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Transsectoral Summer School: Learning City. Beyond the Classroom

Public Events

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17 August 2020, 6 pm, Opening Talk
Convivial Research and Everyday Life
Prof. Magdalena Nowicka (Berlin)

The term conviviality stands for how we understand togetherness (or, integration) and, in particular, what it means to live with difference in settings where people of various religious, national, ethnic and racial identities meet - the settings where the post-migrant emerges.
In her opening lecture for the summer school Viadrinicum 2020 Prof. Magdalena Nowicka will briefly introduce the term conviviality and elucidate how it is currently used in social sciences. Besides that, the lecture will shed light on the way this term can inform research that involves partners from academia, civil society and the arts and point out new fields of its application in the context of post-migration and dis-integration.

Magdalena Nowicka is Head of Department Integration at German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM-Institut) in Berlin and Professor for Migration and Transnationalism at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research and teaching activities are in the field of transnational migration in Europe, cosmopolitanism and conviviality, social inequalities, diversity, racism and qualitative research methods. She is member of the German Sociological Association, Council for Migration, diverse research networks, advisory boards of international journals (ex. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Advances in Research: Migration and Society).

The event will be streamed online on Facebook here.


24 August 2020, 6 pm, Panel Discussion
The Normal to Return to? Learning (from) Migration in Times of Pandemic

Panelists: Maksym Butkevych (human rights activist, coordinator of the NGO "No Borders Project", Ukraine)
Altynay Kambekova (social activist, member of the queer-feminist initiative "Feminita", Kazakhstan)
Estela Schindel (scholar, Institute of European Studies/European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder))

Moderation: Gwendolyn Sasse (director of ZOiS - Centre for East European and International Studies)

Despite the repeated official statements about us all “being in this together”, the inequalities with regard to capabilities to maintain safety and necessary wellbeing could hardly be more glaring in our quarantined societies. During the current disruption of an accustomed course of life through the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic precarisation of (social) lives goes along with a stronger interweaving of biopolitical governance, citizenship and the rights for basic living conditions. What can/should we learn from this disruption and the various strategies of dealing with it? What is the social “normal” that we want to return to and (how) can the current pandemic serve as a portal to a fairer future? What can the figure of the migrant (in times of pandemic) tell us about the notion of citizenship as the right to have rights and the entitlement to have a social safety net to rely on?

The event will be streamed online on Facebook here.


29 August 2020, 2 pm – 6 pm
Final Exhibtion of Results from the Lab.Workshops

During the exhibition students, young civil society activists and artists from inter alia Kyiv, Wrocław, Chisinau, Moscow and Frankfurt (Oder) will present their films, installations and field studies which were realized during the Lab.Workshops (ArtLab, DocLab and ResearchLab). The Brandenburg State Museum for Modern Art together with other local partners in several countries will host the event.


If you want to receive a link to the Zoom-meetings, click here to register. All events will also be streamed online on the Facebook page of Viadrinicum - Summer School.