In this episode we talk to David Scott. David Scott is Ruth and William Lubic Professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He has published numerous works - among them Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, published 1999, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, published 2004, and Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, in 2014. He also has two forthcoming books: “Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History,” and, with Orlando Patterson The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue. He visited the University of Potsdam in July and August as the RTG’s Mercator Fellow, where he gave public talks and master classes, which enabled us to develop an ongoing conversation with him and to have the pleasure of hosting him on this podcast. Our discussions focussed on his preoccupation in the last years with the life and thought of his friend Stuart Hall, specifically on his 2017 book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity, which is also the center of this episode. For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode, we talk to Khwezi Mkhize about his current project Home-Made Empire: South Africa’s Imperium, where he moves away from the dominant periodization of apartheid, to think about South Africa as a nation state with its own imperial project, particularly evident in its aspirations toward Namibia. Khwezi brings a different focus to the work of black intellectuals working against colonialism and racial rule in South Africa, adding a global and diasporic dimension to South African intellectual history, a history that has often remained in the shadow of the singular national history of apartheid. For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

Introducing season 2 of the minor constellations podcast! The Minor Constellations Podcast is the podcast of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms. We feature the work of thinkers and cultural practitioners – people whose work touches on the current moment and who are interested in the ways in which our theories and practices shed light on the relations between knowledge, politics and power. The RTG is based at the University of Potsdam and in partnership with Humboldt University, the Free University Berlin and University of Koblenz and Landau. It also has 8 international partner universities, located in Australia, South Africa, India and North America. We are a multidisciplinary group that seeks to reinvigorate the question of how to “think and feel beyond the nation'' in the wake of the unravelling of the cosmopolitan promise. We aim to do this by focusing on that which may be situated within specific local, historical and political situations but makes worlds, throws unexpected connections into relief, or builds forms of cooperation across difference. In this second season of the podcast, we release an episode every month: conversations with exciting guests, among them David Scott, Ira Raja, Jasmine Cobb, Elad Lapidot, Khwezi Mkhize, Judith Coffey and many more. Catch up on Season 1, and check our website at minor.hypotheses.org/podcast

In this final episode of the first season, we talk to Professor Elahe Haschemi Yekani about her joint transdisciplinary project Revisualising Intersectionality, a collaboration with Magdalena Nowicka and Tiara Roxanne, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and the book of which is forthcoming this year. The conversation centres on her chapter titled “The Ends of Visibility” in which she interrogates the limits of identity categories in intersectional frameworks by specifically focusing on visuality. In doing so, she draws on discussions from postcolonial and decolonial theory to offer a critique of representation and intersectionality via readings from visual culture that offer, as she puts it, modes of “seeing and being” differently. For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we listen in on a conversation between Dr Zoran Terzić, a writer, jazz pianist, and a visual artist and Priyam Goswami Choudhury, a PhD fellow in the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms researching publishing networks of poetry. Zoran and Priyam have known each other for 5 years now, and in August this year they met in Zoran’s apartment in Berlin to chat about his book, Idiocracy: Thinking and Acting in the Age of the Idiot, published in German in 2020 with the English translation forthcoming from Chicago University Press.  What we hear in this episode is part of a longer conversation which took place on that day, and of their ongoing discussions. We drop in as they talk about how Zoran came to publish a book on the figure of the idiot so timeously, and follow them as they move from different manifestations of the idiot whether in Dostoyevsky, Flaubert or on the internet, through to the reproduction of the self through phenomena such as memes or Tik Tok, and finally, as they come to talk about the direction of the internet and different figures of futurity.  You’ll also hear Zoran’s musical interludes, played by him on the melodica. For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we host a conversation between Dr Layla Zami and Jan Dammel about Dr Zami's recently published book Contemporary PerforMemory: Dancing Through Spacetime, Historical Trauma, and Diaspora in the 21st Century.  Dr Zami is an academic and artist, working in the fields of humanities, performance studies and art history. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She also curates for the International Human Rights Art Festival in New York, together with Oxana Chi. Jan Dammel is our colleague in the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms and his project, Theatre and German Colonialism, investigates theatre practices in the context of Tanzanian-German entangled histories by conceptualizing theatre as a site of both complicity and resistance. For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we talk to Azar Dakwar, a PhD candidate in political and social thought at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent. The conversation centres around an article he wrote with Raef Zreik entitled  “What’s in the Apartheid Analogy? Palestine/Israel Refracted”. Taking this as our point of departure, we start with the events which took place in Palestine/Israel last May. We continue with the proliferation of the apartheid discourse: we ask what’s between South Africa and Palestine/Israel, and explore the differences between settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation. For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest, please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecopper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we talk with Tim Fish Hodgson, socio-economic Human Rights expert at the International Commission of Jurists, about Covid-19 vaccine inequality, focussing on the ICJ briefing paper he put together, in collaboration with activists and stakeholders from within the SADC states, titled “The Unvaccinated: Equality not Charity in Southern Africa”.  For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest, please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast  Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecooper.bandcamp.com/ 

In this episode, we talk to Eilat Maoz, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago. We start with the events which took place in late May, in the mixed cities in Israel. We talk about police and policing, vigilante law and even some thoughts on the current project of the left.  For links, a list of references, and more information about our guest, please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper, called "Bass in the Bathroom", from the album "Small Songs for Big Times", March 2020. For more, please visit shanecooper.bandcamp.com/

In this episode we find out about the translation tool macht.sprache. We talk about some of the challenges of translating politically sensitive terms across not only language but also discursive contexts.  For links, a list of references and more information about our guests, please visit https://minor.hypotheses.org/podcast Our Amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper: “Bass in the Bathroom”, from the album Small Songs for Big Times, March 2020. For more, please visit shanecooper.bandcamp.com/