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Kategorie: TRAFO

Rethinking Slow Science from the Perspective of Warzone Academics

By Anastasiya Leukhina et al. With its “publish or perish” imperative, stiff competition for grants and positions, and focus on quantifiable output, neoliberal academia breeds fast science. Many academics have pointed to the need to slow down, emphasizing that good quality academic work takes time. This text attempts to expand the contextual boundaries of understanding slow science. It was born out of a conversation among eight female Ukrainian scholars, each of whom has been affected in their own way by the full-scale Russian invasion. While discussing the speed and quality of academic output, we arrived at the conclusion that the fast vs slow science debate acquires additional nuances in a war zone. The work on this text reflects the practices of slow science we are advocating for: collaborative work, sensitivity to contexts—collective and personal—and experimentation with formats. 

التراث الثقافي السوداني بين مخاطر الحرب والغياب المؤسسي الفاعل

By Ahmad Adam. This text is a summary of a paper presented by the author on November 9, 2024 at the 27th Arab Archaeologists Union Conference in Cairo. It examines the impact of war and political instability on Sudan’s cultural heritage. Sudan, a country with a rich and diverse historical legacy, has faced repeated conflicts that have endangered its archaeological sites, museums, and intangible heritage. His text assesses the current situation in war-torn Sudan, highlighting the destruction, looting, and neglect of key heritage institutions, including the National Museum of Sudan, the Ethnographic Museum, the Khalifa House Museum, and regional archaeological sites. It also addresses the absence of effective institutional protection and the challenges posed by the 2023–armed conflict. Additionally, he explores ongoing efforts to safeguard Sudanese heritage, emphasizing the role of local and international collaborations, digital documentation, and community-driven initiatives. It calls for urgent action to document, preserve, and protect Sudan’s cultural assets amid the ongoing crisis.

The Political Activities of Dual Citizens in the Western Mediterranean, with a Focus on Tunisia, Algeria and France – 5in10 with Thomas Serres

Dr. Thomas Serres’ research spans the field of Middle Eastern studies, critical security studies, and comparative politics, combining an ethnographic approach with a conceptual apparatus inspired by critical theory. He is particularly interested in the effects of protracted and entangled crises (popular uprisings, “war on terror,” refugee crisis, neoliberalization) in North Africa and beyond. His first book, The Suspended Disaster: Governance by Catastrophization in Bouteflika’s Algeria, was published in 2023 with Columbia University Press, expanding on a French edition initially released in 2019. He also co-edited the volume North Africa and the Making of Europe with Bloomsbury Publishing (2018).

Beyond “Alternative Globalization” in Socialist Eastern Europe: A Critique of the Concept

By Béla Tomka. Research on the globalization of socialist Eastern Europe has become a thriving field within international historiography over the past decade. At the same time, scholars have made ambitious efforts to develop new conceptual tools for identifying the distinctive features of globalization in socialist Eastern Europe. Some of these new concepts go beyond just examining the transnational ties of socialist states — they also make broader claims about globalization itself by suggesting that globalization is not a single, uniform process but rather one that unfolds in distinct, segmented ways. The approach of “alternative globalization” introduces a profoundly new way of thinking about the topic by reshaping how we understand the dynamics and chronology of globalization in the region.

The Making of Modern Austerity: Insights from Clara Mattei’s “The Capital Order” and its Contributions to Global History

By Julie Birke. Clara Mattei’s book “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism” offers an important contribution to our understanding of austerity policies and the debate on the origins of neoliberalism by putting class challenges at the heart of her argumentation and linking it to monetary and financial policies of the 1920s. By comparatively analysing the economic policies of interwar liberal Britain and fascist Italy, the book shows how austerity worked as a set of fiscal, monetary and industrial mechanisms, with the common goal for economists in those countries to reimpose capitalist relations of production where they were gravely endangered. This essay will demonstrate how Mattei revives and updates the class interpretation of neoliberalism and to what extent it makes a compelling contribution to the field of global history.

The State’s Friendly Face? Post-2013 Egyptian Exiles and Turkey’s Exceptional Legal Tools

By Elsayed E. Abdelhamid. Turkey’s selective approach to regularizing displaced Egyptians, initially as diplomatic leverage and later as a gesture of goodwill, fundamentally shaped their everyday lives and future prospects. The use of exceptional legal measures, such as presidential decrees and discretionary citizenship policies, not only reflected Turkey’s shifting foreign policy interests but also created spaces for forced migrants to negotiate their legal status through community mobilization and “everyday diplomacy.”

“I learned that academia could be a shared path” – 5in10 with Ido Fuchs

Ido Fuchs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow for the academic year 2024/2025 at the Forum Transregionale Studien and a Visiting Scholar at the Utrecht University Network for Environmental Humanities for Spring 2025. His project, Writing Returns, studies the poetics of return in Palestinian literature, focusing on questions of gender, anti/post-colonialism, and world literature. His second project, tentatively titled The Atmosphere of Doomsday, brings together research on colonialism, violence, apocalyptic discourses, and contemporary cultural production in Palestine/Israel. His works, deriving from both projects, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Interventions, Biography, Theoretical Practice, Mafte’akh, and Bezalel.

Tensions Over Participation: How Inclusive are Renewable Energy Partnerships Between the EU and Maghreb Countries?

By Philipp Wagner. Energy transitions have become a key process around the globe to decarbonise economies in response to climate change. Structural transformations such as the expansion of renewable energy infrastructures are not free of conflict since they are deeply entangled with questions of distribution, access, and participation. To illustrate this, the following essay aims to intervene in the debate on renewable energy partnerships between the EU and Maghreb states with concrete policy evaluations and recommendations. It aims to unravel the forms of participation and political exclusions in these processes: What is at stake is the place of local communities and citizens in the energy transitions of the Maghreb.

Breaking Bias: Training Judges to Challenge Gender Stereotypes in Courts

By Beate Streicher. As part of her re:constitution project, Beate Streicher investigated the impact of stereotypes related to gender identity and expression, sex characteristics and sexual orientation on judicial proceedings and decisions and identified key challenges and good practices related to judicial training on this topic. To provide practical recommendations, she examined the guidance of international monitoring bodies, responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Istanbul Convention, combined with insights from elite interviews with eight experts (six identifying as female and two as male) involved in Council of Europe (CoE) cooperation projects dealing with the topic and the respective courses from the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Programme, including the HELP course on WAJ, violence against women and gender equality and gender mainstreaming.

Finding Home in Exile: How Ukrainian Refugees Remember Their Time in Polish Households

By Kamil Luczaj. What is it like to flee your home overnight and rebuild life in a stranger’s house? For many Ukrainian refugees who arrived in Poland after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the answer is woven with fear, resilience, and unexpected acts of kindness. But how do they remember those first chaotic weeks – and what stories do they choose to tell? This post dives into the narratives of 30 Ukrainian war refugees who found temporary refuge in Polish households. Through interviews conducted in 2023, it explores how they recount their journeys – from the moment the invasion began to their experiences settling into a new, unfamiliar space. While every story is unique, common threads emerge: the shock of displacement, the challenges of adapting to a new culture, and the fragile hope of rebuilding life from scratch.

“The Internet has fascinated me for as long as I can remember” – 5in10 with Valentina Golunova

Valentina Golunova is an Assistant Professor in Digital Democracy at Maastricht University. Her research lies at the intersection of platform regulation and fundamental rights. Valentina’s PhD thesis addressed the interplay between algorithmic content moderation, the regulation of digital services in the EU, and freedom of expression online. At the moment, Valentina is pursuing research projects on the legal approaches to countering disinformation and strategic litigation in the field of digital rights.

Female Agency and Colonial Repression: Memory and Archives in Tunisia

By Nora Lafi. Reflecting on the role of women under colonialism crucially contributes to debates on how
to write the history thereof in contemporary Tunisia. Based on a corpus of original archives relating to French repression of women designated “rebels,” it is shown how a focus on women’s agency makes it possible to write the history of colonisation differently and to cast issues of memory in a new light. In the case of the Arab world and the Ottoman Empire more broadly, scholars have sought to shift perspectives, revise chronologies, and develop analytical frameworks that acknowledge women’s capacity for action. This approach contrasts with colonial and Orientalist frameworks that often depicted women as doubly subjugated—both by local patriarchal structures and by colonial rule. By centering women’s agency, scholars have not only illuminated the nature of colonial domination but also explored how its legacies persist in postcolonial contexts. Contemporary research also highlights the agency of the colonized, challenging traditional imperial narratives and reconnecting histories of empire with the lived experiences of affected societies.

Breaking Bias: Entry Points for Gender Stereotypes in Judicial Decision-Making

By Beate Streicher. As part of her re:constitution project, Beate Streicher investigated the impact of stereotypes related to gender identity and expression, sex characteristics and sexual orientation on judicial proceedings and decisions within the European context and beyond, applying an intersection perspective. The multimethod approach combined an analysis of key cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) dealing with gender stereotypes, recommendations of international monitoring bodies such as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), and elite interviews with eight experts (six identifying as female and two as male) involved in CoE cooperation projects dealing with the topic such as the projects on Women’s Access to Justice (WAJ) and the respective courses from the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Programme.

The Potentialities for Globality in the Tradition of Critical Theory

In this article, Johan Bolding Rasmussen examines how Critical Theory can engage with global intellectual history. He suggests that by moving beyond Eurocentric perspectives, Critical Theory can address global challenges more effectively. Rasmussen proposes integrating diverse intellectual traditions to enrich critical discourse and enhance its relevance in a global context. According to him, “global intellectual history is the emergence of a promising and strong research field that combines intellectual history with the recent increase in attentiveness towards the global”. Similarly, “recent years have seen a significant number of research monographs” on the Frankfurt School emerge. Inherently universal, the literature does, however, raise crucial questions on its globality.

La rente et le changement institutionnel en Algérie – 5in10 avec Samir Bellal

Diplômé de l’Institut National de la Planification et de la Statistique (INPS) d’Alger et de l’université Lyon 2, Samir Bellal a enseigné dans de nombreuses universités en Algérie. Actuellement, il exerce en qualité de professeur d’économie à l’université Mouloud Mammeri de Tizi-Ouzou. Il a publié, fin 2017, « La crise du régime rentier – essai sur une Algérie qui stagne », paru aux éditions Frantz-Fanon, et en 2022, aux éditions El-Amel, « Rente, populisme et question économique en Algérie – réflexions sur un système en crise ».

Policying the Roma in the Service of Whiteness. Post-Pandemic Reflections from Bulgaria

By Francesco Trupia. Bulgaria’s bio-political population management remains instructive to showcase the embeddedness of the policies of white-enclosing with the diversely universal conditions of discrimination, scapegoating, and racism. Race is undoubtedly central to charting out the genealogical lines of past and present violence against Roma and other minority groups in Bulgaria.

New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

By Anne-Marie McManus. In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared.