For this assignment, I invite submissions of 7-15 pages that explore the themes of “Memory and Archive: Curated Histories” and “Knowledge and Education: Spaces of Learning” with relation to the Middle East (sic!) through the lens of Berlin’s cultural institutions and scholarly spaces.
You may choose from the following five topic areas:
- Exhibiting the Middle East
- How do museum exhibitions and cultural displays in Berlin represent or challenge mainstream narratives about the region?
- Whose voices and histories are centered or marginalized in these curated presentations?
- How do object choices, spatial design and institutional framing shape perspectives?
- Archiving Middle Eastern Pasts
- What is revealed and concealed about Middle Eastern histories through Berlin’s archives and special collections?
- How do archival practices of ordering, description and access enable or limit historical understanding?
- In what ways do silences, omissions and archival absences distort or enrich collective memory?
- Memorializing Middle Eastern Trauma
- How do Berlin’s memorial sites, monuments and public installations engage with cultural trauma, displacement and loss from Middle Eastern conflicts?
- Whose suffering and experiences are commemorated or rendered invisible?
- What narrative strategies facilitate connection, witnessing or unresolved tensions?
- Constructing Middle East Knowledge
- How do Berlin’s universities, think tanks and academic spaces shape and disseminate knowledge about the Middle East?
- In what ways do theoretical lenses, methodologies and scholar positionalities open up or limit understanding?
- What counternarratives, interdisciplinary approaches and situated knowledges offer new critical perspectives?
- Teaching and Programming the Middle East
- How do pedagogical approaches, public programs and cultural initiatives in Berlin facilitate or impede engagement with Middle Eastern topics?
- What challenges arise in translating academic expertise for broader audiences?
- How do innovative practices re-frame understanding or reinscribe problematic assumptions?
I welcome original perspectives that provide nuanced insights into how memory, knowledge, and understanding of the Middle East are curated, constructed and disseminated in Berlin’s cultural-academic spaces.
Deadline: Thu Nov 8, 2 PM. Submit as a pdf, including a cover page and indicating one of five topic areas, too, by e-mail from the zedat or @fu-berlin.de e-mail address to my email address, use the subject “porcupine”.