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A MINOR COSMOPOLITAN

INTERVENTION

May 8-10, 2025

Free and open to all

 

Key Themes
Repairing + Collaborating

Description 

Centered on the themes of repair and collaboration, the final event of the minor cosmopolitanisms research training groupoffers an overview of nine years of transdisciplinary interventions while looking toward the future.

The event seeks to facilitate experimental collaborations across disciplines, based on the RTG's core values of conviviality, geopolitical decentering, and social commitment. During its nine years of activity, the RTG has sought to establish new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies while addressing the systemic violence within historically colonial institutions. Building on the RTG’s previous events Minor Cosmopolitan Weekend at the HKW (2018) and Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly at silent green (2022), this final event engages with Berlin-based organizations and communities that critique and actively resist (neo)colonialism in its myriad forms.

What kinds of repair might (still) be possible in an increasingly volatile planet, with escalating environmental, military, economic and social crises threatening non/human lives and life worlds? As a word, “repair” might suggest radical interventions oriented toward emancipatory transformation; a return to the stasis of normative structures and states; temporary or ephemeral restorative periods; or the kinds of mundane, quotidian maintenance (metabolic and structural) necessary for the continuation of life. Through lectures, panels, talks, workshops and roundtables, the Minor Cosmopolitan Intervention experiments with reparative and collaborative interventions in doing, undoing, and redoing the cosmopolitan project.

The event is organized by the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms with funding from the DFG (German Research Foundation).

Keep checking this space and our Instagram account @minorcosmopolitanisms for more information: https://www.instagram.com/minorcosmopolitanisms/

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

Thursday May 8 | Haus der Kulturen der Welt

2pm-3:30pm Parallel Sessions

  • PANEL | Bodies on the (Digital) Margins: The Politics of Solidarity and Resistance in the Age of “Smart Borders”

Organized and moderated by Mohammad Dalla

With Nuno Ferreira (University of Sussex)

  • PANEL | Nonbinary Futures: Reflections on a Forthcoming Special Issue of Continuum Journal

Organized and moderated by Claude Kempen and CQ Quinan

 

4pm-5:30pm Parallel Sessions

  • ARTIST TALK | Rest\\less[m]ess: Articulations of The Otherwise Discarded Listening and Viewing Session

Organized and moderated by Fogha MC Cornilius Refem and defayasite kolektif
With Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem and Venayuver Marc a.k.a. Wan Shey

Contributors: Wan wo Layir (painting, video, sculpture and prose), Wan Shey (music), h.n lyonga (poetry), Abiral Kumar (short story)

  • WORKSHOP | Weaving Wor(l)ds: Collaborative Practices for Just Presents and Futures
    Facilitated by Climate Justice Berlin Kollektiv

 

7:30pm-9:30pm Keynote Session

  • LAUNCH | Chimurenga Book Series: “Riots of Our Hands, Deep as Revolt”

Organized and moderated by Saskia Köbschall

With Ntone Edjabe, Mishca Peters, Memory Biwa, Moses März and Aouefa Amoussouvi

 

9:30pm-midnight Opening Night Party

Special guest DJ: Ntone Edjabe

Friday May 9 | Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin

1:30pm-3pm Parallel Sessions

  • ROUNDTABLE | Art, Culture, Education and Global Contemporaneity – an Exploring Visual Cultures Initiative

Organized Lize Kriel in cooperation with Co-Making Matters

Moderated by Lize Kriel, Ernst Wagner and Avi Sooful

With Elsa Cuissard, Benjamin Merten, Runette Kruger, Bernadette van Haute and Viviane Tabach

  • PANEL | Re-Schooling Society: Cosmopolitanism and Mofussil Education in ContemporaryIndia Panel

With Madhumeeta Sinha, Florian Schybilski and Satish Poduval

  • WORKSHOP | Queer Asylum Policy Lab

Organized and moderated by Mohammad Dalla

With Nuno Ferreira

*Pre-registration required. Please register by sending an email by May 1st with the subject line “Workshop Registration” to mohammad.dalla.1@uni-potsdam.de

 

3:15-4:45pm Parallel Sessions

  • PANEL | Weaving Webs across the World: Networks of Knowledge from the Pacific to Finland and Germany in the Long 19th Century

Organized and moderated by Sebastian Jablonski

With Mikko Myllyntausta, Sebastian Jablonski, Hermann Mückler

  • WORKSHOP | Theorising the crush as reparative

Organized and led by Hannah McCann

  • LISTENING SESSION | Listening In: A Collective Sonic Improvisation

Organized and led by Marcus Boon and Abiral Kumar

 

5:30pm-6:30pm Amo Salon Keynote Lecture

LECTURE | Insurgent Reparation: The Infrastructural Imaginary and Forms of Repair

ByHenry Ivry

Friday May 9 | Savvy Contemporary

7pm-11pmSavvy ContemporarySpecial Session

PANEL | Revisiting Shifting Ethnoscapes

Organized and moderated by Regina Römhild

With Arjun Appadurai and Bonaventure Ndikung

Saturday May 10 | Spore Institute

2-3:30pm Roundtable

ROUNDTABLE | Diasporic Returns

Organized by the ERC Research Group “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary”

With Fenja Akinde-Hummel, Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Thao Ho, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen and Anne Potjans

 

4-5:30pm Conversation

CONVERSATION | “A radicle reaching for a home in the earth”: collaborative nature writing

Organized and moderated by Anna von Rath and Lucy Gasser

With Jessica J. Lee and Nina Mingya Powles

 

5-7pm Film Screening & Discussion

FILM | Travelling Through Tilisms: A surrealist travelogue from page to screen

Organized by Abiral Kumar

With Abiral Kumar and Mainak Mitra

 

5pm-6:30pm Roundtable

ROUNDTABLE | Collective reading as intervention: On delving into fascism and alt-right literature(s), together

Organized by Sofie Fingado and Sophia Doyle

With Neela Janssen, Andreas Gehrlach, Stephan Zandt

 

6pm-7:30 Film screening & discussion

FILM | Aşît ve Aşîtî:  Avalanche and Peace- Rethinking Kurdish Question through Violence, Destruction and Memory

Organizer and moderator: Zeynep Turkyilmaz

With Pinar Ogrenci

 

7:30pm-9pm Special Reading Session

READING | Tony Birch

Organized and moderated by Chris Healy

 

9pm (until late) Closing Night Party