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Category: Issues

What are current issues, ideas, themes or concerns that merrit transregional debate and exchange, and why? Issues offers an opportunity to introduce, report, explain and contextualize academic events, new and ongoing projects. For more information see Contributions.

Female Agency and Colonial Repression: Memory and Archives in Tunisia

By Nora Lafi. Reflecting on the role of women under colonialism crucially contributes to debates on how
to write the history thereof in contemporary Tunisia. Based on a corpus of original archives relating to French repression of women designated “rebels,” it is shown how a focus on women’s agency makes it possible to write the history of colonisation differently and to cast issues of memory in a new light.

Breaking Bias: Entry Points for Gender Stereotypes in Judicial Decision-Making

By Beate Streicher. As part of her re:constitution project, Beate Streicher investigated the impact of stereotypes related to gender identity and expression, sex characteristics and sexual orientation on judicial proceedings and decisions within the European context and beyond, applying an intersection perspective. The multimethod approach combined an analysis of key cases from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) dealing with gender stereotypes, recommendations of international monitoring bodies such as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO), and elite interviews with eight experts (six identifying as female and two as male) involved in CoE cooperation projects dealing with the topic such as the projects on Women’s Access to Justice (WAJ) and the respective courses from the Human Rights Education for Legal Professionals (HELP) Programme.

New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

By Anne-Marie McManus. In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared.

Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production

By Wendy Doyon. Within the global archive of archaeology created by the past two centuries of excavation in the Middle East and North Africa, a significant portion of archival documents, notes, and photos form a shadow archive of Middle Eastern history. It documents the knowledge transfer, techniques, craftsmanship, apprenticeship, material studies, and linguistic community of Arabic-speaking co-producers of archaeological knowledge. Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and his family are the “Ghost Writers” par excellence of Upper Egypt. Their first-hand narrative of excavation over thirty years of work in the field is the best documented example we have of the fundamentally multilingual process of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt and Sudan.

„Ḥamā lam tamut” (“Hama did not die”) – Remembering the Hama Massacre after the Fall of the Assad Regime

By Anna Christina Scheiter. With the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the brutal violence with which the regime had held on to power for 54 years came increasingly and overwhelmingly into the public eye. The Hama massacre in February 1982 is a momentous example of this violence. This central and defining event of Assad’s rule, which was a strong taboo for decades and has never been discussed or dealt with publicly, is now openly and freely commemorated for the first time and the victims are mourning on the occasion of its 43rd anniversary in February 2025. Addressing the Assad regime’s atrocities of the last 54 years openly at last and seeking justice for its victims is central for social reconciliation and a basis for the establishment of a new collective identity after the end of the dictatorship.

“Affectueusement, Laila”: Being a Communist “Foreign” Woman in Post-colonial Egypt

By Rim Naguib. Naguib’s research surveys a process of securitization of nationality and foreigners’ residence, whereby the right to Egyptian nationality and to residence in Egypt were instrumentalized in the colonial and post-colonial policing of leftist internationalist ideas and movements. While analyzing state practice, Naguib also inquires into how this particular policing technique impacted the lives of individuals, and how those who were the most likely targets of deportation resisted their remov-al in different ways. The story of Noémie Canel is one such account.

Populism in a Global Perspective: Who Needs Democracy?

By Katarina Ristić, Therese Mager, Constanze Blum and Man Zhang. The rise of populism in the “West” has prompted extensive academic research which often appears oblivious to populism’s historical origins and non-western genealogies. Focusing on populism as a threat to western democracies, much of the research on populism neglects variations and the different contexts within which populism operates in different world regions. In our seminar “Critically Engaging with Populism as a Global Phenomenon,” which we taught during the summer 2024 term for MA students enrolled in Global and European Studies at Leipzig University, we sought to offer broader insights into populism in a global perspective.

Decolonization of Migration in Divided Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm and Artistic Representations of Migrant Subjectivities in the 1970s

By Nazan Maksudyan. This contribution forms a part of a broader research agenda on the aestheticization of migration in France and Germany during the 1970s. It focuses on aesthetic representations of migrant subjectivities and the critique of labor migration in the context of arts and cultural production. The overall project adopts a sound studies perspective, and in this brief exposition, I focus on the concept of artistic residency and the invitation of artists from the “European South” to intervene in migration debates with an aestheticized frame.

Translation in Multiple Diasporic Contexts – Yasmeen Hanoosh in conversation with maia tabet

maia tabet and Yasmeen Hanoosh are Arabic-English literary translators who have spent decades living and translating from multiple diasporic locales. In this conversation, they retrace the trajectories of their experience as translators, uprooted Arab women, and bilingual diasporic subjects to identify intersections and divergences along their paths.

a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies

By Hashem Abushama. This essay was the winner of the inaugural Stuart Hall Essay Prize, a project initiated by the Stuart Hall Foundation. The award was presented at the 7th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in March 2024, also organised by the Foundation. The judges said: “We found it to be a powerful, politically important and theoretically nuanced piece of work written in lyrical prose. As a ‘theoretical diary’ that combines memoir, ethnography photography and critical analysis, it took us directly to particular places, evoking the author’s personal experience growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, carefully historicising the layers of colonial and settler colonialisms of this space, and theorising their relationships to different modes of capitalism.”