Autor: Forum Transregionale Studien
By Chunping Lin. The word “幽默 yōumò,” which means “humor” in Chinese, is originally from Jiǔzhāng 九章 of the Chu Lyrics 楚辭 Chǔcí (475 B.C.–221 B.C.) and was used to describe the tranquility of nature. Lin Yutang林語堂 (linguist, philosopher, and translator, 1895–1976) translated the English word “humor” with the word “幽默 yōumò”.
Just three weeks following my release after 16 years in prison in Syria, I started translating a book into Arabic. The book was “Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order,” by Noam Chomsky. It had taken me some time to realize that the leading linguist and the harsh critic of American imperialism was the same person.
By Hala Auji and Nurçin İleri. Capitalism’s far-reaching social, industrial, and cultural implications on the socio-political aspects of production, labor, and class struggle are well-documented. Scholarship on labor has emphasized the social and economic aspects of the capitalist economy and the history of working classes in a global context.
By Ulf Engel. In October 2021, I published the Yearbook on the African Union (YBAU). This yearbook is the first of its kind. The YBAU is first and foremost an academic project that provides an in-depth evaluation and analysis of the institution, its processes, and its engagements.
“Die Vergangenheit ändert sich ständig”, lautet ein sowjetisches Sprichwort. Vielleicht hat sich das auch der russische Präsident gedacht. Am 21. Februar hat er die Separatistengebiete in der Ostukraine anerkannt und eine Rede gehalten, in der er diesen Schritt vor allem historisch begründet. Manche sagen schon jetzt, diese Rede werde die Historiker noch beschäftigen.
By Susan Grunewald, Ruth Mostern, and Karl Grossner. As digital projects become increasingly popular for the humanities, linked open data (LOD) is a means to combine the efforts of many individual researchers and research teams to enable truly transregional research.
By Marina Rudyak. The seminar “Reporting Corona: State Media, Critical Journalism and Citizen Witnessing during the COVID-19 Outbreak in Wuhan” at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University, which I taught in the summer semester of 2021, explored the news and information production in locked-down Wuhan. It analysed the different types of reporting and writing, their motivations and their ways of coping with censorship.
By Alihan Mestci. Culture is a battle that “has not yet been won” – this has been iterated on numerous occasions by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ever since late 2016, the year of the July 15th coup attempt. The state of emergency has given a legal blank check for thousands of dismissals in the civil service as well as for the criminalization and marginalization of dissenting voices from the media and civil society.
By Gautam Liu. The COVID-19 pandemic in India generated a strange phenomenon in how health workers were perceived. On the one hand officials were not tired in proclaiming doctors and nurses as gods, on the other hand health workers were ostracized by large parts of the general population.
By Khadija Mohamed Embaby and Amira Mittermaier. In times of profound uncertainty, what does God offer to believers? And how does uncertainty affect believers’ ideas about, and relations to, God?