Frictions: Europe, America and global Transformations

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Bridges and Borders of Area Studies and International Relations. An interview with Jan Hornát & Mélanie Sadozaï

Jan Hornát and Mélanie Sadozaï discuss the intersections, complementarities, and frictions between area studies and international relations (IR), tracing the theoretical and empirical synergies that interdisciplinarity can generate
IMAGO / Shotshop

Navigating Polycrisis: The EU’s Challenges in Migration, Legitimacy, and Geopolitics. An interview with Ruth Ferrero-Turrión

Discover Ruth Ferrero-Turrión's insights on the EU's response to migration, legitimacy, and geopolitical challenges. Can the Union overcome its "polycrisis" and embrace a unified future?
Mélanie Sadozaï

Border Studies in 2024: Where are we now?

Mélanie Sadozaï examines how the 2024 LISER conference on "disruptive borderlands" highlighted borders as sites of both crisis and resilience, openness and restriction, urging a shift towards inclusive, cross-border cooperation in policy.
Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. A piece of the vast Great Sage Plain in Montezuma County in extreme southwestern Colorado. -05-28. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, .

Vast Early America: A Transcontinental Conversation

Markus J. Diepold explores how German American Studies can benefit from a stronger focus on Early American history, inspired by its vast scales and temporal depth.
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Intentionale Toleranz? Ein kritischer Kommentar zur Bedeutung frühneuzeitlicher Religionsfrieden in Europa

Were early modern religious peace treaties milestones of tolerance or political compromises that left tensions open and power structures in place? Insights from Miriam Mähner's prize-winning Master's thesis reveal more

International Business from East to West: Shifting perspectives. Ten years of the Central and Eastern European Chapter in the Academy of International Management

This piece considers how turning to Central and Eastern European firms can encourage rethinking traditional theories of international business, including divisions of emerging and developed markets.

Exploring Far-Right Shadows: Navigating disturbing archival material in California and Virginia

Our ScienceCampus doctoral researcher reflects on researching archives on the far-right in the US, presenting the ethical and methodological challenges alongside practical solutions for maintaining mental wellbeing.

The University of Toronto Under Sur/Sous/Subveillance

The author traces the lasting impact of Canadian Media Theory to develop a virtual topography of the University of Toronto.
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Der Kollege von ‚drüben’: Gastwissenschaftler*innen an der Uni Regensburg im Kalten Krieg

Drawing from archival records, this essay explores visits by scholars from socialist states, providing insights into Regensburg University's role in knowledge transfer during the Cold War.

Lateinamerika und das östliche Europa. Ideen für historische Vergleiche

UR historian Klaus Buchenau reveals striking regional differences shaped by distinctive social and historical contexts in Latin America and Southeast Europe.
IMAGO / Pond5 Images

Turning Points, Hidden Treasures and Touchdowns: One month in Ann Arbor

UR historian Timothy Nunan reflects on a month in Ann Arbor and how it enriched his research on Shi’a Islamist transformations of the world in the late 1970s.
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2nd Graduate Workshop 2023 Report | Competing Sovereignties: Intertwinement, Contestation, Evolution

Learn more about the multiscalar and reflexive approaches to the contested concept of sovereignty developed in this 2021 workshop
IMAGO / ZUMA Wire

The Post-Dialogic Imagination: Brexit Friction, Brexit Fiction

Dirk Wiemann explores recent British fiction, including the works of Jonathan Coe and Ali Smith, to consider how novels have approached Brexit and its impact on the ability to conduct dialogue and form national imaginaries. Adopting a Bakhtinian lens, he considers the ways novels negotiate the polarized agonism that threatens to undo social cohesion with models of meaning-making rendered ineffective in new conditions.
IMAGO / Shotshop

The Nation-State, Liberal Global Orders, and Freedom of Movement

In an illuminating essay, Jannis Panagiotidis argues that even before the Covid19 crisis forcefully reminded us of the state’s power to regulate and restrict the movement even of its own citizens, a scholar of migration would have found little reason to believe the notion that the nation state could become obsolete anytime soon. While migrations transcends the confines of the nation-state perhaps nowhere is the nation-state more present than in migration matters.
Photo 1: A poster with members of Mapuche people in a classroom of Liceo de Aplicación with the question: Community?Igor Stipić / poster based on creative commons images

People from the Land: A High school story of the Mapuche Indigenous people in Chile

How are radical high school protests, environmental extractivism and indigenous identities entangled in Chile? Igor Stipić offers insights based on his ethnographic research
Melanie Hussinger

Photo Essay | Herbst der Erinnerung. Partizipatives Gedenken an den Großen Terror | The Autumn of Memory: Participatory Remembrance of the Great Terror (Moscow, October 2021)

How did participatory remembrance of the Great Terror, from family memory to civil society endeavours, fit in Moscow's urban and mnemonic landscape shortly before the war against Ukraine? This photo essay offers moving insights
Hare Krishnas in Moscow, 1990. Image courtesy of Katharina Kucher and her extraordinary image collection, perestroika.visual-history.deImage courtesy of Katharina Kucher and perestroika.visual-history.de

The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Mormons

How did the attractiveness of the Mormon embodiment of US utopian, spiritual and material ideals shift in the turbulent realities of post-Soviet Russia? U Georgia historian Joseph Kellner investigates
IMAGO / Pacific Press Agency / Jorge Sanz

Commemorating National Martyrdom through Re-Creating the Past: Vukovar, Prijedor, Derry/Londonderry, and Gernika/Guernica

How do performative recreations across European post-conflict societies help antagonistic memories retain a multi-generational appeal? Berkeley doctoral researcher Blaze Joel investigates
IMAGO / ZUMA Wire

Tadeusz Kościuszko, Poland-Lithuania and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

How were efforts to secure US and Polish-Lithuanian independence linked in the Age of Atlantic revolution? And in what ways were attempts to free slaves and emancipate peasants connected? Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski takes us on a transatlantic journey with Tadeusz Kościuszko at the helm
Selbi Durdiyeva

Theorizing binaries through auto-ethnography, method, and commoning: Reflections from the field

Revisiting her fieldwork at a Russian memorial site, the author offers autoethnographic reflections on moving away from imposing academic authority towards the common production of knowledge alongside subjects
IMAGO/ Kirill Kukhmar/TASS

Racial Capitalocene Binaries: Approaching environmental destruction in the Russian context

Sasha Shestakova explores intersections of climate change, extractivism and the destruction of indigenous cultures in Russia’s Far North, querying human/nature and North/South binaries while tracing colonialism’s long-term legacies.
IMAGO / agefotostock

Transatlantic Circulations of Conspiracy Fiction: From Europe to the United States

Conspiracy theories are often in the (fake) news today. Although they are closer to fiction than reality, Chloé Chaudet, a recent visiting researcher at the ScienceCampus, shows that cultural and literary studies lack the tools to develop a transmedial narratology of conspiracy discourses which could investigate them in their historical and transatlantic dimensions.
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Jana Stöxen

Post-socialism in Passing: Impressions from field research conducted off the beaten track | Postsozialismus im Vorbeigehen: Eindrücke einer Feldforschung abseits der großen Straßen

Jana Stöxen, winner of the inaugural Regensburg Prize for Prize for Outstanding Master's Theses, presents a photo essay based on her ethnographic field research conducted in Bucharest. She traced the ways post-socialism forms part of everyday life, shaping the community in a block of flats in the Berceni district of the Romanian capital. The texts are in English and German.
Verena Baier

Sometimes the Past is Just Around the Corner: Impressions from Berkeley

In the 1980s Berkeley was one of the centers of US-Americans’ Nicaragua solidarity work, which supported the Sandinista Revolution. Today remnants from back then can not only be found in UC Berkeley’s extensive archives but also hidden throughout the city. PhD researcher Verena Baier explored them while on a research fellowship there in 2019/20.

Workshop Report: Migration, Mediality, Liminality

In collaboration with international partners from U Michigan and U Arizona, the ScienceCampus explored how migration experiences, in the past and today, are mediated through a variety of formats, giving expression to the liminality of global and regional mobilities.