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Kategorie: BEYONDREST

Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Taking restitution not as an endpoint but as the point of departure for its inquiry, Beyond Restitution tackles dispossession not as a loss to be mended but a means to transform knowledge through inquiries into absence. Beyond Restitution argues that the dispossession of art is not merely a problematic of colonialism or empire, that is of the past, but an ongoing process that is constitutive for the governance of heritage in its national and transnational formations. The research project focuses on the interlocution between Western Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, mapping relationships between people and “things” that have largely been left out of current debates.

Editors: Banu Karaca (Principal Investigator), Çiçek İlengiz (Postdoctoral Researcher)
Editorial support: Jessica Metz (Coordinator), Loes Hendriks (Student Assistant)

“Let Us Imagine a Parallel Universe” – 5in10 with Zoya Masoud

Zoya Masoud works at the intersection of postcolonial studies, post-foundational urban theory, and critical heritage studies. As of Autumn 2024, she has taken on the role of postdoctoral researcher within the framework of the ERC-funded project “BEYONDREST,” based at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her current research initiative is titled Irrestitutable: Inquiries into Hauntings of Absent Cultural Heritage. In October 2024, she successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Dislocated. Heritage Construction through Experience of Loss in Aleppo” at the Technical University of Berlin within the DFG Research Training Group “Identity and Heritage.”

Poor Connections

By Jeremy F. Walton. In this contribution to the “Beyond Guidelines” Series, Jeremy F. Walton sheds light on a neglected aspect of the heavily ethicized field of European academia: the manner in which research ethics as a fantasy of best academic practice abets and exacerbates longstanding regional hierarchies among nation-states, and fundamentally complicates the professional lives of scholars who mediate between pan-European discourses and local institutions. There are connections here that have yet to be adequately grasped.

Ethics of Listening to the Silence: Voices, Archives, and the Unspoken Past

By Himmat Zoubi. In recent decades, critical intellectual trends have achieved significant breakthroughs in analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as in analyzing the dynamics between dominant and marginalized groups. These trends have led to profound debates about the production of history, emphasizing the need to consider the identity of the producers of history, the perspectives of those recording history, methods of reconstructing the past, ways of framing the present, the selection and availability of sources, and techniques of historical revision.

When Off-the-Record Takes Over: Research Ethics under Authoritarianism

By Çiçek İlengiz. In recent years, restitution demands for several artifacts raised by the Turkish government have fueled heated debates on “what belongs to whom and under which conditions,” and have simultaneously opened a new ground to reinscribe civilizational narratives onto the politics of heritage. Centered on questions around the construction of legal ownership, as well as “imaginations of inheriteance”, the author’s project aspires to connect the notions of heritage and inheritance by illustrating the links between what is considered public and private. In other words, it is an attempt to understand how what is supposedly belonging to everyone (world heritage) is legally, discursively and materially treated as inheritance.

Doing Research Under Current Ethics Regimes: Some Observations

By Birgit Meyer. Even if one does not find issues regarding data management and research ethics particularly exciting as such, it is necessary to delve into the rules and regulations that underpin the institutionalization of current ethics regimes in the social and cultural sciences. This is part of the basic infrastructure of knowledge production, that scholars need to know so as to be able to operate therein.

Introducing “Beyond Guidelines”: Navigating Mismatched Expectations between Research Ethics and Institutional Ethics Regimes

In this introductory post to the blog series “Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production”, principal investigator at BEYONDREST Banu Karaca raises a few issues pertaining to the key concepts in ethics guidelines that emerge from the mismatched expectations between scholarly research ethics and institutional ethics regimes. Tackling these mismatches is ever more urgent as these ethics regimes are ultimately part of governance structures of higher education and academic research that are themselves increasingly subject to critique in the social sciences.