UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN

This talk investigates the structural and epistemic neglect of anti-Asian racism (AAR) in Europe through a Fanonian lens of subjectivity and the historico-racial schema. Drawing on empirical data from Asian Voices Europe (2024), I argue that AAR operates not only through institutional exclusions but also through socially embedded perceptual frameworks that racialize and misrecognize Asian bodies. The dual condition of hypervisibility and invisibility imposed by the White gaze exemplifies the psychic and social contradictions experienced by the Asian diaspora.

Many commentators have argued that the Brexit Referendum of 2016, its result and its aftermath have both revealed and exacerbated deep divisions within British society. Brexit has been seen as a driver of affective polarisation, creating disharmony and discord – i.e. dissonance – between Leavers and Remainers. My paper will present a selection of literary and cultural responses to Brexit, from novels, theatre plays to art projects and films. I will argue that by representing both sides of the Brexit divide, these texts consciously make room for the dissonances that Brexit has revealed. I will moreover discuss and invite a discussion about the opportunities and limits of such representational strategies.

This paper explores the dynamics of interaction between Peloponnesian poleis within the Achaian Koinon, both in their relations with one another and with the central federal authority. Special attention is given to interstate arbitration as a mechanism for conflict resolution, highlighting its role as a form of political and diplomatic engagement among member cities. This talk aims to show how the study of interstate arbitrations as one of the forms of interaction between autonomous poleis that recognize each other as peers (Ma 2003) may perhaps also offer insights into the political aspects of conflicts and interactions within the federal structure of the Achaian Koinon.

I am part of a recently formed, small, and extra-institutional group of loosely connected researchers based in Germany attempting to describe what we've begun to call the anti-antisemitism dispositif. Our first impulse was to map its elements and articulations. Such a mapping could, for example, visually reconstruct Hanno Hauenstein's reporting from September 2024 on an exclusive story by the Springer-owned Bild Zeitung on Hamas sabotaging ceasefire negotiations: a desinformation campaign that can be traced back to Israeli premier Benjamin Netanjahu's office, wrote Hauenstein, while also pointing out that Axel Springer SE owns Israel's largest classified ads online platform Yad2 on which property is offered for sale in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. Springer, in other words, is making money by promoting the ongoing expropriation, expulsion and destruction of Palestinian people. 
But mappings and their theories of networks tend to feed on conspiratorial plot mechanics. Considering how conspirational constructions are a fundamental component of antisemitism as practice of meaning making and how they also define more broadly many elements in our current moment of fascizisation, we might be invested in constructing different forms of representation - reflexive mappings marked by antifascist affordances. 

Often, the term ‘normal’ is used to express what is socially acceptable within a given cultural or social context. While an established social normality presents itself as a timeless and self-evident truth, it grows out of a contingent and fragile state, where norms have not yet been established. In my talk, I understand this state phenomenologically as lived inter-subjective normality and describe it as an interactive and ongoing process of making and (un-)making of normality. I will argue that a sustainable normality needs friction, both, within one’s individual course of experience, between my experience and those of others, and between different (social) normalities. This space between, I will try to show is a source of normative friction, but also the place where one can stop clinging to old fictions, and begin to perceive the world and others anew, do things differently, and tell better stories.