“Statuomania” overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments and statues placed thousands across their prized settler colony. The afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France, legally or clandestinely, draw on colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments offer visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. The increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate earlier settler colonial histories means that today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving a contested, yet shared monumental heritage.

Part I  Open to scholars of all levels

9:30- 10:30

As a continuation of Susan Slymovics lecture the previous evening, she introduces her work via a close reading of one case study or a monument that she examines in her book.

Short break

Part II For registered Masterclass participants only

11:00-12:00

Focused discussion of Susan Slyomovics’s book Monuments Decolonized. Students’ questions (collected beforehand) will be organized under thematic clusters such as mobility, decolonization, memory, materiality, and methodology and will be posed in class to have a discussion on each theme.

12:00- 13:00 practical exercise: 

Each student-participant brings one material trace from their own research, such as a photo of a monument, ruin, building, or object that carries a contested or ambivalent memory. Individually or in small groups of four or five, they place their case alongside your Algeria material: is it preserved, reused, erased? Who claims it? This would give space to students who wish to shed a brief light on their own projects. 

13:00- 13:30 Free questions, comments, and discussion. 

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Prof. Dr. Birgit Meyer (Utrecht): „Undemonise!“ Verlust und Wiederaneignung spiritueller Artefakte der Eʋe in Ghana und Togo

As part of the colonization and missionary activities on the Gold Coast and in Togo, spiritual artifacts of the Eʋe found their way into German ethnological museums through various channels. Carl Spiess, a missionary with the North German Mission, not only preached against so-called “paganism” but also collected many related artifacts, which were brought to Bremen as evidence of “idolatry” and “sorcery” and have been stored in the Übersee-Museum’s depot for more than 125 years. The starting point for this lecture is the work of the Legba-Dzoka Project, which investigates the origins and future of this collection through work in the storage facility, the archives, and field research in Ghana and Togo. For people in Ghana and Togo, engaging with the sensitive and emotionally charged Dzoka, Legba, and Aklama objects in the “Spiess Collection” opens up new perspectives on these artifacts, which, from a Christian viewpoint, continue to be associated with fear. Fear of the artifacts is transformed into respect for indigenous spirituality. De-demonization offers a different perspective on the missionary iconoclasm. This creates the opportunity to reassemble what was lost and to come to terms with this loss, both in terms of content and emotion.

————

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Archives have long since ceased to be understood as neutral repositories of the past. A rich body of critical scholarship has shown them to be contested infrastructures through which memories, histories, publics, and relations of power are shaped, negotiated, and erased (Foucault 1972; Mbembe 2002; Stoler 2009). Yet, much of this work has remained primarily concerned with the archive as a site of preservation, governance, contestation, or, in its counter-archival inversion, resistance.

Rather than revisiting these debates, this workshop asks what they look like when viewed through the lens of cooperation. We follow the fluid movements and diverse incentives through which different publics mobilize, rebuild, uncover, conceal, and seek to erase recollections of past events. This workshop shifts attention to archiving as an ongoing practice of cooperation, understood as the mutual production of the means and procedures of interaction (Schüttpelz and Gießmann 2015). It examines how and why the past is remembered and made public in the present through media, infrastructures, institutions, technologies, and environments; how particular versions of it circulate and acquire authority; and how its traces are maintained, transformed, contested, or erased. From this perspective, the archive is approached as an infrastructure of cooperation, grounded in distributed, material, and mediated practices of memory work through which past events are made sensible, publics are formed, and futures are imagined.

Approaching archives in this way shifts attention from what archives contain to the heterogeneous practices and relations through which they are assembled. It foregrounds the cooperative work that connects memories, their custodians, and the material and mediated traces through which they endure, while revealing how memories are produced, stabilized, contested, and transformed as different publics mobilize competing versions of the past. Like all forms of cooperation, these processes may falter, exclude, fragment, or break down.

The workshop asks what forms of cooperative work bring archives into being, hold them together, transform them, or allow them to fall apart. It follows archival traces as they circulate through landscapes, religious networks, migrant mobilities, museum collections, artistic practices, administrative records, and digital platforms. How do a colonial water system, a military ruin, a statue of Mary, a museum object, an administrative file, an old train timetable, or a sensor record become enrolled in new forms of cooperation that assemble publics and generate meanings beyond their original purpose?

The workshop brings Susan Slyomovics’ work on memory, heritage, vernacular archives, and postcolonial justice in North Africa and the Middle East (Slyomovics 1998, 2005) into conversation with current research within the SFB Media of Cooperation to explore archives as infrastructures of cooperation through which memories, publics, and possible futures are continuously made and remade.

Expected program: 

Keynote lecture

Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) , keynote lecture; discussant: Sevi Bayraktar(HfmtKöln)

Panel I: Sustaining: the labor that holds recollections of the past together

How is the past kept alive through repetition, transmission, maintenance, and care, and who is enrolled in that work?

Carla Tiefenbacher (B04) Catholic networks, voluntourism, travelling Marian statues, cemeteries, and transnational Catholic memory

P01 (Meyer/Mondada) sensory mediation, embodied memory, and cooperative practices of transmission

Nina ter Laan (B04) transnational memory activism and contemporary engagements with the material remains of colonialism in the Rif

Panel II: Breaking and sensing: absences, gaps, and cooperation that fails

What happens when archival cooperation fails, and how is this sensed and made meaningful?

A04 (Potthast) institutional infrastructures, maintenance and breakdown, public administration

P06 (Bareikyte) war sensing, documentation, and conflict archives

Martin Zillinger (B04) haunted water infrastructures, agricultural modernism, and environmental afterlives of colonial and postcolonial development in Morocco

Panel III: Future-making: imagining collectivities, claims, and repair

How do archival practices construct identity/collectivities, and project futures, including through restitution and historical justice?

Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University) religious heritage, mediation, museums, and restitution

Anna Brus (Cologne University)museum collections, and provenance research

A01 (Gießmann) historical media infrastructures, networked archives, and archival practices

Roundtable discussion

Closing roundtable with all participants, reflection on cross-cutting themes.

The 2026 annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical and climate catastrophes, anti-democratic backlashes and the rise of authoritarian regimes—all of which are phenomena closely intertwined with increasing datafication, generative AI developments, and the growing power of Big Tech. 

Around the world, we find ourselves confronted with these complex entanglements, whose environmental, political and societal costs are distributed unevenly. While digital technologies enable new forms of cooperation, their energy consumption also contributes to environmental disasters. At the same time, it is precisely these digital technologies and infrastructures that are increasingly becoming sites of violence, from algorithmic discrimination to gendered and racialized forms of harassment and disinformation. 

Against this backdrop, the annual conference examines how cooperation is being reshaped in today’s sociotechnical environments. It explores how various alliances—between states and Big Tech companies on the one hand, and between researchers, activists, artists, and communities on the other—negotiate the possibilities and limits of public action and perception. How do media and data practices contribute to new forms of control and how are they challenged via digital protests or anti-tech initiatives? And how can cooperative practices and protests also enable resistance and democratic engagement?

Bringing together scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers and journalists, the conference invites participants to inquire into the politics of media, data, and sensory practices, and to explore the role of cooperative forms of sensing and sense-making.

The conference is organized around three key thematic areas:

Area 1: Digital Power and Techfascism
In this section, we examine emerging alliances between governments, technology corporations, and far-right digital cultures. It focuses on current formations of violence and power: the cooperation between governments and Big Tech on the one hand, and the rise of the global far-right enabled by deregulated social networks on the other. Topics include digital violence, disinformation campaigns, the affective politics of online communities, techfascisms, and debates around digital sovereignty.

Area 2: Sensory Conflicts and Mediated Wars
This area explores how contemporary conflicts, from wars to geopolitical tensions, are experienced, mediated, and interpreted through digital technologies. It addresses major geopolitical and media-technological shifts, including the digitally mediated forms of witnessing wars and conflicts, as well as the fundamental expropriations of land, water, and resources underpinning digital media, which become visible through practices of extractivism, and the sensory confusion produced by disinformation and generative AI.

Area 3: Resistance, Cooperation and Democratic Practices
Alongside critical diagnoses discussed in the other two areas, this part of the program highlights practices of resistance and democratic engagement from activist research and digital anti-facist initiatives. The third section therefore explores interventions in the radicalization and fascistization of societies, how scholars and universities can act together with civil society to counter anti-democratic processes in which Big Tech and other corporations are actively implicated. 

As part of the annual conference, Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz will deliver his farewell lecture, which will include a laudatory address by Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser. The farewell ceremony will be held in German.

The SFB cordially invites you to the farewell lecture by Prof. em. Erhard Schüttpelz. The farewell lecture will take place as part of the CRC’s annual conference.

Please register →here

Erhard Schüttpelz was the founding director of SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation” and of the Graduate College “Locating Media” (2012–2021), and in these roles he played a key role in shaping the university’s interdisciplinary research profile in the field of digitization and media. With his work on the ethnographic foundations of conceptual development in media studies, he established a new research paradigm of international significance. Erhard Schüttpelz also served as a peer reviewer for the DFG and as a member of the University Council. In recent years, E. Schüttpelz has also, as a public intellectual, initiated and shaped political discourses, particularly regarding recent German history; see, for example, the discussion surrounding the significance of May 8, 1945: https://blnreview.de/ausgaben/2025-05/erhard-schuettpelz-tag-der-befreiung-8-mai-displaced-persons

In his farewell lecture, Erhard Schüttpelz will present and discuss his film essay “General Marseille,” which he produced together with Anja Dreschke and Carlo Peters. Prof. Rembert Hüter will deliver the laudatory address.

Following the lecture, the SFB invites attendees to a reception.

More information coming soon.

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Prof. Dr. Erella Grassiani (Amsterdam): Arboreal Nationalism: Planted landscapes of death and return in Israel / Palestine

In February 2026, thousands of young saplings were planted by bereaved families in a ceremonial planting event organized by the Jewish National Fund, or KKL-JNF, an organization founded in the 20th century to buy land in Palestine for the creation of the Jewish State. These saplings are to become part of a new forest, the Sword of Iron forest, named after Israel’s military operation in Gaza, and they serve to commemorate the civilians who were killed on October 7th by Hamas and the soldiers who died on this day and afterwards. Each young tree is flanked by a sign with the name and date of birth and death of one of the dead.
In this talk, I will analyse the planting and imagining of this forest and the meaning of death and commemoration through return in the landscape of Israel/Palestine, through the use of arboreal nationalism. I will show how the violent deaths and their commemoration through planting new trees function as a revival of the Zionist landscape and a firm rooting in it. The landscape, heavily scarred by war, is returned to the public to enjoy, but not without reckoning with its dead.

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Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

The SFB 1187 "Media of Cooperation" is pleased to welcome Kirill Maslinsky (INALCO, Paris) for a guest lecture on the methodological promises and pitfalls of using large language models in empirical research. The lecture continues the SFB's ongoing discussion of AI-based research methods, including the Synthetic Methods series and the Critical Data Schools on AI methods. It looks at a question that becomes urgent once LLM agents are used to analyse whole corpora: when do the numbers they produce actually support the claims we want to make?

Abstract

Modern LLMs have made it possible to automate content analysis tasks with a much higher level of semantic and contextual understanding than earlier NLP technologies. By analogy with Web 2.0, this transition may be labelled Content Analysis 2.0. The recent surge of agentic workflows has made these capabilities applicable at scale to real corpora. Isn't this the dream of mixed-methods research, where qualitative understanding translates into quantitative results with only modest time and budget requirements?

The problem with this scaling is that in the naive setting, where we simply instruct agents and collect results, we risk running estimation without identification. Estimation is the procedure that produces the numbers of interest that characterise the content of a corpus: proportions, trends, and effect sizes. Identification is the argument that the data at hand can support the claim we wish to make. The apparent fluency of LLM-generated results masks the lack of identification for some of the claims they produce. In this lecture, I will discuss methods to ensure the identification of text-based claims in the context of agentic workflows.

About the speaker

Kirill Maslinsky is a quantitative researcher in the humanities and a research engineer at INALCO (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales) in Paris. His background is cross-disciplinary: he trained in linguistics and literary studies and holds a PhD in cultural anthropology. His current work focuses on computational literary studies, including a quantitative history of Soviet children's book publishing, and he contributes to the ERC project "Theory of Tone". His methodological toolkit combines causal inference, Bayesian statistical modelling, and agentic workflows adapted for text analysis. He is committed to open data and open research practices and to building digital research infrastructure.

The lecture will be held in English and is open to all SFB members, students, and interested guests. It takes place on-site with a hybrid option. Please register via email to info@sfb1187.uni-siegen.de to receive the Zoom link.

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Dr. Hilal Alkan (Berlin): Return, stay, back-and-forth: Syncing migrant-time with plant-time

Hilal Alkan has conducted research with migrants from Turkey who settled in Berlin and its surroundings in the last five decades. For about four years, she accompanied them in their gardens, homes and balconies, where they care for plants. These plants play many roles in the lives of migrants: some smell or taste like home, others are material connections to the places and the people they left behind. Some are like friends who accompany them, others are witnesses to life-changing events. Migrants’ relations with plants change over time, also affected by where they stand in their transnational trajectories at that moment. However, their relationships with plants also shape and become the expression of how they relate to their pasts, live the present and imagine their futures. Plant roots, offshoots, branches and flowers help them emplace themselves, expand, relate, return or stay, both metaphorically and quite materially.

————

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Workshop days

Thursday: 10am - 5pm

Friday: 10am - 1pm

About the Masterclass

Are you a maker of multimodal works—a film, a game, a performance, a comic, a city walk, a web platform, an exhibit, a sound installation— but concerned about their legitimacy in institutional contexts that privilege text-based formats? Is it possible for us to appreciate and evaluate a multimodal work as academically relevant without becoming an expert in the specific affordances of each media format? What kind of pitfalls and risks exist when conceptualizing and practicing multimodal research, and are there ways to anticipate or even avoid them?

This workshop will draw upon the recently published Multimodal Appreciation Kit (Albrecht, Criado, Farias, Gilbert and Maier, 2025), and feature sessions devoted to identifying and articulating the value of multimodal works, as well as planning for and designing more-than-textual research. It will be of interest to those who have a multimodal practice, those who are considering incorporating multimodality into their research, as well as those who are curious about more-than-textual research and how to evaluate it.

Andrew Gilbert is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in multisensory and multimodal ethnography, experimental and collaborative research design, and the politics of social transformation in contexts of historical upheaval. He is professor of design anthropology at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, and former co-director of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Participation

The master class has 15 spots. Please register with Astrid Vogelpohl by November 15.

If you are currently working on a multimodal project and would like to present it in the master class, please indicate this when you register.

About the series "Masterclass for Media Ethnography"

The use of audiovisual media has sparked an increasingly diverse methodological debate within the history of ethnographic research approaches. This has provided innovative impetus for the reciprocal collaborative relationships that are developing between ethnographic researchers, research participants, the audience of ethnographic research findings, and the various media involved. In the Cologne-Siegen Masterclass in Media Ethnography, leading figures in visual ethnology will present their work and research approaches and discuss their respective research material with the participants.

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Hamid Bouhlal (Autor und spirituelles Oberhaupt der ʿIsāwa Shaym u Muhtār, Meknes-Paris), Sebastian Eschenbach (Filmemacher, Uckermark), Prof. Dr. Martin Zillinger (Köln): Selbstverlust und Selbstgewinn: Trauer, Trance und soziale Gemeinschaft in Marokko

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

As sensor technologies increasingly permeate everyday practices in mobility, traffic, health and care, the capture, processing, and interpretation of data have become central to socio-technical organisation, planning, monitoring, and decision-making. This one-day workshop is a cross-project initiative (A03 Navigation in/through Smart Cycling, A05 Healthcare, P05 Traffic Interaction) that invites researchers to critically examine the politics, ethics, and technical challenges inherent in negotiating and handling sensory data.

Besides technologically generated sensor data, research on sensory and embodied knowledge foregrounds the distributed sensorium, highlighting how sensing through bodies and environments produces situated forms of data and knowledge that coexist and interact with technical modes of sensing.
Moving beyond mere data presentation, this workshop explores how conceptions and practices of visualisation act as a form of distributed sense-making, posing the question how complexity can be handled and, where possible, reduced without losing accessibility. Participants will engage with critical tensions regarding data ownership and access (e.g. public vs. private platforms), interoperability across domains, and the (in)visibility of interpretative processes that define “prosocial” behavior, pertain to “good governance”, or shape care practices.

Through interactive “show-and-tell” talks, collaborative mapping and graphic recording, the workshop addresses the negotiation work that goes into making sensory data accessible, including for non-visual modalities (audio/haptic), and accountable to diverse stakeholders. The goal is to produce a shared framework for understanding the distributed socio-technical sensorium, identify frictions in current data practices and infrastructures, and formulate a research agenda for future working papers on the politics of sensing.

If you want to particiapte at the workshop, please register via email to Akib Shahriar Khan.

more information coming soon

During the defense, Yarden Skop will present and academically defend the findings of the dissertation before the examination committee. The title of the dissertation is: “Making Online Speech Governable: Problematizations, Platforms, and Publics in Algorithmic Moderation Infrastructures”.

How is problematic speech online turned into something a machine can detect? Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across content moderation teams on news websites, fact-checking organizations and EU-funded AI consortia, Yarden Skop examines how counter-hate speech and counter-disinformation initiatives problematize speech in distinct ways in order to operationalize these definitions through ML technology. The media studies project follows four cases: Google’s Perspective API, Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking program, Full Fact and its Alpha tool, and the EU Horizon-funded VeraAI project. It draws on interviews, event ethnography and on participant observation of participatory design workshops.

At its core are the research questions:

Who and what constitutes speech problems online, such as disinformation and hate speech - where did they come from, what are their specific constructions in the domains in which they are problematized?

Second, What forms of governing practices and social regulation are enabled when defining the problems as such?

Third, How are these governing practices executed in the building of software and machine learning tools for mediating said problems?

The central thesis of the dissertation is that definitions of problematic speech are not settled before technologies are built but are enacted, narrowed and stabilized in the tools, data practices and funding arrangements that claim to only apply them. These decisions are not neutral, and taken together, these projects can be seen as “moral infrastructures” built to define, identify and enforce the boundaries of acceptable speech.

The dissertation project is part of the SFB’s Integrated Graduate School and Skop is a member of project A07: “The Industry of Personal Data”. 

The examination will be conducted in English and will be chaired by Prof. Dr. Carolin Gerlitz (first examiner), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bernhard Rieder (second examiner), Prof. Dr. Marcus Burkhardt (member of the examination committee) and Prof. Dr. Dagmar Hoffman (member of the examination committee).

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Between Houses: Sensing Losses and Making Home in the Life of an Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Worker

Saleh Said Adem, MA (Uni Köln)

• Wednesday 12-1pm @ the department library, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Uni Köln –

This presentation follows the life of Mulu, an Ethiopian migrant domestic worker, as she moves through a series of houses and other domestic spaces between rural Wollo, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates. Rather than treating these movements as mere geographical mobility, I use Mulu’s trajectory to explore how different forms of loss are sensed, experienced, and made meaningful through shifting relationships to houses, work, belonging, security, and attachment. Mulu’s journey begins in her family home in rural Wollo, where migration is collectively imagined as both a departure from familiar forms of belonging and a possible route towards a better future. In Dessie, a household becomes a workplace, temporary home, and preparation space for migration. In the UAE, an agency accommodation places her in a condition of waiting, while the kafil’s household offers relative stability alongside restricted mobility and legal dependency. Her first encounter with an ijazah house subsequently makes another form of life imaginable. Returning to the kafil’s home, she begins to experience the same room differently: “The room became smaller after I came back … now I knew there was another life outside.”When Mulu eventually leaves sponsorship, she knowingly accepts the loss of legal security and predictability in exchange for greater control over her movement and work. Yet life beyond kafala does not simply resolve precarity. Instead, new attachments emerge through ijazah houses, migrant networks, informal work, and continued movement between households. Even after moving into informal live-in work, Mulu maintains a place for herself in the ijazah house.Following these movements, the presentation asks what is lost, what remains, and what is made anew as a migrant life unfolds between houses. It argues that displacement is not only an experience of losing home, but also a process through which meanings of home, belonging, autonomy, and future possibility are repeatedly unsettled and remade.

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Most subprojects already have a DMP. This session is about keeping it useful, how to treat the DMP as a document that grows with your data collection, what to revise and when, and how the DMP connects to storage, archiving and the requirements that come later in the project. Practical work on your own plan, not a lecture on templates.

The workshop is for all CRC members.

Here is the event link: https://umfragen.uni-siegen.de/index.php/785387?lang=en

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Grieving the unbecome: migration, disappearance, and contested mourning in Senegal
Marco Sassoon, MA (Uni Köln)

• Wednesday 12-1pm @ the department library, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Uni Köln –

In Senegal, migration has become a vital pathway to constructing an existential horizon, fulfilling core cultural values, and gaining a meaningful role within family and community — what anthropologist Francesco Remotti calls anthropopoiesis, the cultural process through which personhood is made. However, this happens in a contested space. Increasingly restrictive European border policies and their externalization have turned migration journeys into dangerous, potentially deadly ventures. Repatriations, disappearances, and deaths en route have become frequent, and migration is perceived with growing ambivalence — particularly by the families of aspiring migrants, who want it and fear it simultaneously.

During a year of ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural Senegal, I explored the ambiguous and contested experiences of loss among families of missing migrants. Such losses often remain unresolved: contradictory information, the impossibility of retrieving bodies, and the lack of institutional support complicate mourning rituals and prevent closure. Grief becomes contested as the migratory transition remains incomplete and the surrounding social ambivalence refuses to resolve. I argue that migrants and their families can undergo a process of border unbecoming: as border logic proliferates into intimate spaces, social legibility unravels and the pathways through which personhood is culturally constructed are foreclosed. In response, families of the missing develop collective practices of solidarity that can become sources of political voice and future-making.

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Sensing Loss - Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

„Umweltwandel am Sepik - die Nature Ministry und ontologische Politik“ 

Prof. Dr. Christiane Falck (Universität Göttingen)

• Wednesday 12-1pm @ the department library, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Uni Köln –

In der Sepik-Region Papua-Neuguineas verändert sich die Umwelt unter dem Einfluss des Klimawandels sowie menschlicher Eingriffe in das lokale Ökosystem tiefgreifend. Die Menschen vor Ort beschreiben diese Entwicklungen mit der Feststellung: „Nature“ habe begonnen sich zu verändern. Am Sepik ist „Nature“ jedoch nicht etwas, das außerhalb der menschlichen Sphäre existiert, sondern etwas, das eng mit ihr verbunden ist: mächtige Geistwesen und deren Materialität. Mein Vortrag untersucht, wie das Naturkonzept als Nature Teil der Lebenswelt meiner GesprächspartnerInnen wurde und es in einem von ungleichen Machtverhältnissen geprägten, polyvokalen Kontext mit unterschiedlichen Praktiken und Wissensformen verknüpft wird. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Nature Ministry, eine religiöse Bewegung, deren Mitglieder Beziehungen zu Busch- und Wassergeistern herstellten, um Wohlstand und Kontrolle über eine zunehmend unberechenbare Natur zu gewinnen. Der Vortrag fragt danach, wie Umweltwandel am Chambri-See erfahren, erklärt und praktisch bearbeitet wird und begreift Nature als eine Entität, die sich im Spannungsfeld unterschiedlicher, historisch miteinander verflochtener Weisen des In-der-Welt-Seins konstituiert. In ihr verdichten sich Verflechtungen von Christianisierung, kolonialer Transformation und lokalem Wissen. Umweltwandel erscheint dabei als Krise und Neuverhandlung der Beziehungen zwischen Menschen, Geistern, Landschaften, Wissen und Macht.

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

more info coming soon.

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

More information coming soon.

More information will follow soon