Summer 2019 Conference | Rurality and Future Making
GAA (German Anthropological Association) Conference
Date: 22nd - 24th of May 2019
Venue: Tagungsraum, Seminargebäude, Albertus-Magnus Platz, University of Cologne (UoC)
Convenors: Simon Holdermann (Cologne), Christoph Lange (Cologne) ,Katharina Lange (Berlin), Michaela Schäuble (Bern) , Andreas Streinzer (St. Gallen/Frankfurt), Jelena Tošić (St. Gallen/Vienna), Martin Zillinger (Cologne)
Organized by: DGSKA, TRR 228, GSSC, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at UoC, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)
Contact: Christoph Lange (rural-future-making@uni-koeln.de)
The conference brings together three GAA (German Anthropological Association) regional working groups – Anthropology of Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean – to explore rurality as a reserve and resource for future-making in their interconnected and transnational regionalities. It invites participants to explore situated practices of future-making in order to trace how rurality is achieved, marked and (de-)stabilized in different places. Through concrete ethnographic case studies, we aim at conceptualizing the ‘rural’ beyond well-known center-periphery dichotomies. Well aware that ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ can only be “understood as a continuum irreducible to the polarity of one or the other term” (Chio 2017:362); we use the rural lens to create an anthropological laboratory (Albera 1999) which enables us to “write against established categories” (Horden 2014:9). This conference invites researchers to reflect on the various perpetuated methodological urbanisms, ruralisms and regionalisms, i.e. the persisting preoccupation of ethnographers with urban spaces and research in geographically and/ or politically bounded categories like Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
LECTURE 22.05.19, 17:45–19:15
Connectivity and its discontents: the Sahara, second face of the Mediterranean?
(Judith Scheele, Paris/Berlin)
RECEPTION & VERNISSAGE 22.05.19, 19:30
São Teotonio na drome — Documented stories between locality and globalization
(Exhibition by Barbara Wimmer, artist and journalist, Wien)
LECTURE 23.05.19, 09:30-11:00
Between the Alps and the Mediterranean: Reflections on the representations of the rural world
(Dionigi Albera, Marseille)
LECTURE 24.05.19, 09:30-11:00
Ordinary uncertainties: Remembering the past and imagining the future at times of rupture and mobility (Frances Pine, London)