Author: Forum Transregionale Studien

“Why Queer? Don’t you have something more important than this to talk about?” – 5in10 with Razan Ghazzawi

Razan Ghazzawi received their PhD in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Sussex, Brighton. They also hold an MA in Gender, Sexuality, and the Body from the University of Leeds, UK, and an MA in Comparative Literature from Balamand University in Lebanon. In their thesis “Pedagogies of Everyday…

“It’s necessary for researchers, driven by ethical values, to establish historical perspective in times of crisis” – 5in10 with Olha Labur

Photo: ©Olha Labur Olha Labur is a historian from Kyiv who researches women’s experiences in the 20th century. She works as an associate professor in the Department of History of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. Since 2017, she teaches the post-graduate course “The Gender History of Ukraine”. She is a…

Envisioning a Homoeroticized Cityscape Through Work

By Ezgi Sarıtaş In 1963, Istanbul Ansiklopedisi (the Encyclopaedia of Istanbul) published a letter to the editor from Istanbul resident Mustafa Cihanbeyli about a quatrain that the encyclopaedia had published in one of its earlier fascicles.[1] Written by Tâhirü’l-Mevlevî (1877-1951), a Sufi dede and poet also known by his official…

Merging in Space: The Ongoing War and Previous Wars in Ukraine

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Denys Shatalov Until recently, when Ukrainians mentioned the ‘pre-war’ or the ‘post-war’ periods or subjects in everyday conversations about the past, no clarification was needed. It was obvious to everyone that this was about World War II, or, rather, a part of it…

“If earlier you had a problem finding relevant information, now it’s a challenge to choose useful and non-misleading material from the huge flow of it” – 5in10 with Taisiia Ratushna

Taisiia Ratushna is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Zaporizhzhia National University. In 2010, she received her PhD in Sociology from the Classical Private University (Zaporizhzhia). Since then, she has been working in the Department of Sociology at the Zaporizhzhia National University and conducts research on communication…

War, Migration and Memory: An Introduction

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Viktoriya Sereda The unprecedented Russian full-scale attack on Ukraine brought the recent conflicts over memory in East Central Europe and in Ukraine to the attention of an international audience. Mass displacement also exposed millions of Ukrainians to new challenges that triggered intensive reinterpretations…

Silence and Radical Rethinking in Syrian Theatre of the Long 1980s

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Friederike Pannewick This essay focuses on a Syrian author who spent most of the 1980s in self-imposed silence: the dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997). This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose artistic self-understanding was strongly molded by…

It’s Russia and Europe That Have a Problem With Ukraine

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research Interview with Vasyl Cherepanyn by Paulina Januszewska Vasyl Cherepanyn is the organiser of the Kyiv Biennial, an international forum for art, knowledge, and politics. In this discussion with Paulina Januszewska, he identifies some of the fundamental misconceptions about Ukrainian identity, history, and culture that…

Memory and the Repressed: The Possibility of Therapeutic Histories of the 1980s

By Idriss Jebari In their hearts, historians are first storytellers who seek to offer intelligible narratives of the past. Ever since Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), the border between history and literature has become less meaningful – to the joy of some and anxiety of others.[1] Yet, valid questions remain: can…

Against Remembering: The Fictional Truth of a Massacre

By Samad Alavi Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness anthologizes poems that testify to some of the last century’s darkest political tragedies.[1] In her introduction, Forché establishes her basic criteria for selection. First, she includes only poems, as she wishes to demonstrate that the old “arguments about…

Ukrainian Comics and War in Ukraine

By Svitlana Pidoprygora[1] In the autumn of 2013, Euromaidan started in Ukraine as a response to the authorities’ decision to end European integration processes and focus on the Customs Union with the Russian Federation. Thousands of people went to protests on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (literally, ‘Independence Square’) in Kyiv and the…

Ukrainian Comics and War in Ukraine

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Svitlana Pidoprygora[1] In the autumn of 2013, Euromaidan started in Ukraine as a response to the authorities’ decision to end European integration processes and focus on the Customs Union with the Russian Federation. Thousands of people went to protests on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (literally,…

The Use of Humor During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Taiwan

By Chunping LinThe word “幽默 yōumò,” which means “humor” in Chinese, is originally from Jiǔzhāng 九章 of the Chu Lyrics 楚辭 Chǔcí (475 B.C. – 221 B.C.) and was used to describe the tranquility of nature.[1] Lin Yutang林語堂 (linguist, philosopher, and translator, 1895–1976) translated the English word “humor” with the…

Chomsky Is No Friend of the Syrian Revolution

By Yassin al-Haj Saleh Just three weeks following my release after 16 years in prison in Syria, I started translating a book into Arabic. The book was “Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order,” by Noam Chomsky. It had taken me some time to realize that…

Gods and Outcasts: Ambivalent Attitudes towards Health Workers in India during the Coronavirus Pandemic

TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research By Gautam Liu Gautam Liu. Photo: private. The COVID-19 pandemic in India generated a strange phenomenon in how health workers were perceived. On the one hand officials were not tired in proclaiming doctors and nurses as gods, on the other hand health workers were…

Teaching between Spoon-Feeding and Dialogue: My Experience in Institutions of Higher Education and in Interactive Theater

تجد/ين هنا النسخة العربية لهذا النص. By Marie Elias (French Literature / Theater Studies, University of Damascus / Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts, Damascus, Syria / Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon) Teaching is a difficult, exhausting profession, but an exciting one, and, if handled satisfactorily, it allows for enriching forms…
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