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Category: Issues

Four women standing in front of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Tartu University.

“Resilience and Adaptation in Difficult Times”: Reflections on the 2025 Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies

By Olha Haidamachuk, Lidia Kuzemska, Taisiia Ratushna, and Yuliia Soroka. In June 2025, four Fellows of the Prisma Ukraїna: War, Migration, Memory research group at the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin took part in the 9th annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies dedicated to “Resilience and Adaptation in Difficult Times”. On the second day, the Fellows organised a very well-attended panel entitled “Memories of War: Barriers and Bridges between Past, Present, and Future in the Ukrainian Experience”. They reflect on the different panels and talks and give an insight into the topics discussed.

(De)coloniality and EU Legal Studies

By Jennifer Orlando-Salling. In EU legal studies, time, space, place, and knowledge are locations for contestation, deliberation and reconstruction. A departure from methodological avenues ‘traditionally’ used in EU legal studies is not just timely but imperative to equip the field with the ability to engage with a broader array of options, viewpoints, knowledge(s), and strategies. The text shows how decolonial approaches can bridge the gap between history, theory, and action, offering practical and alternative solutions for reconciliation.

Women, Visibility, and Politics of Night from Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey

By Nurçin Ileri. When Kamelya Hanım was found dead in her home on Taksim Street in 1896, the news made headlines with sensational details in the newspapers of the time. In January 2016, 19-year-old E.F.B. was raped and robbed while returning home at night on Istanbul’s Bağdat Avenue, causing a similar media coverage. What was it that made the attitudes toward the victims in these two separate incidents, a murder and a rape that took place in vastly different historical periods and social contexts, so strikingly similar? The discourses and policies that aim to exclude women from urban spaces and the public sphere continue to persist by relying on traditional moral codes and the belief that the city can never be safe for women.

Kira Jumet & Merouan Mekouar’s “Doing Research as a Native: A Guide for Fieldwork in Illiberal and Repressive States” – Reflections from a MECAM Workshop

By Charlotte Fiedler. At a recent event held as part of MECAM‘s “Rencontre Ibn Khadun” series, Dr. Kira Jumet (Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College (USA)) and Dr. Merouan Mekouar (Associate Professor at York University (Canada)) presented and discussed their book “Doing research as a native: A guide for fieldwork in illiberal and repressive states”, which has recently been published by Oxford University Press. The edited volume brings together fascinating fieldwork accounts from social science and humanities researchers (spanning anthropology, sociology and political science amongst others) who conducted fieldwork in their 15 repressive and/or illiberal home countries across the world.

Queere Kunstgeschichte global kuratieren: Eindrücke von der Ausstellung The First Homosexuals

Von Pavel Golubev. Im Rahmen der Ausstellung The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939 in Chicago werden rund 300 Werke von etwa 120 Künstler:innen aus verschiedenen Teilen der Welt gezeigt, ausgeliehen von über hundert Leihgebern: Museen, Galerien, institutionellen und privaten Sammlungen. Schon der Titel des Projekts und der gewählte historische Zeitraum bringen die Idee der Ausstellung klar zum Ausdruck: Es geht um die Einführung eines neues Begriffs in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (und dessen Verschränkung mit Identität).

Who Measures the Value of Work? Artificial Intelligence and the New Transnational Job Precarity

By Nahima Dávalos-Vázquez. Over the last decade, the expansion of outsourcing companies, commonly known as digital labor platforms or talent clouds, has transformed how work is distributed and managed in the Global South. I met and accompanied the faces, bodies, and exhaustion of three remote workers during fieldwork for a digital and sensory ethnography. I followed their everyday life and registered their bodily and emotional states. What does it mean to work, to inhabit, and to resist in this new transregional scenario?

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.

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.

Remembering an Artist Who Gave Life to the Children of Gaza

By Loaay Wattad. Born in 1997, Dorgham was a Palestinian artist known and beloved by many in Gaza. Through theater, cinema, painting, and song, he brought smiles to the faces of displaced Palestinians — especially children — throughout the genocide. But Dorgham was not just a painter, filmmaker, or theater director: with his humble presence and tender voice, he gave kids whose childhood had been stolen by war the chance to dream again, and the hope that their dreams would one day come to life. On March 18, Dorgham, his wife Aya, and 26 members of his family were killed in a brutal Israeli assault that targeted his home in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza City. But the hope and joy he planted did not die. They still resonate in the Palestinian children who crowded into refugee tents across Gaza, where Dorgham created art projects and staged cultural productions for them — acts of resistance in their own right.

Ukrainian by Choice. Introduction to the Case of Ihor Kostetsky

By Tetiana Shestopalova. Ihor Kostetsky (1913–1983), a writer, editor, and publisher, was a huge enthusiast and promoter of Ukrainian culture. He belonged to a group of popular figures who identified as “Ukrainians by choice” in twentieth century Ukraine. This paper aims to reveal the factors behind Ihor Kostetsky’s Ukrainian choice and to characterize the peculiarities of his “volitional approach” to being a Ukrainian. Kostetsky’s self-identification as Ukrainian is not so much based on ethnicity as on the promotion of freedom of choice in national identity, which, in his opinion, was the embodiment of the struggle for independence.