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The Power of Maps and Geographic Imagery in Digital Communication: Narrating Russia’s War in Ukraine

By Alina Mozolevska In modern history of wars, visuals have been repeatedly used as a part of information strategies or propaganda. Drawings, images, photos, posters, cartoons, or maps represent a powerful tool of both informing and mobilizing populations and consolidating political powers around a common goal. They serve not only…

How to render a network map, part 1: black and white

25 min read In this series of posts, I roam and gauge the design space of network maps. The series presents and discusses common solutions to the main readability problems that arise when visualizing large networks (1000+ nodes) as dot-line charts, typically based on a force-directed layout or equivalent. The…

A Turning Point for French Democracy? Assessing the Impacts of Emmanuel Macron’s Pension Reform

By Therese Mager, Research Institute Social Cohesion (FGZ)/ ReCentGlobe, Leipzig University – On April 14, 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron officially enacted his deeply unpopular pension reform law. The law, which will progressively raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 and do away with special benefits schemes for...

African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966

By Ismay Milford ‘The trick of the colonist is to isolate colonial territories from the rest of the world’. This was Abu Mayanja’s 1958 message to students at Makerere University College, Kampala, from which he had been expelled some years previously. Mayanja had recently formed an influential pan-African collective in…

Eduard Zander in Ethiopia, 1847–68

German Historical Institute London Blog Eduard Zander (1813–68), from Saxony-Anhalt, combined the roles of painter and draughtsman, architect and artisan, ethnographer and assistant to the German botanist Georg Wilhelm Schimper in one person.1 What is left of the artist’s output consists to a large degree of drawings in a naturalistic…

The Fragile Space: Striking a Balance Between Visibility and Persistence in a Local Shia Mosque

Location of the Mosque in Bochum © Zahra Naghshband. The representatives of Shia congregations[1] convened in Bochum in April 2022 to sign a statement reacting to the German government’s banning and confiscation of two Shia mosques.[2] The signatories including 58 Shia associations from different cities in Germany, stated that this…

A Matter of Motion: Glass as a Material in Flux

Abstract: As a supercooled liquid, glass is characterised by its constant state of flux that is not perceivable to human senses, yet a concrete material phenomenon. Analysing two contemporary artworks, a video series by David Schnuckel and a monumental glass sculpture by Pae White, this article explores different means of…

Reclaiming Spaces from the Streets to the Gutter: Sketching Feminisms in Contemporary Arab Graphic Narratives

By Rasha Chatta This article was originally published by Mai Feminism In a region where authoritarian and patriarchal regimes have held the monopoly on what circulates publicly and where spaces of contestation are under scrutiny, graphic narratives[1] or qisas musawwara as they are referred to in the Arabic language[2]—alongside other…

Dušan Barok: For Artist and Community Web Archives

Author Dušan Barok is an artist, researcher and organiser born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. His work deals with digital culture, memory studies and activism. He is founding editor of Monoskop, a research platform for avant-garde...

Backstory podcast:”Thar she blows – The history of whales and America”

Today, I would like to introduce you to the historical radio program and podcast “backstory”, which did run between 2008 and 2020. Ayers, Brian Balogh, Peter Onuf, Joanne Freeman and Nathan Connolly gathered a variety of topics from the news and “explored its roots through the American past”.1 Despite the…

A History of Arts and Crafts from Late Ottoman Beirut (ca. 1860-1914)

Carpenters’ market (ṣūq al-najjārīn), Beirut, no date. (https://www.yabeyrouth.com/3095-سوق-النجارين) Sarah Sabban In the post 9/11 context, permanent and temporary exhibitions of “Islamic art” aimed at countering the effects of “terrorist Islam” by improving the image of “Islam” and humanizing Muslims in the eyes of the global community. Showcasing functional and decorative…

How to Postcritique II. The Necessity of Being Vulnerable. In Conversation With Toril Moi

What can literary studies be? Toril Moi, Duke University, author of Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell inspires us to educate our judgment and claims that finding a question is the work of literary studies. She helps us read Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament as…

My Historical Backpack – An Exercise in Teacher Education

Since 2016, the teaching exercise My Historical Backpack has been established as part of the teacher training program at Örebro University in Sweden. By focusing on historical artifacts, the purpose of the exercise is to stimulate students to present an account of their respectively their family’s history and to offer…

How to Postcritique I. Delaying Judgment. In Conversation With Rita Felski

How does aesthetic experience come about? Rita Felski, University of Virigina, author of The Limits of Critique and Hooked: Art and Attachment guides us through her actor-network-inspired theories and demonstrates how the key concepts of identification, empathy and attachment can illuminate our reading of Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Love. We also look at the pleasures of…

Small Literatures and Neighborhood

By Judith Sieber On February 16 and 17, 2023, the workshop “Small Literatures and Neighborhood” took place at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) as part of the project “Europäische Zeiten/European Times” (EUTIM). The two-day event was organized by Annette Werberger, Anja Jahn, and Claudia Dathe from the EUTIM…
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