German languages and literatures in Bucharest at a time when the curriculum was being completely overhauled – we were the first generation to be allowed to read Orwell’s 1984 and Nabokov’s Lolita, which had been banned before 1989. But we were also the first generation of students who had a realistic chance of traveling to the countries whose languages and literatures we were studying, something that most of our professors, just like my parents, had never been able to do. After getting my degree, I therefore went to Germany to study sociology in order to get a better sense of what the “socio” in “sociolinguistics” that we had been taught as part of the study of languages was all about. It was not before I had obtained a PhD in sociology four years later that I acknowledged that I was a migrant and was in Germany to stay. I acquired increasing awareness of my lesser Europeanness in a Western European environment through the difficulties that the spelling of my last name posed to everyone outside of my country of birth and the uneasiness that my Romanian passport occasioned border authorities and myself. A research stay in the United States shortly before 9/11 made me acquainted with dependency theory, world-systems analysis and the modernity/coloniality perspective. Together, these approaches provided me with an analytical framework into which peripheral experiences and structural dependencies at the global level made perfect sense, as did their marginalisation in mainstream social theory. I therefore became interested in how imperial and colonial power relations affect present-day opportunities for global mobility, structure inequalities worldwide, and impact citizenships.”

Dr. Wiebke Keim from SAGE (Sociétés, Acteurs, Gouvernement en Europe - University of Strasbourg) will hold a lecture of the title "Global Knowledge Production and Circulation“. 

All students of the Global Studies Programme are excluded from the recently introduced increase in university fees (for non-EU students) in South-Western Germany.

From Knowledge to Informational Basis: Capability, Capacity to Aspire and Research

Vando Borghi, University of Bologna, Italy

Abstract

This lecture explores the way the process of transformation of knowledge into an ‘informational

basis’ (of policies and of public choice) represents a good terrain for building an effective exchange

and collaboration between the capability approach and other efforts, in the social sciences, to

emphasize the crucial role of agency, actors’ critical capacities and voice. Beyond the rhetorical

image of our self-claimed ‘knowledge societies’, the analysis of the contemporary characteristics

of the relationship between knowledge and an informational basis leads us to reconceive research

in terms of a human right to actively participate in the knowledge-making process, enabling

citizens’ capacity for voice to intervene in the construction of the informational bases of the

collective decision. Starting from focusing on these transformations through research cases about

the informational basis framing the relationship between safety and work, the article shows how,

beyond labour issues, at stake is the relationship between knowledge and democracy, as the core

moment of the latter, before the political choice is the cognitive one. An effective interaction

between the capability approach and other social science perspectives of research centred on

agency and capacity offers very helpful analytical tools for a critical appraisal and inquiry into these

transformations.

Keywords

informational basis, capability, capacity, capacity to aspire, voice, critique, labour, safety

The freiburger film forum has been showing current productions from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania since 1985, and it continues to make a major contribution to transcultural discourse through its choice of themes. Its workshop atmosphere and moderate size lend the festival a certain intensity and allow for conversations about film that are attractive for directors from all over the world. As an added bonus, the students’ platform also presents the opportunity to view a selection of international debut films by talented directors.

FOCUS USA: AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

In cooperation with the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in New York, the freiburger film forum will be showing a selection of historical and contemporary documentary films that actively engage with social reality in North America. In light of current political developments and the general global shift to the right, the freiburger film forum will be looking at not only the people who are affected, but also different approaches to and models of taking a stand against increasing xenophobia and social injustice.

Check out this year's programme: 

https://www.freiburger-filmforum.de/en/

 
The visiting Brazilian scholar Alexander Englander, who is currently writing his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Manuela Boatca, will speak on "The Brazil as periferic modernity: politics and society in dependent capitalism".

 
Join us this thurday at 8pm in our beloved media room (building KG 4, Rempartstraße 15, 5th floor) for a memorable evening of film and discussions - with snacks and drinks (BYO), friends and love. Be there, especially if we haven't seen you in yonks, if we just met you the other day or if we haven't met you at all. 

The antinomies of economic growth and public health -

Econometric and sociological conceptions of food and nutrition

Abstract:
The assessment of nutritional status of populations has always been a quantitative exercise that facilitates macro analysis, comparisons and policy interventions. The mainstream discourses on nutrition are based on the caloric conception of food as a biochemical substance. While this enables measurement, assessment and the provision of formulaic foods for the malnourished, it has its own limits. The biochemical and quantitative conception of food is most conducive to capital investment and industrial production of food that may not be healthy. Popular perceptions of food among communities and neighbourhoods indicate that there is a complicated dynamics between culture, cost and cuisine that cannot be grased by exclusive quantitative approaches. Drawing on field data from ongoing research in South India and South Africa, this working paper highlights the methodological and substantive issues in transposing statistical averages on existential realities of food and eating.

We have the pleasure to announce this guest lecture by Professor V. Sujatha, head of the Centre for the Studies of Social Systems at the GSP-partner Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
V. Sujatha's field of specialisation is the Sociology of knowledge and the Sociology of health and medicine with particular reference to traditional systems of medicine.

Donnerstag / 3. November 2016 / 20 Uhr c.t. /HS 1015, KG I

Dr. Dirk Tomsa (Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics and Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne)

"Indonesia under Presidend Jokowi - Domestic and Foreign Policy challenges for an Aspiring Regional Power"

Montag / 7. November 2016 / 18 Uhr c.t. / HS 1015, KG I

Anita Prakash (Director General, Policy Department, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA))

"Political Realism and Economic Outlook in ASEAN and East Asia"

 Organized in cooperation with the Institute of International Politics, South East Asian Studies Programme Freiburg, Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Freiburg and the Carl-Schurz-Haus

More detailed information about this lecture series can be found here: https://www.studiumgenerale.uni-freiburg.de/col-politicum/vortragsreihen/spotlight-suedostasien 

On Thursday, June 30, at 6pm, Dr. Anca Parvulescu (Washington University St. Louis, USA) will speak on

„East European Women‘s Migration, Racial Triangulation and the Making of Europe“

in ÜR 1, KG IV, 5th floor.

Her lecture is based on her book „The Traffic in Women‘s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe“ (University of Chicago Press, 2014). The book is an intervention in the heated debate on the making and unmaking of Europe in the wake of 1989. It argues that the critical project of pluralizing Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the traffic in East European women. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame the traffic in women, the book shows that, in today’s Europe, East European migrant women are “exchanged” so they can engage in labor traditionally performed by wives within the institution of marriage. East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, become responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives.

On Wednesday, July 6, at 4pm, Prof. Vilna Bashi Treitler (CUNY Graduate Center, USA) will give a talk entitled

"White Supremacy & Ethnic Projects: How & Why Racism Survives & Thrives"

in the media room, KG IV, 5th floor.

The talk will draw from and also go beyond the theses in her latest book, "The Ethnic Project. Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions" (Stanford University Press, 2013), as well as the work on our co-edited monograph issue of Current Sociology, "Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective" (March 2016).

On Friday, July 8, at 6pm, Prof. Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz (University of Maryland, USA) will speak on

"Global Elites in Historical Perspective"

in ÜR 1, KG IV, 5th floor.

The talk builds on the research Prof. Korzeniewicz has undertaken in the past ten years on inequality, migration, and economic elites in the capitalist world-system. You can find an interview with Prof. Korzeniewicz detailing his biographical background, his methodological approach, and some advice for graduate students here:
http://umdsocy.blogspot.de/2009/09/interview-with-roberto-patricio.html

The two latter talks are part of the GSP classes "Dynamics of Inequalities in a Global Perspective" and "The Haves and the Have-Mores", so students should take advantage of the opportunity to meet the authors whose works we've read this semester and ask their most pressing questions. Beyond their role in the classes, our two guests are prominent inequality researchers and experts in their field, which is why the talks are public - you are all very welcome to attend and spread the word!