Events

Previous Workshops

2023

Deadline-bound – Theory, Effects, and Materiality of Juridical Timing

20 - 22 March 2023

• Konstantin Chatziathanasiou (Münster, GER)
• Jens Gerlach (Hamburg, GER)
• Maria Marquardsen (Bochum, GER)
• Michael W. Müller (Mannheim, GER)
• Rike Sinder (Freiburg, GER)
• Bettina Stepanek (München, GER)

In law – as much as elsewhere – they are omnipresent: they are set and noted, observed and extended, missed and forgotten. They are necessary, cruel, and exciting. We are talking about deadlines. A world without them does not seem conceivable. But does that mean that they are also the focus of jurisprudential reflection? Hardly. Essentially, there are two strands of literature on legal deadlines: on the one hand, a somewhat limited number of doctrinal contributions oriented to practical needs, and on the other hand, a theoretical literature devoted to the tension between the temporal limitation of political rule and its long-term effects. The aim of the workshop is to connect these strands and to enrich them with new perspectives. It is planned to result I a book entitled ‘fristgebunden’ (‘deadline-bound’).

Trade Revisited

23 - 24 March 2023

• Hanjo Hamann (Bonn, GER)
• Gregor Albers (Bonn, GER)

New ways of consuming challenge not only traditional distribution chains, but also the law on commerce and trade. Previously, sales contracts took center-stage as the dominant logic of social ordering. In our workshop “Trade Revisited” we want to tackle the question of how the roles have changed of actors in various stages of the trading process, and how this reflects in the sales contracts they conclude. This past development might be labelled the “differentiation of retail channels”. To extrapolate into the future, we will next consider how a shift from goods to services and experiences influences extant structures and processes. We will discuss which contractual arrangements could reflect these developing “new ways of value creation”. Our focus will be on the intersection of business and law, integrating their historical and geographical dimensions, and the underlying general question of how law and the economy progress in step.

Intersecting Pasts. Collaborative Working at History’s Fuzzy Boundaries

23 - 24 March 2023

• Lisa Regazzoni (Bielefeld, GER)
• Ingrid Mann (Tromsø, NOR)

The workshop aims to explore new forms of cooperation in the multidisciplinary study of the past. An interdisciplinary and international group of scholars of different backgrounds ranging from Space Physics, Chemistry and Geology to Paleoanthropology, Archaeology, History, and Philosophy is called to rethink the question of what history is, namely at the boundary of different disciplinary fields – between the Natural Sciences and the Humanities. In particular, these scholars are invited to focus on their own multidisciplinary working practices and reflect on how the constant process of negotiating research questions and research designs, of mixing source typologies and methods, and of intersecting space/time scales is shifting our understanding of history.

Questions pertaining to what precisely constitutes history emerge at the boundary zones of interdisciplinary research work. The workshop will ultimately call for joint dialogue among experts studying the past to collectively shaping a new research field under the heading "intersecting pasts".

Evidence-based benevolence? The role of philanthropic organizations in global public policies

27 - 29 March 2023

• Alexandra Kaasch (Bielefeld)
• Marc Mölders (Bielefeld)
• Evelyn Moser (Bonn)
• Oliver Razum (Bielefeld)
• Holger Straßheim (Bielefeld)

In the past two decades, the philanthropy sector has been subject to broad transformations. Financially powerful organizations, established by economic and technological elites scale up their philanthropic activities by applying business tools and management techniques outside their original fields of expertise worldwide. This global movement was coined “philanthrocapitalism”. Proponents hold that the usual way of tackling grand societal challenges could and should be rationalized by evidence-based and data-driven approaches. We witness such projects in almost every policy area from public health and welfare to climate change. Some speak of an overdue reform of democratic decision-making. Others see this change as a threat to democracy. Our workshop investigates the implications of the recent transformations in philanthropic organization for global public policies. What do we know about the impact evidence-based and data-driven practices have on current modes of decision-making? What has been overrated/overlooked? To see where we stand with regard to “evidence-based benevolence” and what the consequences are in the near future, we assemble an interdisciplinary group of experts who analyse from their specific scientific perspective the role of philanthropic organizations in global public policies.

Sprache und Schmerz: Medizin und sprachbezogene Wissenschaften im Dialog

05. - 06. Mai 2023

• Carolin Schwegler (Köln, GER)
• Gerhard Schmid-Ott (Löhne, GER)
• Scott Stock Gissendanner (Göttingen, GER)

Die Wahrnehmung von Schmerzen und Schmerzstörungen sowie die Wirksamkeit ärztlicher Interventionen können von BehandlerInnen v.a. über das Sprechen und Schweigen von Betroffenen nachvollzogen werden. Neben der Schmerzmedizin, der Psychosomatik bzw. der Psychologie beschäftigen sich verschiedene sprachbezogene Wissenschaften aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven mit dem Sprechen über Schmerzen. Aufgrund fachsprachlicher Register und disziplinär abweichender Forschungsziele, finden die vielfältigen Ergebnisse allerdings selten direkten Eingang in die Medizin. Zentrale Kategorien der Analyse, wie Ausdrucksweisen oder Praktiken, sind jedoch interdisziplinär übertragbar. Hierauf liegt der erste Schwerpunkt der Veranstaltung. Ein zweiter Schwerpunkt sind darüber hinaus die soziokulturellen Einflüsse auf die Wahrnehmung, die (kulturelle/gesellschaftliche) Einordnung von Schmerzen – z.B. im medialen Diskurs – sowie die damit verbundene Sinnherstellung von Betroffenen – prominent beispielsweise über Social Media. Die beiden Schwerpunkte werden gemeinsam aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln betrachtet, um Synergien zu schaffen, die letztlich der Behandlung bzw. den Betroffenen zugutekommen können.

Lebensende und Lebensbeendigung im Strafvollzug

15. - 16. Juni 2023

• Michael Lindemann (Bielefeld, GER)
• Torsten Verrel (Bonn, GER)

Der Strafvollzug ist ein Spiegel der Gesellschaft – gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen machen in der Regel auch vor den Mauern der Justizvollzugsanstalten nicht halt. Bisweilen gewinnen Fragestellungen, welche die Gesellschaft beschäftigen, unter den Bedingungen der „totalen Institution“ Strafvollzug sogar eine besondere Dringlichkeit. Dies gilt unzweifelhaft für den demographischen Wandel unserer Gesellschaft, der zur Folge hat, dass sich auch Justizvollzugsanstalten zunehmend mit älteren Gefangenen konfrontiert sehen, die ihr Lebensende im Vollzug verbringen. Auf die besonderen Bedürfnisse dieser Gefangenengruppe ist der Strafvollzug nicht ohne Weiteres vorbereitet. Darüber hinaus wird die besondere Akzentuierung, welche das Recht auf selbstbestimmtes Sterben in der jüngeren Vergangenheit durch den Gesetzgeber und die Rechtsprechung erfahren hat, auch von Strafgefangenen wahrgenommen und in Forderungen nach der Ermöglichung etwa eines Sterbefastens oder gar der Inanspruchnahme von Beihilfe zum Suizid umgesetzt. Diese Entwicklung trifft auf ein Vollzugssystem, das seinen Auftrag bislang ausschließlich in der Abwendung selbstschädigenden Verhaltens Gefangener durch psychologische Intervention und physische Sicherung gesehen hat. Die disziplinübergreifende Diskussion der von diesen Entwicklungen ausgehenden Herausforderungen für das Vollzugssystem und möglicher Lösungsansätze sind Gegenstand dieses Workshops.

Intersecting Pasts - Collaborative Working at History’s Fuzzy Boundaries

7 September 2023

• Lisa Regazzoni
• Ingrid Mann

Chemical Connections

4 - 7 October 2023

• Carsten Reinhardt
• Paulina S. Gennermann

Studying Interdisciplinarity Through the History of a Discipline

25 - 27 October 2023

• Martin Carrier
• Armin Gölzhäuser

Next-level energy-climate research tosupport the transition to climate -proof net zero energy systems

13 - 17 November 2023

• Jan Wohland
• Hannah Bloomfield

XIX Brunel - Bielefeld Workshop on Random Matrix Theory and Applications

18 - 19 December 2023

• Gernot Akemann

2022

The 1st International Workshop on Data Storage in Molecular Media (DSMM)

21 – 23 March 2022

• Georges Hattab (Marburg, GER)
• Dominik Heider (Marburg, GER)
• Anke Becker (Marburg, GER)

Today, all important information is stored in digital libraries, e.g. on tapes or networked storage systems (clouds). However, these systems are unreliable for the long-term storage of information. With the occurrence of solar storms or other electromagnetic disasters, natural or not, mankind will be confronted with a digital dark age. We propose to extend the existing memory hierarchy by using molecular clusters and storage systems as a viable solution to these challenges. To accomplish this task, different areas are necessary, e.g. mathematics and computer science for coding theory and efficient storage of information.

At present, the state of the art is concerned with molecular clusters and storage systems and is based on the fields of biology and chemistry. On the one hand, existing DNA-based approaches have mainly used short synthetic DNA as information carriers, relying on genetic bases (A, C, G, T). On the other hand, inorganic chemistry has been helpful for storing information within chemical clusters by absorbing and emitting light, relying on a novel geometry created by crystalline-like structures. We plan to include research from biology, chemistry, mathematics and computer science, as well as visual analytics and related disciplines.
By bringing different disciplines together, the goal of molecular media is to provide a better alternative for data storage, and there is an urgent need for standardization.

Ethik des Erinnerns

6 - 8 April 2022

• Jan Christoph Bublitz (Hamburg, GER)
• Simone Kühn (Berlin, GER)
• Dimitris Repantis (Berlin, GER)
• Martin Dresler (Nijmwegen, NDL)

The workshop examines the ethics of memory and related epistemological questions. The primary focus is on individual memories, i.e., episodic and autobiographic memories. While ethical question of collective memory and remembrance have been widely discussed in Germany and elsewhere, systematic treatments of an ethics of individual memory are largely absent. The workshop seeks to contribute to this field by bringing together researchers in the German speaking world from various disciplines and having them discuss and shape the relevant topics. Apart from questions who should, must, or may remember what, and in which way, questions about an ethics of forgetting and false memories should be addressed. The latter are practically relevant in law and psychotherapy, but many empirical and ethical questions about them are hardly discussed. Moreover, novel forms of memory such as intergenerational (epigenetic) transfer of “memory” should be addressed, as well as novel forms of externalizing memories in artefacts

HRI in Real-world Settings: Towards a Methodology that Allows for Comparative HRI Research ‘in the Wild'

30 May - 4 June 2022

• Florian Muhle (Bielefeld, GER)

The interdisciplinary research field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) seeks to understand and shape the interactions between humans and robots. To achieve this goal, HRI researchers draw on existing knowledge about human sociality and empirical methods, which mainly stem from psychology and cognitive science and are based on artificial laboratory experiments under controlled conditions. While there is no question that this allows for gaining insights into specific problems of HRI, at the same time it remains unclear, to which extend the results of experimental studies really help to design robots that can successfully interact in ‘messy’ real-world settings. Against this background, the workshop aims at bringing together researchers, who work with methodical approaches that do not limit their focus on countable aspects of interaction, but instead consider with naturally occurring interactions. The goal of the workshop is to (1) foster the discussion between them, (2) establishing cooperation, (3) increasing the visibility of their methodical approaches within HRI, and (4) contribute to the progress in the field through strengthening approaches that allow for comparative HRI research ‘in the wild’.

Equal Pay in Practice: Comparative Research on Policy Implementation

20 - 21 June 2022

• Amy G. Mazur (Washington, USA)
• Isabelle Engeli (Exeter, GBR)
• Ania Plomien (London, GBR)
• Sophie Pochic (Paris, FRA)
• Alexandra Scheele (Bielefeld, GER)

The goal of this workshop is to bring together scholars who have been conducting research on the implementation of private sector equal pay policies in post industrial democracies in order to present and discuss their in-progress research and prepare their papers to be eventually published in a special issue of a social science journal or an edited book, to be determined at the workshop. As previous studies have shown, gender wage gaps have been difficult to narrow, in part due to the limits of regulatory policies and collective negotiations. Thus, this workshop contributes to understanding the obstacles and opportunities to achieving gender wage equity and gender equality more broadly speaking. The highly interdisciplinary group of scholars has been brought together within the context of the Gender Equality Policy in Practice Network (GEPP), which seeks to promote the systematic study of the implementation and outcomes of gender equality policies in terms of gender transformation and women’s empowerment. At this point, research will be presented on Albania, Austria, Australia, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK, the USA. In addition to a focus on country-based research findings at both the national and sub-national levels, workshop discussions, as well as the publication coming out of the workshop, will address cross-national and regional trends in the dynamics and determinants of the practice and impacts of equal pay policy.

Businesses beyond dividends? Purpose-oriented legal forms in economic, legal and sociological perspective

27 - 28 June 2022

• Anne Sanders (Bielefeld, GER)
• Christina Hoon (Bielefeld, GER)

In many legal systems, shareholder value thinking is criticized as a barrier to long-term oriented, sustainable entrepreneurship. Instead, orientation towards a businesse’s purpose rather than dividends is advocated even in new legal company forms. In the USA, many states have introduced so called “benefit corporations”. In the UK the community interest company and in France, the “société a mission” came into force. The German concept of “Steward Ownership”, in German “Verantwortungseigentum”, is an example of this movement. Under the coalition agreement of the new German government, a new legal basis for this concept shall be introduced. Under this concept, entrepreneurs shall have no access to the businesse’s profits at all.

However, traditional economic thinking sees profit as the main incentive for entrepreneurial engagement and as primary driver within principal-agent relationships. The workshop wants to investigate such enterprises in which pursue purpose rather than shareholder value from a comparative legal, economic and sociological perspective.

Racial and Ethnic Microaggressions: International Manifestations, Interdisciplinary Interventions

29 – 30 June 2022

• Lisa Spanierman (Tempe, USA)
• Andreas Zick (Bielefeld, GER)

Racial microaggressions refer to brief and commonplace verbal or nonverbal indignities that target racial and ethnic minorities. Microaggressions are subtle, unintentional, and often invisible to perpetrators. Numerous studies have documented experiences with microaggressions among racial and ethnic minority individuals. Although seemingly trivial slights and indignities, the frequent and cumulative nature of racial microaggressions can cause harm to targets, such as a range of psychological and physical symptoms. Recent research has focused on individual and collective coping, or strategic responding, to racial microaggressions. This line of research is promising in that it identified factors that mitigate the negative effects of microaggressions. This conference will be the first of its kind to bring together leading microaggressions scholars from different national contexts and disciplinary perspectives.

Preisträgerkolloquium für Bettina Schöne-Seifert: "Medizinethik ohne Scheuklappen: Ein Doppel-Workshop"

4. - 5. Juli 2022

• Ralf Stoecker (Bielefeld, GER)

Das Symposium besteht aus zwei separaten Workshops, die strittige Aspekte aktueller und zukünftiger Medizinethik thematisieren: Im ersten Workshop geht es um die Bewertung und den Einsatz begleitender palliativer Sedierung, wenn Patienten bestimmte Behandlungsbegrenzungen als Exitstrategie wünschen oder vorausverfügen. Im zweiten Workshop geht es um die Dringlichkeit und die Möglichkeiten, im deutschen Gesundheitssystem die (egalitäre) Patientendienlichkeit der Versorgung entschiedener als bisher zum strukturierenden Leitprinzip zu machen.

Moving in a divided world: Transnational crime, national borders and irregular migration

11 - 12 July 2022

• Antje Missbach (Bielefeld, GER)
• Soledad Álvarez Velasco Heidelberg (GER)
• Luigi Achilli (Firenze, ITA)

This workshop seeks to critically address the complex social and cultural dynamics underlying the encounter between transnational crime and irregular migration. It will generate unique insights into how this encounter reshapes social categories and social formations, alters the lived experience of mobility, and creates new horizons of actions and spheres of possibility amongst irregularised migrants. In particular, this workshop aims at overcoming fragmented, often one-sided perspectives on the socio-cultural dynamics of the migratory journey, by redirecting more attention to the relationships between mobility facilitators, migration infrastructures, migrants and related community dimensions. Mapping the political economy of mobility, the workshop will draw together a collective of researchers to critically engage with the entanglement of mobility and crime by problematising the simplistic generalisations and representations connected to the interaction of migration with transnational criminal phenomena. Instead of relying on state-centred narratives on human smuggling/trafficking and related transnational organised crime, this workshop seeks to develop actor-centred understandings for why, where, when and how unsanctioned border crossings appear to scrutinise widespread assumptions about clandestinity, resistance to global apartheid, solidarity and loss of (state) control.

The conference receives additional support from the “Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung”.

Deadline-bound – Theory, Effects, and Materiality of Juridical Timing

25 - 27 July 2022

• Konstantin Chatziathanasiou (Münster, GER)
• Jens Gerlach (Hamburg, GER)
• Maria Marquardsen (Bochum, GER)
• Michael W. Müller (Mannheim, GER)
• Rike Sinder (Freiburg, GER)
• Bettina Stepanek (München, GER)

In law – as much as elsewhere – they are omnipresent: they are set and noted, observed and extended, missed and forgotten. They are necessary, cruel, and exciting. We are talking about deadlines. A world without them does not seem conceivable. But does that mean that they are also the focus of jurisprudential reflection? Hardly. Essentially, there are two strands of literature on legal deadlines: on the one hand, a somewhat limited number of doctrinal contributions oriented to practical needs, and on the other hand, a theoretical literature devoted to the tension between the temporal limitation of political rule and its long-term effects. The aim of the workshop is to connect these strands and to enrich them with new perspectives. It is planned to result I a book entitled ‘fristgebunden’ (‘deadline-bound’).

Legal:Inter:Faces. Ein „Netzwerk Quartäre Jurist:innenbildung“ als Antwort auf die Herausforderungen der Digitalgesellschaft?

28 - 30 September 2022

• Norbert Paulo (Graz, AUT)
• Hanjo Hamann (EBS Universität, Wiesbaden, GER)

Ten years ago, the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) pleaded for legal studies to increase its interface potential with other academic disciplines. Meanwhile, digitalisation in our social, economic, and legal systems have raised new questions, created new resources and enabled new methodologies, all of which reinforce the plea for multidisciplinarity of ten years ago. In fact, legal scholars are increasingly educating themselves in neighboring disciplines, some even continuing their education or obtaining a second doctorate. In the language of educational research, this could be called “quaternary jurist education”. Which new questions and research resources motivate legal scholars to take such steps? Which potentials do they realize, which hurdles do they encounter in their discipline? Which reforms in education, hiring and promotion might be advisable to integrate research staff with multidisciplinary pedigrees in legal teaching and research? The workshop will discuss such questions based on hands-on experiences and joint discussion.

Personal Pronouns: Towards an Interdisciplinary Grammar of Personhood

19 - 20 October 2022

• Mona Körte (Bielefeld, GER)
• Elisa Ronzheimer (Bielefeld, GER)
• Sebastian Schönbeck (Bielefeld, GER)

In current debates, no other group of words attracts as much attention as the personal pronouns for what is at stake in their use is the adequate expression of different concepts of identity. Potential scientific contributions to the fervid discussions have gone largely unnoticed, however. This is why the workshop brings together researchers from classics, ethnology, literary studies and linguistics, medicine, pedagogy, philosophy, sociology and animal ethics in order to encourage an interdisciplinary exchange about the relation between the person and its pronouns.

While constructions and theories of personhood have been the subject of extensive inquiry in different disciplines, the question of the person’s pronominal representation – as it is posed by law and bureaucracy, in the laboratory and on stage – has thus far been scarcely reflected upon in an interdisciplinary setting. The participants are therefore invited to discuss the relations between theories and practices of representation and positioning of personhood and pronominal grammar.

The Globalization of Dam Building

28 - 29 November 2022

• Vincent Lagendijk (Maastricht, NLD)
• Frederik Schulze (Bielefeld, GER)

Dams are one of the central infrastructures of globalization and the Anthropocene: they have been built worldwide, have generated networks of globally acting actors, institutions, and companies as well as globally circulating bodies of knowledge and discourses, and they have permanently changed the planet and its river systems. The workshop will explore the complex global history of dams and hydropower plants and discuss their interdisciplinary complexity. Without perspectives from geography, anthropology, political science, regional studies, literature and cultural studies, it would be impossible to describe the social, political, economic, and cultural significance of dams adequately from a historical perspective.

Therefore, the workshop will discuss, in an interdisciplinary setting, essays that analyze the global interconnections of dams in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. All contributions are informed by the argument that dams can contribute to a new understanding of classical narratives such as international cooperation, globalization, success of Western technology, and uniformity of infrastructures. Dams enabled new actors, especially from the global South, to gain agency and challenge global power relations.

2021

Video conference: Momentum of its own Inherent Dynamism in Pre-Modern Societies

28 – 30 January 2021

• Franz-Josef Arlinghaus (Bielefeld, GER)
• Andreas Rüther (Bielefeld, GER)
• Jörg Quenzer (Hamburg, GER)

The core thesis is that the fundamental structures of pre-modern societies worldwide show elements which are themselves driving forces for a constant change of these societies. At the same time the kind of change is of a specifically pre-modern nature. This continuous restructuring, as is the second assumption, leads in tendency to precisely these structures becoming clearer. In other words: in a way, pre-modern society comes into its own only by the end of the period under observation (ca. 700 to ca. 1700), shortly before its – from this point of view – comparably rapid and surprising restructuring into a functionally differentiated modern age.

The workshop puts its emphasis on a) the discussion of the thesis with experts of various regions of the world from different countries, and b) to introduce our idea in international debates as well as c) to modify our concept base on the results of the workshop.

Crimmigration. On the merger of crime control and migration control

11 February 2021 – Video Conference
12 October 2021 – Video Conference

• Martina Althoff (Groningen, NED)
• Christine Graebsch (Dortmund, GER)
• Axel Groenemeyer (Dortmund, GER)
• Bettina Paul (Aachen, GER)
• Birgit Menzel (Hamburg, GER)
• Dorothea Rzepka (Darmstadt, GER)
• Klaus Weinhauer (Bielefeld, GER)

Crimmigration refers to the intersection and increasing amalgamation of two legal arenas that are still considered as separate in legal theory: The merger of criminal law and migration law, of crime control and migration control. Crimmigration is at the same time cause and consequence of a societal discourse in which the construction of migration, of the foreign and the other, comes along with constructions of crime, insecurity and danger. With respect to the law in action, an important consequence is the loss of procedural guarantees, with respect to discursive practice a substantial identification of the criminal with the foreign. This conference will initiate the necessary interdisciplinary discussion that will be grounded in theory, legally and historically informed, and that despite its international orientation will not neglect national characteristics in- as well as outside the law.

Video Conference: Peace and Fear – A multidisciplinary Approach

17 – 19 February 2021

• Yaatsil Guevara González (Bielefeld, GER)
• Sebastián Martínez Fernández (Bielefeld, GER)
• Joachim Michael (Bielefeld, GER)
• Andreas Zick (Bielefeld, GER)
• Roberto Briceno-León (Caracas, VEN)

Why is it important to reflect on the relationships between Fears and Peace?

Societal, collective and individual fears and their relationships to states and processes of peace are the central issue of the workshop. In peace and conflict research many approaches concentrate on one of the issues, either on fears linked to anxieties, threats, regimes or states of fear, depending on the societal or cultural conditions; or on peace as a state or process. Only rarely research or theoretical frameworks bring both concepts of peace and fear together. 

Thus, the first objective of the workshop is to bring together different areas of knowledge in order to better understand the dynamics of conflict at an intra-societal level. The second objective of the workshop is to analyze the conditions of conviviality in the society while considering the increasing tendencies towards differentiation and segregation of social groups. The third objective is to discuss common research initiatives.

In order to achieve this, peace and conflict studies, fear studies, violence studies, security studies, social psychology, culture and media studies and area studies are coming together. This orientation follows the recommendations of the German Council for Science and the Humanities on peace and conflicts studies in Germany to develop such studies by strengthening interdisciplinary openness and to increase cooperation with area studies.

Depending on the spatial, social and cultural location in the world, fear will take different forms and provoke different reactions. For example, in Mexico it will be mainly related to insecurity and violence associated with drug trafficking (Serbin, 2008), while in Germany it will be linked to the threat of the precarization of labor and living standards in the context of globalization (Bude, 2014) as well as to the socio-cultural transformations caused by migratory flows (Castles, 2010). "Different cultures have different ways of being afraid" (idem.). In this sense, we could talk about types of fear, on the one hand, by referring to the different forms and origins that it can have; and, on the other, about the topos of fear, by thinking about the different types of fear depending on the respective society and culture, as well as on the geographical location. Thus, the typologies of fear are directly related to their topology, that is, to social, cultural and historical contexts and conjunctures.

That being said, the workshop will bring together researchers, activists from NGOs dealing with different locations in the world who are confronted with questions of fear and peacekeeping in endangered regions, and research funding agencies. A central aim is also to strengthen the ability of young researchers working on questions of peace and conflict to exchange disciplinary perspectives and question the limits of previous theoretical approaches or new possibilities for empirical analysis. In this way we hope to broaden the field of peace and conflict research.

Video Conference: Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces

11 - 13 March 2021

• Merle Tönnies (Paderborn, GER)
• Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig, GER)
   

This workshop takes an interdisciplinary approach to reach a comprehensive overview of the various 21st-century British plays which make use of characteristic dystopian and/or utopian elements. These works, hitherto neglected in critical discourse, operate in the specific spatial scenario of theatre and provide new functions, departing significantly from the established genre of dystopia that has for a long time overshadowed utopian scenarios. They can be seen as responding both to the general literary and cultural trend towards dystopian formats and to the increasing disintegration of political discourse in Britain at least from the mid-1990s onwards. Against this background, British dystopian theatre can work as a way of returning to the genuine political issues of power relations, inequality and exclusion that are now often hidden by a smokescreen of rhetoric.
 

Video Conference: Theorizing African Diaspora(s) Anew

11 – 13 March 2021

• Gigi Adair (Bielefeld, GER)

'Theorizing African Diaspora(s) Anew' – this interdisciplinary symposium will bring together established and emerging literary and cultural studies scholars, social scientists and historians to discuss how theories of African diaspora should be updated. The currently established and influential theorizations are based mostly on the Atlantic diaspora which resulted from the enslavement of Africans and their transport to the Americas. A reconceptualization is needed today both to account for new African diasporic formations formed by more recent and multi-directional waves of migration (e.g. from Africa to Europe, the Americas and Asia, within Africa, and from the diaspora back to Africa) and new understandings of diaspora emerging from recent research, such as a focus on gender and sexuality, "diaspora without displacement", or diasporic subjectivity. Diaspora research is a highly interdisciplinary topic: it has always combined insights from empirical migration research, history, anthropology, literary, cultural and music studies and more. In order to theorize African diaspora(s) anew, in view of the enormous changes in African ethnic populations and cultural formations around the world, it is necessary to bring social scientists, historians and humanities scholars together to share their insights and discuss how the multifaceted phenomenon of diasporic Africa and Africans is to be understood today.

Video Conference: Animal (Pre)History, Agency & Legacy

10 – 12 May 2021
27 – 29 September 2021

• Stephanie Zehnle (Kiel, GER)
• Shumon T. Hussain (Aarhus, DEN)

Among historians and archaeologists alike, the human-animal nexus has received a lot of attention in recent years. Following the 'animal turn' and its many theoretical achievements, there is a growing consensus that human history remains incomplete at best if the subjectivity, agency and legacy of animals is not taken into careful consideration. Expanding on this emerging recognition, the workshop undertakes a concerted effort of combining historical and archaeological perspectives – both in terms of evidence and research methodology – to discuss the possibility of an independent science of animal history. In contrast to previous attempts of 'animating' the human past, we stress the importance of extending the scope of investigation beyond the limits of written records and to develop new approaches to exploring the contingency and historicity of past animal behavior, without resorting to a pre-invested human perspective. The success of this new science of animal history not only hinges on epistemological premises, however, it also requires the integration of a heterogeneous set of source materials – texts, images, objects and biosignatures derived from isotopes and proteins – and the distillation of a genuine 'animal signal' that can be charted and compared in time and space. By joining both data and expertise from archaeology and history and bringing them into dialogue with scholars of animal philosophy, animal behavior, critical geography and multispecies anthropology, we hope to develop some of the required resources for this undertaking and to begin disentangling the complexity and continuing legacy of our 'more-than-human' past.

Video conference: Competing Socialisms: The Sino-Soviet Rivalry in Africa during the Cold War

17 – 18 May 2021

• Kirsten Bönker (Bielefeld, GER)
• Thoralf Klein (Loughborough, GBR)

The participants of the workshop consider the Cold War as a multilateral conflict that created specific global connections'. We seek to realign the interdisciplinary analysis of its 'glocal' interdependencies. We will do this by raising essentially new questions on the social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of the as yet barely researched Sino-Soviet rivalry for the African continent. First, our aim is to initiate the necessary international collaboration between scholars working in the hitherto poorly networked fields of African, Chinese and Soviet history. These speakers will explore topics at the intersection of different sets of expertise, applying a transnational and multi-perspective approach. Second, these transnational historical approaches will be supplemented and enriched by scholars from political science, linguistics, literary studies and economics. The analysis of historical phenomena will thus be embedded in an interdisciplinary discussion to shed new light on the multilateral interdependencies on the basis of three broader fields, such as (1) economic aid and development, (2) the export of educational models, the educational migration to the USSR and China and back, foreign language policies, as well as (3) the imagination and emotionalization of the 'Other'.

Human-Robot Interaction in Real-world Settings Towards a Methodology that Allows for Comparative HRI Research 'in the Wild'

7 – 11 June 2021

• Florian Muhle (Bielefeld, GER)

The interdisciplinary research field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) seeks to understand and shape the interactions between humans and robots. To achieve this goal, HRI researchers draw on existing knowledge about human sociality and empirical methods, which mainly stem from psychology and cognitive science and are based on artificial laboratory experiments under controlled conditions. While there is no question that this allows for gaining insights into specific problems of HRI, at the same time it remains unclear, to which extend the results of experimental studies really help to design robots that can successfully interact in 'messy' real-world settings. Against this background, the workshop aims at bringing together researchers, who work with methodical approaches that do not limit their focus on countable aspects of interaction, but instead consider with naturally occurring interactions. The goal of the workshop is to (1) foster the discussion between them, (2) establishing cooperation, (3) increasing the visibility of their methodical approaches within HRI, and (4) contribute to the progress in the field through strengthening approaches that allow for comparative HRI research in the wild'.

Video-Conference: Paradise or Purgatory? The challenges of accommodating refugees

10 – 11 June 2021

• Oliver Razum (Bielefeld, GER)
• Lisa Eckenwiler (Fairfax, USA)
• Verina Wild (Augsburg, GER)
• Angus Dawson (Sydney, AUS)

Refugee migration is a particularly highly regulated form of migration. Policies and regulations address essential domains of life, for example housing: refugees are frequently accommodated in mass shelters or camps, where they usually have to follow strict rules and remain under close observation. They are being taken care of, but can thereby be disempowered and lose control over their day-to-day responsibilities and freedoms such as food provision, work, leisure time, etc. The way refugees are accommodated has far-reaching implications for physical and mental health, as well as human rights. States, international institutions or local actors carry responsibility for policy and practice of refugee accommodation. The research question of this ZiF workshop is: How can the responsibilities for refugee accommodation best be met, taking empowerment, human rights and health into account? Our approach is three-tiered: 1) providing analytical frameworks for assessing types of refugee accommodation from different disciplinary perspectives (methodological); 2) balancing the trade-off between giving shelter to, and restricting freedom of, refugees (theoretical / normative-ethical); and 3) developing approaches to improve various aspects of the way refugees are accommodated (interventional).

Video-Conference: Scenarios – techniques and practices for doubling reality

22 – 23 June 2021

• Matthias Schaffrick (Siegen, GER)

Scenarios are popular techniques of theory building and development within various disciplines. There is, however, a remarkable lack of interdisciplinary research on scenarios, although the ongoing debate about scenarios across politics, science, and society seems to require such an interdisciplinary approach. The workshop investigates concepts and methods of scenarioing as techniques and practices for 'doubling- reality'. Scenarios offer insights into the epistemological assumptions and social self-descriptions implied by the imagination of disasters, escalations of conflicts, future worlds etc. Thus the workshop aims at an interdisciplinary approach to scenarioing and seeks to analyse concrete – literary, scientific, political, historical ? scenarios from an interdisciplinary point of view considering particularly four aspects: ontological status, plot, practices of scenarioing, social self-description.

Video-Conference: Opium Wars – Opium Cultures: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

23 – 24 June 2021

• Nadine Böhm-Schnitker (Bielefeld, GER)

The conference 'Opium Wars – Opium Cultures' is to explore the two Opium Wars (1839-42; 1856-60) in their 19th-century contexts, particularly with regard to the fraught intersection of capitalism and imperialism, and it is to extend this view by an interdisciplinary, intercultural and transnational approach in order to take into account the very different historiographies of the events from a British, Chinese and Indian perspective. In addition, the conference is to sketch the cultural, historical and political legacies as well as current political reverberations and cultural appropriations of the Opium Wars. The innovative potential of the conference lies in its orientation towards the concept of global history and, what is more, the transnational and comparative analysis of the respective memory cultures. What was and is their impact on routes of migration, drug trafficking and international relations? How can their cultural afterlife be described? In which cultural channels, in which forms and according to which generic conventions are they represented and remembered? And finally, which concepts, approaches, methods and theories are required to tackle the complex legacies of these conflicts? To answer these questions, the conference is to bring together scholars from disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, history, sociology, health sciences, political science, Chinese and Indian studies.

Toxic Commons. Disciplinary Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Conversations

8 – 9 July 2021

• Simone M. Müller (München, GER)
• Angeliki Balayannis (Exeter, GBR)

In the age of the Anthropocene our commons, such as air, water, and ground, are increasingly toxic and the experience of toxic exposure, albeit not equal, is increasingly common. We lack, however, tools of analysis to scrutinize these developments of an everyday toxic exposure. Rather, scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of environmental justice, toxicity studies, and environmental history of toxicity and poisons, rely on binary notions of externalization that divide between an outside and inside system, victims and perpetrators, and suggest that there exists a safe haven (free of toxicity) as well as (eventually) an ultimate sink.

This interdisciplinary workshop seeks to scrutinize both the concept as well as phenomenon of the toxic commons for the study of global environmental justice and the commons. The workshop aims to engage both in theoretical discussions about the concept as well as to learn from the study of toxic commons through concrete case studies. Contributions focus on concepts of commons and externalization or practices of resistance and commoning. Case studies exemplify toxic commons in urban settings or introduce the body as a toxic commons. The final session scrutinizes how the concept of the toxic commons opens up new avenues for artist-research engagement and new pathways for academic communication to a wider public. Scholars come from the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, law, and the arts.

Self-Destruction in Distributed Systems: Autoimmunity, Inflation, Noisy Signaling

2 – 3 August 2021

• Kay Junge (Bielefeld, GER)
• Kirill Postoutenko (Bielefeld, GER)
• Fernao Vistulo de Abreu (Aveiro, POR)

Across the natural and social world, some fairly advanced and apparently robust systems seem to suddenly destroy themselves without discernible reason, function or purpose. While some living bodies succumb to the diseases of their own making, empires collapse and revolutions, as the late 18th century French used to say, tend to devour their own children. Whereas such and similar cases have been extensively discussed within specific branches of scholarship, with occasional parallels exposed and analysed (see details below), the attempts to propose and test a general theory of self-destruction in complex systems remain, to our knowledge, a thing of the future. To move in this direction, we suggest a tentative hypothesis, claiming that the distributed nature of complex systems, often overlooked by scholars, may be chiefly responsible for their unintended self-annihilation. Further, we suppose that the relations of such systems to their own distinctiveness, time processes and other systems may result in specific pathologies (respectively, autoimmunity, inflation and noisy signaling) playing crucial role in self-destructive activities. To specify, amend, confirm or disprove these suppositions, we intend to enlist the cooperation of historians, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, legal scholars, literary and language scholars, immunologists and computer scientists and information specialists.

Mathematics of Machine Learning

4 – 7 August 2021

• Benjamin Gess (Bielefeld, GER)
• Guido Montufar (Leipzig, GER)
• Nihat Ay (Leipzig, GER)

In recent years, machine learning algorithms have seen an unprecedented success in a variety of fields, ranging from science and engineering to medicine and social sciences. As a result, artificial intelligence has been identified as one of the key technologies for future social and economic advance. With its rising importance also in failure sensitive systems, for example in medical devices and autonomous driving, the need for a systematic understanding of the functionality of machine learning algorithms and for guarantees on their accuracy and precision becomes vital. This calls for the development of a mathematical understanding of the structures and mechanism underlying the success of machine learning techniques. This endeavor has seen a significant increase of interest and efforts in recent years, crucially relying on interdisciplinary interaction, communicating mathematical progress and empirical research. The proposed conference is aimed as a contribution to this rapidly developing field, by bringing together experts from various mathematical areas with shared interest in applications to machine learning and experts from fields such as computer science and biology.

History & Memory. Towards a New Interdisciplinary Dialogue – 2nd Authors Meeting

18 – 20 July 2022

• Christina Morina (Bielefeld, GER)
• Wulf Kansteiner (Aarhus, DNK)

Memory is an ubiquitous phenomenon of our times. Memory Studies are thriving as a distinct academic field with a footing in various disciplines, notably not predominantly in history. As a result of a wider socially and culturally driven Memory Boom since the 1980s and the concurrent process of professionalization, the field features widely read journals, book series and handbooks and figures ever more prominently in curricula at universities around the world. Yet, none of these efforts focuses systematically on the relationship between memory studies and professional historiography.

Given the fact that history and memory studies share a similar curiosity about the past, collaboration between them should and can be easily expanded – to both sides’ benefit: The field of memory studies can profit from historians’ ability to historicize sources, research concepts, and memory cultures and integrate complex argumentative and narrative objectives; historians could conversely benefit from memory studies’ theoretical ambition, interdisciplinary profile, empirical range, and didactic and political appeal.

With these premises and objectives in mind, the proposed Working Group comprising of 37 authors (incl. the editors) from around the world aims to jointly write a dialogical handbook, The Oxford Handbook History & Memory, to map and widen that interdisciplinary potential und understanding

Participation as a condition for humanizing epistemology? Interdisciplinary and international perspectives

27 – 28 August 2021

• Oliver Böhm-Kasper (Bielefeld, GER)
• Saana Jukola (Bielefeld, GER)
• Anna Kirova (Edmonton, CAN)

In our post-truth era, accepted ways of getting at the truth are in crisis. In the context of intensifying borders, forced migration, climate crisis and extinction, and the rise of the global right, we are witnessing an intensifying crisis in meaning making about orders of humanity. The positivist research paradigm that dominates the social sciences and humanities confronts researchers and practitioners across disciplines with shared limitations in addressing dehumanization not only as an object of research, but as produced through theory, methodology, and approaches to measurement, with practitioners and minoritized communities often ignored as producers of knowledge. This workshop brings together scholars from educational science, philosophy, and health sciences to amplify this crisis in meaning for the purpose of accelerating what Thomas Kuhn (1962) conceptualized as a paradigm shift. Taking professional practice as a site of praxis, our guiding question is: what conditions are necessary for professional practice to become a site for the co-construction of a humanizing epistemology?

Drivers and paths of authoritarian developments in the 21st century

 8 – 10 September 2021

• Günter Frankenberg (Frankfurt am Main, GER)
• Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Bielefeld, GER)

The conference will examine the possibility of the emergence of authoritarian development paths in modern Western societies. The question acquires urgency, given the increasing visibility of crisis-driven authoritarian tendencies in parts of European societies over the past two decades. Contemporaneously, authoritarian political movements and parties opposing liberal democracy and open societies have emerged and acquired influence in numerous countries.

In the context of the extensive control losses associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, five main strands on the drivers and paths of authoritarian development need to be discussed and analysed. These are the sociological, social-psychological, cultural, legal and media factors and their interactions, both contemporary and historical.

Video Conference: Stylistics Past and Present: Interdisciplinary Transformations of a Method in the Humanities

 14 – 15 October 2021

• Elisa Ronzheimer (Bielefeld, GER)

Matters of style have gained renewed attention in recent years. The workshop explores this present interest from an interdisciplinary perspective, investigating the history of stylistic methods in the humanities. Its objective is to understand in what ways the methodological exchange between the disciplines has shaped stylistic practices throughout the twentieth century. The exploration of the transformations that stylistics has undergone as the notion of style traversed the fields of art history, philosophy, history as well as literature and cultural studies opens up new perspectives on recent developments in the theory and methodology of style. Asking about the past and present states of stylistics also implies engaging in methodological issues currently discussed in the Digital Humanities.

Video-Conference: Conceptualising Intercultural Contact in the Early British Empire

21 October 2021

• Marcus Hartner (Bielefeld, GER)

Over the past two decades questions of intercultural contact and transnational exchange have reached central stage in early modern studies. In the wake of the general academic success story of postcolonialism, the humanities have witnessed a veritable explosion in the number of academic works exploring the early modern period and its emerging Western empires with a view to questions concerning the global entanglements of trade, politics, ideology and the closely interrelated (post)colonial history of Western ideas about European identity, race, and imperialism. On the one hand, this development has led to a profusion of new (historical) insights and re-evaluations. On the other hand, it has created a bewildering multitude of competing scholarly concepts, (theoretical) approaches, and terminology which have yet failed to consolidate into a more manageable set of complementary theoretical tools. The conference sets out to discuss this situation and addresses the inherent conceptual tensions between different schools of research on a methodological and (meta)theoretical level. It turns to the example of the early British Empire, as the academic study of this 'emerging' global player prototypically encapsulates the conceptual and historiographic tensions at the heart of current research into early modern intercultural contact. By mapping, contextualising and evaluating current concepts, approaches, and paradigms from an interdisciplinary perspective, the conference aims to work towards conceptual and terminological consolidation and intends to provide the initial step in the prospective project of publishing a collaborative Handbook or Companion to Early Modern Intercultural Contact.

Social Structure and cross-national Homicide Rates: Poverty, Income Inequality, and beyond

3 – 4 November 2021

• Wilhelm Heitmeyer (Bielefeld, GER)
• Steven F. Messner (Albany, USA)

Research on the social structural determinants of national homicide rates has been one of the more vibrant fields of macro-criminology over the course of approximately the past fifty years. The literature review shows an impressive volume of research on poverty, income inequality, and cross-national homicide rates accumulated over the course of recent decades. At the same time, the results are inconsistent with respect to the independent associations of indicators of income inequality and poverty.

Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in Emerging Economies of the Global South

7 – 8 December 2021

• Minh Nguyen (Bielefeld, GER)
• Jake Lin (Bielefeld, GER)
• Ngoc Minh Luong (Bielefeld, GER)
• Yueran Tian (Bielefeld, GER)

In recent years, various countries in the Global South and the former Soviet Bloc have been introducing new social protection programs such as cash transfers, basic pension or health insurance. Despite the universal claim, the efficacy of these programs in reducing inequality and protecting the needy, particularly amongst the large number of migrant workers in global factories and in the service sector, remains unclear. Among others, these programs often provide the very conditions for the privatisation of welfare, notably through its financialisation, which generates a great deal of uncertainty. The seemingly convergent experiences across these Global South contexts provide a good opportunity for this interdisciplinary workshop to explore the implications of these welfare shifts for the care and protection of labour, which has also been undergoing major restructuring with the emergence of new forms of work. In particular, the workshop convenors would like to bring the findings of their research project on welfare for migrant factory workers in Vietnam and China into dialogue with research taking place in other contexts. Our comparative undertaking will generate important insights into the struggles and politics underpinning the reconfiguration of welfare in the Global South and its linkage to the global restructuring of labour.

XVII Brunel – Bielefeld Workshop on Random Matrix Theory

17 – 18 December 2021

• Gernot Akemann (Bielefeld, GER)
• Igor Krasovsky (London, GBR)
• Dmitry Savin (London, GBR)
• Igor Smolyarenko (London, GBR)

This workshop continues the annual series that has started in 2005 at Brunel University (London) and that since 2011 alternates between Bielefeld and Brunel. Random matrices are a tool to do a statistical analysis of spectral data in physics, mathematics and other areas. For example, this year's invited 15 speakers will cover wireless telecommunications, computer linguistic and neural networks as they appear in machine learning, apart from more traditional applications to statistical physics or the Riemann-function.

2020

Momentum of its own. Inherent Dynamism in Pre-Modern Societies

12 – 14 February 2020

• Franz-Josef Arlinghaus (Bielefeld, GER)
• Andreas Rüther (Bielefeld, GER)

The conference discussed a new approach on social changes in premodern societies worldwide. The core thesis is that the fundamental structures of premodern societies show elements which are themselves driving forces for a constant change of these societies. At the same time the kind of change is of a specifically premodern nature. This continuous restructuring, so the second assumption, leads in tendency to precisely these structures becoming clearer. In a way, premodern society comes into its own only by the end of the period under observation (ca. 700-1700), shortly before its comparably rapid and surprising restructuring into a functionally differentiated modern age. This suggestion puts a question mark behind narratives that want specific cultural 'features' of certain world regions to be responsible for their specific way to modernity.

Investigating Solid-Liquid Interfaces: The Calcite-Water Interface at the Molecular Level

2 - 6 March 2020

• Angelika Kühnle (Bielefeld, GER)
• Adam Foster (Helsinki, FIN)

Solid-liquid interfaces are omnipresent both in nature and technology. Among solid-liquid interfaces, the calcite-water interface plays an outstanding role. This is because calcite – the thermodynamically most stable modification of calcium carbonate – is highly abundant in the Earth's crust. It is of utmost relevance for the milieu of aqueous systems, especially oceans. It is pivotal to the carbonate cycle, which has a decisive role in storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. As a major rock-forming mineral, calcite also affects many technical areas, including, e.g., seawater desalination, as well as construction and oil industry. In all these fields, fundamental processes take place at the calcite-water interface. During this winter school, highly renowned scientists from various disciplines will introduce state-of-the-art concepts and methods to elucidate the atomic structure and fundamental processes at the calcite-water interface. A strong focus will be on classes about complementary approaches from experiment and theory. To foster a stimulating atmosphere and open discussions, the programme will include informal sessions to raise disturbing questions and identify hot topics.