11 November – Collins C. Ajibo: Sustainable Governance of Natural Resources as a Pathway to Conflict Management
African exports of natural resources constitute roughly 74% of total merchandise exports and the continent is home to about 30% of all global mineral reserves. However, the region has failed to harness these opportunities to foster sustainable development. Worse still, more than half of the 37 countries categorized as fragile and conflict-affected states are to be found in Africa. Other African countries not represented in this statistics are not doing better either. Consequently, this research explores the interactions that underpin sustainable governance of natural resources and conflict in Africa and proffers options for the future.
Date: 11 November 2024
Time: 15:00-16:00
Speaker:
Collins C. Ajibo, Law, University of Nigeria
18 November – Constructive Advanced Thinking Group (CAT): Over Their Dead Bodies: Human Remains from Institutional Collections
Historically, human remains, and skulls in particular, have been repeatedly used to construct arguments justifying racialization and racism, confining people to fixed notions of identities and legitimising violent systems of exploitation and oppression. The hundreds of thousands of human remains amassed in numerous ‘collections’ across the world constitute an ethical and political challenge of reckoning with the violent past, its legacies and continuities.
One central concern of contemporary practice is the examination of histories of the amassed mortal remains (i.e. provenance research) and their repatriation. In most cases there is limited or no biographical information available about concrete remains and the individuals they belonged to. Historical and biological research methodologies provide the basis upon which human remains are ascribed to a particular identity group and returned to putative contemporary representatives of that group. This process is riddled with ethical, conceptual, methodological and political issues that necessitate trans-disciplinary scholarly attention.
Some of the key issues which this group, in collaboration with different stakeholders, is critically examining include: reliance on scholarly and folk ethno-racial classifications in bioanthropological ‘ancestry estimations’; conflation of biological population categories with socio-cultural identities; ascription of socio-cultural group belonging based on scarce historical information; reproduction of racialized ethnic and national categories in political practice; and the ethics of continuous storage and handling of remains. These problems are analysed with particular emphasis on regional contexts, and the biases in differential treatment of remains depending on their origin.
This presentation will introduce the project, funded by the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) programme of the Network of European Institutes of Advanced Studies (NetIAS).
Date: 18 November 2024
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speakers:
- Malin Wilckens, Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany
- Jonatan Kurzwelly (PI), Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany
- Joanna Karolina Malinowska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
- Paul Wolff Mitchell, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Phila Msimang, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
25 November – Jenny Benham: Espionage and International Law in Europe 700-1200
Acquiring, sharing, and acting on intelligence and information was, and continues to be, an essential tool for political leaders. This session will explore the legal context of espionage in times of war as well as in times of peace between 700 and 1200, drawing out similarities and differences with more modern periods.
Date: 25 November 2024
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Jenny Benham, Medieval Studies, Cardiff University
2 December – Jürgen Osterhammel: Comparison in (Global) History and Beyond
An awareness and knowledge of methodology is essential for any practising historian. Yet questions of method are rarely discussed. They are usually left to a small number of specialised historical theorists, whose writings tend to be ignored by the rest of the profession. Thus, opportunities are missed to increase the sophistication of historical research and writing.
The presentation will take the method of comparison as an example of historical methodology (and epistemology) and discuss it in the light of recent theoretical contributions and practical applications, mainly from the field of global history.
There has been a recent revival of interest in comparison in several humanities and social sciences, ranging from sociology, anthropology and law to literature and linguistics. The presentation aims to make a case for comparison and to outline a wider discursive space for comparative thinking, inviting contributions to the discussion from as many disciplines as possible, hopefully including the natural sciences.
Date: 2 December 2024
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Jürgen Osterhammel, History, University of Freiburg
9 December – Philipp Höfele: Nature Orientation of Technology – the Example of a Sustainable Artificial Intelligence
In the face of the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’, i.e. the exponential increase in, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, species extinction or the production of microplastics, the call for technological solutions is growing louder. This raises the question of how technology can contribute to sustainable development. One solution is to call for new emerging technologies to be more nature-oriented. Using artificial intelligence as an example, this talk will show how this orientation of technology towards nature is already being pursued today and how it can be formulated as an ethical demand and task for future technological development.
The idea of nature-oriented technologies is not new and can be found early on in philosophical reflections on technology. However, it is only in the present day that it has become extremely important, firstly because of the technical possibilities of imitation, especially in the fields of biomimetics and artificial intelligence, and secondly because of the need for sustainable solutions. Today’s technological orientation towards nature often goes hand in hand with normative-ethical assumptions, namely that these technologies offer ‘better’ solutions than ‘traditional’ technologies. But this is not automatic. Not every orientation towards plant, animal or human nature ensures that a technology is ‘better’ in terms of sustainability or ethical harmlessness. The talk therefore aims to identify the basic conditions for a concept of normative orientation towards nature, using artificial intelligence as an example.
Date: 9 December 2024
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Philipp Höfele, Philosophy, University of Freiburg
13 January – Stephen Howard: Energy and Generational Injustice
Setting out from a brief remark of Kant’s, this talk proposes a new angle on the problem of generational injustice in the era of climate change. Kant worries that it is unjust for younger generations to benefit from the labour of those that preceded them. For today’s sensibilities, this is a very alien thought. It suggests that our decisions about fossil fuel emissions, and hence greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature rises, may be more complex than is often thought. What is at stake is the balance between the lasting societal advantages provided by our energy use and the disadvantages resulting from the way we access this energy. With reference to thermodynamic concepts and various philosophical positions, the talk will explore the consequences of adopting the perspective spurred by Kant’s remark.
Date: 13 January 2025
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Stephen Howard, Philosophy, University of Leuven
20 January – Giuseppe Sansone: ATTOCOOR: How to measure the duration of attosecond pulses under randomly changing conditions
Free-electron lasers, operating in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray spectral range, are large-scale facilities that have attracted considerable attention over the last two decades for their ability to deliver electromagnetic pulses that combine extremely high peak intensities, high photon energy and ultrashort duration. In 2020, two international collaborations demonstrated the generation of attosecond pulses using free-electron lasers. In this talk, I will outline the main concept underlying the temporal characterisation of attosecond pulses and explain why it cannot be directly applied to free-electron lasers. The main limitation lies in the intrinsic instabilities and changing environmental conditions that affect these facilities.
I will outline how I plan to overcome these limitations by replacing the precise control of the characteristics of the pulses delivered by the free-electron lasers with a correlated analysis of the photoelectron released by the attosecond pulses in the process of photoionisation, assisted by a second femtosecond pulse in the infrared spectral range.
Date: 20 January 2025
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Giuseppe Sansone, Physics, University of Freiburg
27 January – Berit Callsen: Fluvial Agency in Recent Chilean Documentary Film
During the last two decades, in Latin American filmmaking there can be observed an increasing interest in the documentary genre linked to activist but also to experimental approaches. Especially, forms of environmental filmmaking and ecocinema have gained visibility focusing on nonhuman viewpoints and in so doing expanding watching habits that rely on the subject/object divide. This lecture will focus on the filmic representations of aquatic ecosystems, especially rivers, in Chile. In the filmic examples analyzed here, rivers are coming into sight as bodies of water in contact with humans, incorporating an active role as narrative entities in these sometimes-conflictual encounters. Building on theoretical insights in the blue humanities and material ecocriticism and focusing on sound, texture, and self-reflexive modes, this lecture will scrutinize how the films stage a fluvial agency and how they (re)frame human-nonhuman relations.
Date: 27 January 2025
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Berit Callsen, Literature, University of Osnabrück
3 February – Linus Ubl: Defining, Aestheticising, and Fictionalising ‘Suicide’. Negotiations in Medieval German Literature
The current project examines factual and fictional discourses on suicide in the medieval period. Not only does it discuss how suicide was considered on a normative level and its representations in literature – the art of ‘committing suicide’, it also discusses the literary aspects of the cultural discourse – the ‘art’ of committing suicide. These intersecting networks (encompassing theological and legal discourses among others) and their literary and cultural representations will be at the centre of the project. A point of focus will be whether – and to what extent – literary texts reflect their aesthetic potential, and are thus able to transcend other discourses.
Date: 3 February 2025
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Speaker:
Linus Ubl, Medieval Studies, University of Freiburg
10 February – Group Project Glass Age: GlassAge – Challenges and Chances of Transdisciplinary Research
The history of humankind has always been closely linked to materials. Since the early evolution of material process technology, the ages of human history have been intimately connected with the names of materials. In the envisaged project, we will investigate the historic and cultural context of one of humankind’s earliest high performance materials the importance of which has only grown with time: glass. Since the early developments in glass shaping, the history of this material has been closely linked to the cultural context. Interestingly, many of the artefacts of glass that survive from premodern contexts today still surpass the dominating methods of glass processing in the 21st century, and many of the effects found in historic specimens have a surprising actuality. As an example, optical metamaterials have been documented over a span of two millennia with current technology unable to replicate the craftsmanship required to make these objects. GlassAge will explore the cultural and historic context of glass and the breakthrough developments which have, for various reasons, been largely ignored by modern developments in the material.
Just as bionics takes nature as a model for material innovations, our project asks how the know-how of past cultures can inspire modern material developments. We envision to provide inspiration for modern material systems which reach beyond the mere technological assessment, building on the rich history of material and material processing in its cultural context thus enabling a holistic retro- as well as a prospective vision for material systems in the 21st century.
24 February – Extra Session: The Global Qur'an (Exhibition)
A World of Qur’an Translations
From Cape Town to Frankfurt, from Tripoli to Moscow, from Chicago to Jakarta: in the past 120 years, Muslims have produced Qur’an translations in dozens of languages across the globe. Each of these translations tells a story, a story of presidential candidates and religious scholars, Gulag inmates and converts to Islam, dictators and missionaries, governments and commercial publishers. Learn more about these fascinating stories and gain insights into the connections between them: a world of Qur’an translations.
Johanna Pink (GloQur’s Principal Investigator and Professor of Islamic Studies) will offer a guided tour of the exhibition. Several of our current and FRIAS Alumni Fellows are involved in the GloQur project.
Date: 24 February 2025
Time: after FRIAS Lunch,
Meeting point: FRIAS seminar room
Speaker:
Guided Tour by Johanna Pink, Islamic Studies