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Травмований деколоніальний транзит: конструювання історичного наративу в українській культурі на початку ХХІ століття

від Тамара Гундорова. Помаранчевий майдан був формою консолідації національної спільноти і мав виразні ознаки атиколоніального протесту, який однак закінчився значними розчаруваннями. Період між двома Майданами, або двома українськими революціями початку ХХІ століття, проявив минулі травми і зафіксував різні моделі історичної пам’яті, передусім націо-євроцентричну і ностальгійно-радяноцентричну. Прийшов час розбудови історіографічних наративів із фрагментів, плівок і картин, із залишків стертої епохою колоніалізму і тоталітаризму пам’яті.

Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century

By Tamara Hundorova. The Orange Maidan was a form of consolidation of the national community and had distinct signs of anti-colonial protest, but it ended in significant disappointment. The period between the two Maidans, or the two Ukrainian revolutions of the early twenty-first century, revealed past traumas and recorded different models of historical memory, primarily national–Eurocentric and nostalgic–Soviet–centric. The time has come to build historiographical narratives out of fragments, films, and paintings, out of the remnants of the memory erased by the era of colonialism and totalitarianism.

Haaland v. Brackeen, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Ethics of Care

By Dana Lloyd. On June 15, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Haaland v. Brackeen. In this case, non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents argued that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which gives preference to Indigenous parents in fostering and adopting Indigenous children, is unconstitutional. They said the law discriminated against them on the basis of race. In a 7–2 ruling, the court rejected all of the petitioners’ challenges to ICWA, some on the merits of the case and others for lack of standing. In this essay, Lloyd reads the Brackeen case against the background of two hundred years of federal Indian law and assimilation policy and proposes two notions of care as a framework for thinking about the case: the first, associated with U.S. assimilation policy, sees care as charitable, but it is actually coercive and harmful; the second is based on solidarity and is at the heart of Indigenous sovereignty.

Reclaiming Movement: Hayet Amamou on the Maghreb’s Mobile Past and Future

Hayet Amamou in Conversation with Julius Dihstelhoff. Prof. Amamou argues that precolonial patterns of mobility—not rigid territoriality—forged the Maghreb’s identity. Her work challenges modern narratives of exclusion, insisting that historical connectivity, not isolation, holds the key to reimagining the region’s future. Amamou’s work aligns with MECAM’s mission to “imagine futures” by confronting historical erasures. Her keynote underscored that the Maghreb’s precolonial mobility was “a negotiated order, not chaos”—one that offers alternatives to today’s exclusionary policies.

Are we all Migrants? Masterclass with Highschool Students and Prisma Ukraїna

By Marko Duric and Diana Rubezhanska. On Wednesday, 30 April 2025, students of Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium visited the Forum Transregionale Studien for the second time for a workshop on the topic of displacement in the context of Russia’s War against Ukraine. In the Displacement Masterclass, conducted by Prisma Ukraїna Fellows Viktoriya Sereda and Lidia Kuzemska, the students learned about the Forum Transregionale Studien’s Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration and Memory project, an interdisciplinary research group of Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine and Germany that has been constituted in 2022 under the direction of Viktoriya Sereda. The research group offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people’s memory, history, and sense of belonging. Since 2016, the Forum cooperates with the nearby Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium and arranges encounters of students and Fellows on issues of common concern.

Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński

By Joanna M. Moszczynska. The paper deals with narrative journalistic texts by Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński about their journeys to the Eastern Bloc and Latin America, respectively, during the first two decades of the Cold War. García Marquez’s crónicas and Kapuściński’s reportages deliver ideas on socialism(s) and engage in affective workings of a travel experience through representations of convivial socialist spaces. By elaborating a philological approach towards socialist affects, the paper concentrates on affective narrative attunements to lived historical moments and aims at comparing both authors as they raise social and political issues pertinent to the conjuncture of the Cold War. The convivial aspect refers here not only to living together with and knowledge production about the Other as represented in the text, but also to the methodological approach with intercultural sensitivity and transregional and transnational awareness of the aesthetic developments in the hybrid field of global literary journalism.

Dichotomy of Methodology Between the American and the French Approach in Frontier/Border Studies: Sloboda-Ukraine in the 18th Century

By Yuliia Koniva. Historical geography as an interdisciplinary discipline offers many of the conceptions for studying space and territory. In this essay, I want to address that there is no common ground on how to apply these conceptions. In every national historiography we can find plenty of historians who utilize the approaches of studying space or territory according to the research goals which were put forward in front of each scholar.

Whose Imaginary? Coptic Intellectuals and the Question of Subjectivity

By Ismail Fayed. The collapse of the Assad regime and HTS’s rise in Syria have revived debates in Egypt and the region, over the fragile status of religious minorities, particularly Copts, long caught between authoritarianism and Islamist extremism. But when freed from such choices, what kind of worlds do they imagine? In this paper, Ismail Fayed explores this question through the life histories and reflections of two prominent Coptic intellectuals, Salama Musa and Louis Awad.

Towards a Global History of War, Disability and Gender

By Natalie Tongue. Only in recent years has the history of disability become a focus of global history. This essay seeks to examine the connection between disability and masculinity, particularly in relation to histories of war. This will be achieved through a review of a series of books, articles and edited collections to piece together a full picture of the trends in this intersection of the respective fields and to understand where a global history approach would enhance disability histories. A global history approach would highlight the diverse and complex ways in which disability and masculinity interact in contexts of war. Further, as war, conflict and colonialism are inseparable, racialised understandings of how masculinity differed across colonial epicentres and peripheries would be undeniable. This is essential for a meaningful and committed undertaking of the field.

Ukraine and Ukrainians in the Panels: Global Comics Perspectives on the War

By Svitlana Pidoprygora. Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent full-scale invasion in 2022 have brought Ukrainian issues to international headlines and sparked extensive reflections in various genres of fiction and non-fiction, with documentary comics and graphic reportages being no exception. International authors bring varied perspectives to Ukrainian historical and contemporary issues, striving to explain to their audience what is happening right now – why there is war, why the Russian Federation attacked Ukraine. I am focusing on arguably the most significant documentary comics that emerged after the beginning of the full-scale invasion and primarily focus on depicting the war experience. In this essay, I will delve into several key aspects of how these comics depict Russia’s war against Ukraine.