Global South Studies Center University of Cologne

✨Werkstattgespräch zum kritischen Umgang mit potenziell diskriminierenden Quellen, Inhalten und Aussagen in der Lehre und beim wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten und Schreiben✨

Das Forum Decolonizing Academia lädt herzlich zu einem Werkstattgespräch im Rahmen der Diversity Week ein.

📆1. Juli 2026, 10-11:30h
📍 Raum 3.29, GSSC
🗣 Deutsch
📧 Anmeldung: smilich[at]uni-koeln.de

Mit dem Werkstattgespräch soll ein offener und konstruktiver Raum geboten werden, um sich fächerübergreifend und intersektional zu den Herausforderungen und Schwierigkeiten, aber auch zu good practices im Umgang mit problematischen Inhalten auszutauschen. Das Werkstattgespräch ist sowohl für Lehrende als auch Studierende offen.

Mehr erfahren➡ https://vielfalt.uni-koeln.de/events-kampagnen/diversity-woche-du-machst-den-unterschied/werkstattgespraech-kritischer-umgang-mit-diskriminierenden-quellen-und-inhalten

✨Seminar Series | (Value) Chained Contact Zones: Analysing Commodification Processes of Wild Plants in a Capitalist World Economy✨

📆 30 June 2026, 12:00-13:00h
📍 GSSC, Room 3.03
🗣 Anna Céline Schäfer, University of Cologne

In contexts of neoliberal conservation projects, wild nature is regularly commodified in global value chains (GVCs). GVCs spread across the world so that the commodification of wilderness takes place not in one but many locales which are connected through the value chain. One such example is the commodification of Omumbiri, a fragrant resin from a wild growing plant in Namibia, that has been introduced in the global perfume market recently. While the commodification process of Omumbiri clearly shows how the fragrance market reproduces (neo)colonial power asymmetries between Southern Africa and Europe based in exploitative relationships of both natural and intellectual property, the commodification process equally highlights moments of empowerment where neocolonial frontiers are shifted and asymmetric power relations change. At one example from my field, I demonstrate how these moments of empowerment emerge in specific locales in the value chain where actors encounter. These locales become contact zones where human and non-human actors negotiate the commodification of Omumbiri as a wild commodity in the global perfume market. These negotiations can be understood as frictions which create connection, resistance or something unexpectedly new contributing to the creation of what we understand as ‘wild’ commodity. By systematically mapping these contact zones in a multi-sited ethnography, I show how wilderness enfolds in a number of connected contact zones in a global value chain.

Read more ➡ https://gssc.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltungen/gssc-seminar-reihe/gs-26-06-30-schaefer

✨ Anthropology Lecture | ‘Williston is always left behind’: Living in the global shadows of mega-projects of renewable energy, Big Science and racialised histories of genocide and dispossession ✨

📆 29 June 2026 I 18.15 (CEST)
📍 S21, Seminargebäude, University of Cologne
🗣 Steven Robins (Stellenbosch University)

Since 2016, researchers from the Cosmopolitan Karoo research group at Stellenbosch University have been focusing on questions of land, environment and ‘sustainable development’ in the Karoo drylands of the Northern Cape Province, a vast and sparsely populated arid zone comprising a third of South Africa. This region has witnessed massive private investment in mining, wildlife farming, eco-tourism, conservation corridors, rewilding and carbon credits and, most significantly, renewable energy, green hydrogen and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio astronomy programme. Focusing on the small Karoo town of Williston, the paper examines the paradoxes of scale and the contradictions of these Karoo mega-projects as well as the commercial farming ‘success stories’ of resilience and agency of the largely white farmers in this drought-prone arid zone. [...]

Steven Robins is the National Research Foundation (NRF-SARChI) Project Leader in the Sociology & Anthropology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development Research Programme at Stellenbosch University. He has published on a wide range of topics, including the politics of land, environment, housing and water and sanitation infrastructure; issues of memory and identity and the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC); [...].

Read more 🔗 https://gssc.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltungen/focus-global-south/f-26-06-29-williston-is-always-left-behind-anthropology-lecture

This lecture is part of the series “60 Minutes in Ethnography, Theory, Anthropology” by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology.

🎥 Film Screening with Cati Coe: “Making Happiness - Older People Organize Themselves”

Film Screening „Making Happiness - Older People Organize Themselves” by MIASA Fellow Professor Cati Coe (Carleton University) on 📆 Thursday, 18 June 2026, at 12:00 pm in the MIASA Seminar Room, University of Ghana AND online via ZOOM.

“Making Happiness: Older People Organize Themselves” presents the activities of a fellowship group for older adults at Bethel Presbyterian Church in New Tafo, Ghana. In the film, members of the group reflect on the significance of such a group in their lives, in making them happy and relieving loneliness and worry, particularly among widows and widowers. Cati Coe, the filmmaker and MIASA fellow, will provide some context about these fellowship groups in Ghana and the filmmaking process itself and will lead the post-screening discussion.

The event is free and open to the public.

The film screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.

For online participation via Zoom, please use the following link:
https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/69631701252?pwd=JbKowgZ5NxZPdaQa8w5E4tQLfs8n8y.1

For better online streaming of the film, you can also use the following link:
https://youtu.be/ceR7_jzJuXw?si=cFbqev5bw3Z9ZP3c

✨ Fieldwork & Fiction Masterclass III: Drawing, Mapping and Recording Wounded Urban Landscapes ✨

📆 June 24, 2026, 9.00 – 16.00 h (CEST)
📆 register by June 21, 2026
📍 Auerbach Library
➡ MESH (Weyertal 59, back building 3rd Floor, 50937 Köln)

Organized by
🗣 Mariagrazia Portera (University of Florence)
🗣 Daniel Gallano (MESH)
🗣 Christoph Lange (MESH)

In the third masterclass of our Fieldwork and Fiction series, we build on the format of exploratory field experiments from previous sessions, which addressed methodological, aesthetic and narrative aspects of storytelling. We set out to explore the Aachener Berg, a rubble hill transformed into a park in Cologne’s Green Belt—one of the key field research sites for MESH PhD candidate Daniel Gallano in his doctoral project on “Wounded urban landscapes: violence, everyday life and more-than-human urbanism in two Cologne mounds.”

Under the thematic focus “Wounded Urban Landscapes”, the masterclass will investigate how urban environments bear traces of ecological, historical, and social transformations, and how such traces can be perceived, documented, and narratively reworked through embodied field practices.

📝 Participation & Registration
Registration is required. The workshop will be open to MA and PhD students, including postdoctoral researchers, and accommodate a limited number of fifteen participants. To participate in the Masterclass, please send us a short note of motivation (250 words max.) by June 21, stating your professional and personal interest in the topic and your current research project and/or study programme.

Read more about the Masterclass and the registration 🔗 https://mesh.uni-koeln.de/events/meshworks/fieldwork-and-fiction-masterclass-iii-drawing-and-mapping-wounded-urban-landscapes

✨ Lecture and Master Class | Against Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia ✨

📆 Wed., 17. June 2026, 18-19:30h
📍 Seminargebäude, Room S01
🗣 Marcela Suarez Estrada (Radboud University)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have been actively promoted in universities under the guise of efficiency, time optimization, and the fear of missing out or “falling behind.” Advocates for these technologies promise students to improve their writing, help them “taking notes,” or even “giving feedback.” However, the adoption of AI technologies is already showing the deskilling of students and teachers, along with an exponential increase of cases of fraud and plagiarism. At the same, the uncritical adoption of AI technologies puts scientific integrity, diversity, sustainability, digital sovereignty and democracy at risk. This presentation has the objective of discussing the harms of the uncritical adoption of AI technologies in academia and calling for action based on critical AI literacies framework. The presentation will center around the harms for students and lecturers, the responsibilities of universities in responding to these harms, as well as the potential of collective action and agency to resist these harms. [...]

You might also want to join the "Masterclass: The coloniality of sustainable AI"

📆 Thur., 18. June 2026 | 14-15:30h
📍 Seminargebäude, Room S14

Read more about the Lecture and the Master Class
🔗 https://memo.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/cologne-media-conversations

✨ Methods Seminar: Conservation Efforts in Digital Worlds | ‘Charismatic Species’ from Linguistic and Aesthetic Perspectives ✨

📆 16 June 2026, 12:00-13:00 h
📍 Room 3.29, GSSC
🗣 Prof Dr Mariagrazia Portera (University of Florence) and Dr Carolin Schwegler (University of Cologne)

This interdisciplinary seminar brings together perspectives from digital sociolinguistics and philosophical aesthetics. Mariagrazia Portera and Carolin Schwegler will present initial insights into their newly developed project idea, “Planetary Wellbeing and Nature Conservation Online: Multimodal Storytelling and Aesthetic Bias on Social Media”. The collaboration begins with an Instagram dataset focused on the issue space , referring to endangered or otherwise protection-worthy species as represented and evaluated by social media users.

Read more 🔗 https://gssc.uni-koeln.de/veranstaltungen/gssc-seminar-reihe/gs-26-06-23-porteraschwegler

🎓 Call for PhD Scholarship Application | "Violent Futures? Contestations along Carbon Frontiers in East Africa"

Project: CRC Project B03 Violent Futures? Contestations along Carbon Frontiers in East Africa
📍 Host Institution: University of Bonn
📆 Application Deadline: 21 June 2026 (EAT)
📆 Proposed Start Date: ideally 1 August 2026

Our Subproject B03 “Violent Futures” is currently accepting applications for a PhD scholarship position. The project examines how future-oriented carbon credit projects shape social relations and conflicts in Kenya and Tanzania. To this end, candidates are expected to conduct long-term ethnographic research on conflict constellations in Tanzania and Kenya.

◾ Duration of Scholarship: 41 months
◾ Monthly stipend: 1.475 €

Read more 🔗https://crc-trr228.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PhD-adv-for-carbon-project_260608_2.pdf

✨Public Lecture | 250 Years After Independence: Sounding the Black Event✨

📆 24 June 2026, 6:00-7:30 p.m. (CEST)
📍 Hörsaaal B (Hörsaalgebäude)
🗣 Prof. Michael Sawyer

In 1776, a declaration was made in the name of freedom that did not include those who would become known as the philosophical and political problem of the next two and a half centuries. This public lecture takes the 250th anniversary of American independence as its occasion—and its target.
Rooted in African American studies, critical race theory, and Africana political thought and philosophy, the lecture asks: What does Black independence sound like? What does it demand?
Prof. Michael Sawyer will introduce his “Black Event Theory,” which proposes that Blackness is not a lack of freedom but a different way of being (a different ontological address). He will demonstrate this by the performance of the sound installation “CALL ME I 124: A Polyvocal Composition,” which deconstructs and recombines opening lines from the literary works of Melville, Ellison, and Morrison. His discussion will outline what he calls the “Event of being-as-Black”--and we all become part of the living archive.

More information & Registration via Eventbride:
🔗 www.eventbrite.de/e/250-years-after-independence-sounding-the-black-event-tickets-1989900264257

The public lecture is a cooperation of PD Dr. Johanna Pitetti-Heil (U of Cologne), the AmerikaHaus NRW e.V., col.lit.ive, Theodor Wonja Michael Bibliothek, the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, and Prof. Julia Faisst (TU Dortmund).
The event is supported by the Diversity-Projekt Fonds 2026, the State Government of North Rhine-Westphalia, JProf. Judith Rauscher, and Prof. Anke Ortlepp.

🎓 Call for Applications: 4 three-year (65%) postgraduates at University of Freiburg

The Research Training Group 2571 “Empires: Dynamic Change, Temporality and Post-Imperial Orders” invites applications for 4 three-year (65%) postgraduate positions (f/m/d).

📆 Application deadline: 21. June 2026
📆 Publication date: 22. May 2026
📆 Start-date: 1. November 2026
Scope of work: Part-time position (65 %)

Funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), the interdisciplinary Research Training Group (RTG) focuses on imperial temporalities and their representation, reflection, memories, resonance, experiences, and manipulation in the context imperial transformation and in post-imperial orders.
Within this framework, the RTG focusses on three main aspects:
(a) imperial space,
(b) imperial institutions and normative structures, and
(c) imperial economies.

Representatives of the following disciplines are involved: History of any global area from antiquity to the present, Sociology, Political Science, Near Eastern Studies, and English Literature. In addition, the RTG collaborates with representatives of Economics and European and International Law, who can be involved in the supervision of specific research projects. In this call we particularly welcome applications from:
◾️Political Science
◾️Sociology
◾️Islamic Studies
◾️History of East Asia
◾️North American and Transatlantic History
◾️Modern History of Europe
◾️Medieval History
◾️Roman History

Read the full call for applications on 🔗 uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00005001