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/
- View and Download the program as PDF here (PDF 141KB)
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 and guests TBC
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 (aka Wan wo Layir), Venayuver Marc (aka Wan Shey), h.n lyonga and Abiral Kumar
WORKSHOP | Weaving Wor(l)ds: Collaborative Practices for Just Presents and Futures
Facilitated by Climate Justice Berlin Kollektiv
7pm-9pm Keynote Session
LAUNCH | Chimurenga Book Series: “Riots of Our Hands, Deep as Revolt”
Organized and moderated by Saskia Köbschall
With Mishca Peters, Duduestang Lamola, Memory Biwa, Moses März and Aouefa Amoussouvi
9pm-midnight Opening Night Party with DJ Makossiri
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 Contemporary India Panel
With Madhumeeta Sinha, Florian Schybilski and Satish Poduval
WORKSHOP | Queer Asylum Policy Lab
Organized and moderated by Mohammad Dalla
With Nuno Ferreira and guests TBC
*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
By Henry Ivry
Friday May 9 | Savvy Contemporary
7pm-11pm Savvy Contemporary Special Session
PANEL | Revisiting Shifting Ethnoscapes
Organized and moderated by the Collaborations Research Unit
With Arjun Appadurai and Bonaventure Ndikung
Saturday May 10 | Spore Initiative
2-3:30pm Parallel Sessions
ROUNDTABLE | Diasporic Returns (Atrium)
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
FILM | Travelling Through Tilisms: A surrealist travelogue from page to screen (Auditorium)
Organized by Abiral Kumar
With Abiral Kumar and Mainak Mitra
PANEL | "Cross-Pollinating the Minor Cosmos" (Studio)
With Anni Fender, Baldeep Kaur Grewal and Kylie Crane
4-5:30pm Parallel Sessions
CONVERSATION | “A radicle reaching for a home in the earth”: collaborative nature writing (Atrium)
Organized and moderated by Anna von Rath and Lucy Gasser
With Jessica J. Lee and Nina Mingya Powles
FILM | Aşît ve Aşîtî: Avalanche and Peace- Rethinking Kurdish Question through Violence, Destruction and Memory (Auditorium)
Organized and moderated by Zeynep Turkyilmaz
With Pinar Ogrenci
ROUNDTABLE | Collective reading as intervention: On delving into fascism and alt-right literature(s), together (Studio)
Organized and moderated by Sofie Fingado and Sophia Doyle
With Neela Janssen and Andreas Gehrlach
6:30pm-8pm Special Session
PANEL | Dialogue Across Generations: Indigenous Scholarship and Activism (Atrium)
Organized and moderated by Chris Healy
With Tony Birch, Keith Camacho, Hereata Pereyre and Brigalow Joaquin McIntosh
8pm Closing Night Party