Forum Transregionale Studien | Veranstaltungen

Digital Evidence and Advocacy of Human Rights-Based Arms and Technology Treaties

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:10:00 +0200

The growing availability of digital evidence has transformed the monitoring of arms transfers and the use of emerging military technologies. From conventional weapons and surveillance tools to artificial intelligence–driven systems and lethal autonomous weapons, today’s conflicts require new approaches to documentation and advocacy. From AI-driven surveillance and predictive policing to autonomous weapons and algorithmic targeting, these technologies raise profound legal and ethical concerns. Civil society, investigative journalists, and legal practitioners increasingly turn to open-source intelligence and digital forensics to expose violations, trace weapons flows, and demand accountability. This research examines how digital methodologies—capable of geolocating attacks, verifying weapons deployment, and detecting AI-enabled targeting or surveillance—can enhance treaty enforcement, bridge evidentiary gaps, and strengthen advocacy for human rights-centered arms and technology regulation. It considers both traditional arms and emerging technologies as subjects of governance, with particular attention to their implications for international humanitarian law. Using a mixed-methods approach—combining case studies, expert interviews, and methodological review—it assesses how cross-sector collaborations can translate complex technical findings into policy change, with a focus on strengthening European Union frameworks on arms control, AI governance, and the rule of law.

Constitutional Democracy and Its Capacity for Self-Preservation in a Multipolar World: The Concept of Defensive Democracy in Germany, Ukraine, and the Broader European Experience

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0200

After the full-scale invasion, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine characterized Ukraine as a "self-defending democracy." This notion, close to militant democracy, means that despite martial law, restrictions on human rights must remain proportionate and justified to ensure the preservation of statehood. Germany was the first European country to embed the idea of a democracy capable of defending itself against anti-democratic forces. Drawing on the Basic Law of 1949, the German model rests on a commitment to democratic values, defensive capacity, and the promotion of democracy’s protection. Yet a fundamental concern follows: are these mechanisms enough? What if a party that complies with the constitution gains total control over the state? For Ukraine, the preservation of statehood should not be understood narrowly or instrumentally, and the limits of militant democracy’s toolbox must be carefully studied. As democratic states increasingly rely on national legal frameworks, Ukraine must harmonize its constitutional doctrine with the jurisprudence and constitutional principles of the European Union—while ensuring that defensive democracy does not become a threat itself. The research asks how democracies can defend themselves without undermining fundamental rights—and whether Ukraine’s constitutional framework is ready for this challenge under and after martial law.

Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

Reading conflicting accounts of a single, catastrophically violent event, this talk explores how translation has functioned simultaneously as a technology of imperial governance, a ground for the critique of imperial law, and a site for theorizing extra-legal justice and redress. The “Dinshaway Affair” was a 1906 multilingual court case in which four Egyptians were hanged and many more flogged or imprisoned in retaliation for the death of one British soldier. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it became a global symbol of injustice and a spark for anti-imperial and proto-nationalist activism. The talk puts the British trial documents in conversation with an Arabic novel about the event – not to adjudicate between them, but to ask how translation shaped Dinshaway, and how Dinshaway might yet reshape conceptions of translation, justice, and reparation. In the archive, British officials use untranslatability to justify delay, absence, and fatal error. Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī’s novel The Maiden of Dinshaway dramatizes this, turning on instances of miscommunication in the colonial courtroom. The novel’s own mis/translation of Victor Hugo ultimately rejects legal justice in favor of a violent, divine, disproportionate compassion (raḥma). The talk ends by asking how raḥma might inform reparative modes of comparison and translation in the context of ongoing colonial and settler-colonial violence today.

Hannah Scott Deuchar teaches Arabic and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, where she works on Middle Eastern literary and legal histories, translation theory and practice, and broader questions of technology, culture, and language. Her first monograph, Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press in June 2026. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in IJMES, Comparative Literature, Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and other journals and edited volumes, and has won the ACLA A. Owen Aldridge Prize. She is the holder of a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant and in 2025-26 is a Humboldt Research Fellow joint-hosted by EUME and Freie Universität Berlin.

Valeska Huber is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her research combines international and global history of the 19th and 20th centuries with social and microhistorical approaches. She specialises in the history of mobility and migration with a focus on the Middle East, epidemics and international health policy, as well as communication and (global) publics, particularly in relation to education, literacy, and language. In her current book project, she is examining the question of universal access to information through the example of 20th-century literacy campaigns.

Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.

Feminist Comics in Arab and Latin American Protest Cultures

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

In many Global South countries, women* have increasingly embraced the ‘comics turn’, making use of this popular sequential medium to invest and invent spaces, both physically and metaphorically. Our ongoing project maps intersectional feminist comics from the Arab Mediterranean and Latin America and examine the transnational networks through which they are produced, circulated, and read. Particular attention is paid to the diverse thematic concerns that animate these works, including body image and desire, protest and political resistance, grief and memory, migration and displacement, domestic and care work, state violence, coming-of-age experiences, and changing family constellations. At the same time, these comics foreground alternative feminist genealogies through the creation of new “sheroes” and collective imaginaries that challenge patriarchal, colonial, and heteronormative narratives.
By focusing analytically and comparatively on feminist comics production in these two experimental sites – regions connected by long histories of exchange, comparable socio-political tensions, and parallel engagements with feminist and social movements – we seek to illuminate both shared concerns and situated differences. Ultimately, we sketch a vision of a comics of solidarity: a political and aesthetic practice that mobilises visual storytelling to foster recognition, relationality, and feminist alliances across the Global South.

Rasha Chatta is a Research Fellow based at Freie Universität Berlin. She holds a PhD in comparative literature, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies from SOAS, University of London and her postdoctoral research was supported by EUME, MECAM and the Einstein Foundation. Rasha has published scholarly articles on Arab migrant narratives, war literature, visual archives, and Arab comics, in addition to magazine entries and podcasts on comics. Her book Esquisser la révolte. La bande dessinée à l'heure des féminismes arabes [Sketching Revolt. Arab Feminist Comics] was recently published with Éditions Lorelei. Rasha is also co-editor of the online magazine Untold Mag.

Jasmin Wrobel is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from Freie Universität Berlin, was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manchester from 2022-2023 and a MECILA fellow in São Paulo in 2025. At present, she is working on a monograph with the title Resisting Lines: Anti-Patriarchal Agencies in Latin American Comics. Jasmin’s research interests include feminist and anti-colonial comic art, Black resistance, (neo-)baroque literature, literary mediations of memory discourses, and concrete and experimental poetry.

Rasha & Jasmin are currently the co-PIs of a Volkswagen-funded comparative project on feminist comics in the Arab Mediterranean and Latin America.

Ammar Kandeel is a literary and art critic whose work lies at the intersection of visual culture, decolonial studies, and literary/art theory. His research area spans issues of transnational creations and self-representations, focusing on Palestinian testimonial strategies across various media, including literary and historiographical texts, film, photography, and comics. In the academic year 2025/26, he is a EUME Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

Career Perspectives Beyond Academia: Opportunities and Challenges for International Postdocs in Berlin/Germany

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0200

World Café organized by Forum Transregionale Studien and the Berlin Research 50 (BR50) initiative’s Interest Group “Third-Party Funding and Career Advice”, in cooperation with GSO – Guidance, Skills and Opportunties for Researchers e.V.

Poster

Over the past few years, we have observed within our institutions that international postdoctoral Fellows who wish to stay in Berlin after their Fellowships increasingly pursue careers outside academia. Beyond individual motivations, this tendency is linked to the limited availability and accessibility of academic positions in Germany, particularly for those who do not hold a degree from a German university. Assuming that many international postdocs in Berlin are dealing with similar questions about their professional future, this event invites those interested in exploring career opportunities beyond academia.
In the interactive format of a “World Café”, invited speakers who have transitioned out of academia will share their experiences at four thematic discussion tables, offering personal insights into career paths in journalism, cultural work, education, and policy-related work in NGOs and Think Tanks in Berlin. Alongside addressing the opportunities, challenges, and obstacles encountered on their career paths, the speakers will reflect on how academic skills can be applied in non-academic contexts and how to get access to the structural knowledge and networks necessary for entering alternative professional fields. There will be time for discussion, exchange and networking throughout the event.

Program:

10:00-10:15 | Welcome and introduction

10:15-10:45 | Impulse talk by Anne Schreiter (GSO e.V.)

10:45-11:45 | World Café with four thematic tables:

Journalism
Speaker: Enrico De Angelis (Media Research Consultant)

Culture
Speaker: Kateryna Mishchenko (Writer and Curator)

Education
Speaker: Petra Becker (Back on Track e.V.)

NGOs & Think Tanks
Speakers: Arnisa Tepelija and Nino Tsereteli (both Democracy Reporting International)

11:45-12:00 | Wrap-up discussion

12:00-13:00 | Light lunch

We kindly ask for prior registration until 15 June 2026 via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de.

!Seminar cancelled! Bi-Nationalism and the Future of Israel

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:00:00 +0200

This seminar is postponed until further notice.

Narratives of Female Criminality in Turkish Literature and the Press: A Comparative Analysis (1870-1935)

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Queer Temporalities and Cultural Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0200

This workshop addresses questions of time and temporality in Central and Eastern European literatures from queer perspectives, with a focus on Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Russia. Organized within the framework of EUTIM project, it explores how questions of time, sexuality, and literary form intersect across different historical moments and cultural settings.

Over the past decades, queer temporality—developed and articulated in literary and cultural theory by scholars such as Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman, and José Esteban Muñoz—has provided a way to describe and analyze literary conceptualizations of time in relation to queer experience, desire, and intimacy. Rather than treating time as linear or developmental, this scholarship has emphasized temporal phenomena such as delay, belatedness, interruption, repetition, and alternative temporal horizons. While approaches to queer temporality differ in their political implications and theoretical commitments, they share a concern with how dominant temporal regimes structure belonging, futurity, inclusion, and exclusion.

In the literary contexts of Central and Eastern Europe of the 20th and 21st centuries, questions of queer time intersect with particular historical conditions, including censorship, displacement, the fragmentation and uneven transmission of literary heritage, and shifting regimes of visibility, as well as with culturally specific ways of articulating same-sex desire. Against this background, the workshop brings together work on different literary traditions and languages to explore how literary texts engage with temporal structures through representations of sexuality, attachment, and non-aligned life trajectories shaped by political rupture, social transformation, and migration.

The workshop foregrounds literary analysis of a wide range of textual materials, including poetry, prose, drama, essays, diaries, correspondence, and other forms of life writing, in which temporal experience becomes narratively legible. Special attention is given to problems of archival absence, fragmentary textual survival, and locally situated narrative practices, understood not only as methodological challenges but also as constitutive elements of queer temporal experience.

Alongside research on lesser-known or understudied authors and corpora, the workshop also invites renewed engagement with more established figures commonly associated with queer literary history. In such cases, the emphasis lies on re-examining their temporal configurations and literary forms, rather than on reaffirming their canonical status.

The workshop will result in an edited volume featuring contributions from participants.

- more information follows -

Global Hijra: A Modern History of Muslim Refugee Migration

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.

Something is Passing in the Night: Iranian Hyphenates in the World

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:00:00 +0200

More information will follow soon.