Senior Fellows

Dr Fernando Nina is an interim professor at the Department of Ibero-American Cultural Studies at the University of Heidelberg. His main research interests and foci include cultural phenomena of Latin America from the 17th to the 20th centuries, cultural theory, theories of decolonization and the subaltern, and the cultural philosophy of Latin America. Besides long-term teaching assignments in Mainz, Munich, and Utrecht, he has been a guest lecturer in Spain, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil.

Project: Imaginaries beyond the Edge: Envisioning the Concepts of Escrevivência by Conceição Evaristo and Lugar de Fala by Djamila Ribeiro as Decolonial Perspectives on Conviviality

Abstract:
This research project will analyse the work of Afro-Brazilian author Conceição Evaristo (*1946). Evaristo was born in Pindura Saia, a slum in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. Her mother had no education but collected notebooks she found on the streets and filled them with her texts about life, thoughts, and poems. Her mother was certainly a great influence on Conceição. She usually says that, because of her mother’s habit, she grew up surrounded by words, even if she didn’t grow up surrounded by books. Evaristo’s fiction deals with the silencing of marginalized voices, and visualises with a specific poetical sensibility the histories of Black women living in impoverished conditions, contesting the desire of Brazilian hegemonic petty bourgeoise society to erase or ignore the strong presence of African people and their descendants in the national formation. She coined the term escrevivência to describe her way of writing. Escrevivência means “to tell our stories from our perspectives”. The neologism is compounded by escrita (writing) and vivência (living), as in experience. Evaristo’s literature is the most particular and innovative new form of representation of Afrobrasilidade in contemporary everyday life, that offers a complex vision of a world that (re)cognizes and starts from a multiplicity of voices. Within that framework, this research will focus on her themes of the body, procreation, reproduction, slavery, and desire.

Main discipline: Cultural Studies

Ina Kerner is a political scientist whose work is situated at the intersection of political theory, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. She has held teaching and research positions in Berlin, New York, London, Islamabad, Duisburg, and Bielefeld, among others. Since 2017 she is professor of politics in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz. Her current research is concentrated on two loosely connected challenges: formulating a post-secular feminist critique of religion, and rethinking core questions of political theory in the light of post- and decolonial studies.

Project: Inequality, Conviviality, and Solidarity: A Postcolonial Theory View

Abstract:

Post- and decolonial studies analyse, theorise and critique the manifold facets of our postcolonial present, a present that is shaped by European colonialism in many ways. Western knowledge production has dethematised, trivialised, glossed over or even legitimated these influences for a long time. In these cases, it can be interpreted as being shaped by colonial logic itself. This research is part of a larger book project that aims to help address and undo such colonial residues by outlining what a postcolonial political theory may look like. With regard to inequality, the project focuses on those aspects of inequality that are particularly highlighted and addressed in postcolonial theories, and discusses the ways in which such an approach may enlarge, shift, and challenge more traditional Western social and political theory takes on inequality. Regarding conviviality, it discusses how to deal with the diversity and plurality of contemporary (and hence postcolonial) societies in ways that redress, rather than prolong, past forms of injustice, including colonial ones. Concerning solidarity, finally, it focuses on the difficulties and ambivalences of global solidarity as well as of solidarity across difference lines in contexts that are marked by extreme inequality.

Main discipline: Political Science

Marcial A. G. Suarez holds a PhD in political science and serves as a professor in the same field as well as in international relations at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. He leads the International Politics Analysis Group at UFF. Previously, he was a research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. His research specializes in international security, emphasizing the roles of state and non-state actors, hybrid governance structures, and the resilience of local communities.

Project: Transnational Organized Crime and Hybrid Governance in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico

Abstract:

The research project explores how formal and informal governance interact to control violence in different security, social, and political contexts. We do understand that hybrid governance takes place when protection rackets are run by the illicit relationship between state actors and non-state actors. So, what is the relationship between illegality and violence? Several authors discuss that the dynamics of violence are influenced by several variables such as illicit market competition, fragile law enforcement, and corruption, to name a few. In this research project, the focus of the analysis will be directed to the dynamics of violence in the illicit drug trade market in Brazil and Mexico. The discussion will be more specifically on Brazil’s two main trafficking routes, the Amazon Route and the Provincial Route.

Main discipline: Political Science

Roger Friedlein studied Romance Philology (Spanish, French) and Arabic Studies in Frankfurt, Barcelona and Berlin. After shorter stays in Brazil and Portugal, Romania and Syria, he initially specialised in medieval studies, in particular Catalan literature of the Middle Ages, and completed his doctorate on literary dialogue in the late medieval philosopher Ramon Llull (FU Berlin, 2001). Research assistant at the Institute for Romance Philology and the Collaborative Research Centre ‘SFB Kulturen des Performativen’ at Freie Universität Berlin. Habilitation on the staging of cosmography in the epic Renaissance poetry of France, Spain and Portugal (FU Berlin, 2009). Since 2009 University Professor of Romance Philology, in particular Ibero-Romance Literary and Cultural Studies, at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Literary translations from Catalan, co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Katalanistik (since 2006). Current research interests include processes of knowledge constitution in epic poetry and literary dialogue during the Renaissance, early colonial Portuguese and Spanish literature in South and Southeast Asia, and autoreferentiality of 19th century epic poetry, especially in Brazil.

Project: Autoreflexivity and conviviality in Brazilian epic poetry in the 19th century

Abstract:

Epic poetry is of outstanding importance in the Lusophone world and also occupies a central position in 19th-century Brazilian literature, although some critical voices (in Europe Hegel, in Brazil the Polêmica da Confederação dos Tamoios) declared it dead with the advent of Romanticism. The extensive production of dozens of poems with many tens of thousands of verses can also be explained by Emperor D. Pedro II’s personal interest in the epic in general and in finding a representative poem for Brazil. Whereas the genre had previously been characterised by high literary prestige, social verticality and literary homogeneity, in the 19th century it opened up on all communicative levels: a more vernacular linguistic model (Gonçalves de Magalhães), a more inclusive concept of the epic hero (Teixeira e Sousa), an adaptation to Brazilian settings, a wider social range of authors (Sousândrade, Nísia Floresta) and the opening of the epic poem to the coexistence of divergent literary discourses and aesthetics (Carvalho Ramos) – a diversity of voices previously attributed solely to the novel. The monarchy’s active programme of epic divulgation accompanies these developments, which can be understood in the context of the increasing tendencies towards conviviality in Brazilian literary life. The poems bear witness to this discursive polyphony not only in their composition, but also reflect these processes in their autoreflexive dimension.

Main discipline: Romance Philology

Talja Blokland is an urban sociologist interested in urban inequalities and how our living together in cities enhances social and spatial segregation in cities, and how trust, safety and common understandings of the urban world come about. She has written about concepts close to conviviality such as public familiarity, community as urban practice and urban comfort zones. Having received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1998, she was a visiting scholar with various postdoctoral grants at Manchester University, The New School for Social Research, and Yale University. She was a senior researcher and project leader at the OTB Institute for Urban Development at TU Delft, and Gradus Hendrik professor for Community Development at the Erasmus University. In 2009, she moved to Berlin as a professor in urban sociology at Humboldt University Berlin, where she also directed the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies.

Project: Public Familiarity, Conviviality and Unequal Access to Resources

Abstract:

Why is it important that we rub shoulders in cities? Why is wasting time in the face-to-face presence of urban strangers good for our urban world? The research explores these questions in three papers. First, having conducted a large empirical project on the role of neighbourhood locations for encounters in digital times and under conditions of globalization, and then under COVID-19, the research will explore the consequences of lockdown restrictions for interactions in urban public space, for people’s sense of trust and safety, relations to others and for public familiarity (a concept near to conviviality). Furthermore, the conditions of public familiarity will be explored in a second paper which aims to build an empirically grounded argument on the relevance of urban institutions. Thoughts on the necessity of conflicts and the advantages of face-to-face conflicts – and institutional contexts – over other forms (such as digital exchange) drawing on various older empirical projects will be developed. In a third paper, the lens will be turned to the resource access and inequality dimensions of rubbing shoulders in urban space. Drawing on interviews with 120 Berlin mothers, I explore how they practice care: which configurations of convivialities do they bring about, and what are their exclusionary consequences?

Main discipline: Sociology