1970 saw the start of production for an unusual vehicle under President Salvador Allende in Chile. The Yagán stood for Chilean socialism’s approach to technologies and the materialization of Allende’s utopian project. Eden Medina tells the tale of an inexpensive utility vehicle and how it entered Chile’s history. To article...
Home office, sleeping rooms in the schools, and android teachers: These are just some of the things that students of all grades in German schools, at home and abroad, would like to see according to the results of the ideas competition Our School! The pedagogue Robert Pfützner, scientific advisor to HKW’s project Schools of Tomorrow, in discussion with Elisabeth Wellershaus. Talking about young people and their idea of a school of the future without heteronomy and the pressure to perform according to global standards – around one hundred years after John and Evelyn Dewey’s publication Schools of To-Morrow and other early reform pedagogy movements. To article in German...
Humankind proves to be both a shaper of Earth and the animal world. These formations and the wide-scale use – if not exploitation – of (other) animals by man causes great suffering to animals, which is generally hidden from the public and repressed by it. The legal scholar Anne Peters looks at the history of the relationship between “animals” and “man,” and calls for global standards of animal rights against the background of the dissolution of dichotomies. Article in German...
The history of the beat is a history of innovations in music technology and socio-historical developments. In the 18th and 19th centuries a square in New Orleans became a weekly meeting point for enslaved and liberated Africans, Americans, and Haitians. The musicologist Freddi Williams Evans on the historical appropriation of the site and its meaning for the emergence of Jazz. To article...
Normative binary concepts such as justice ad injustice are in a state of crisis. There are currently no alternatives in sight. The political scientist Nikita Dhawan analyzes the still pending decolonization of the Global North and South and calls for a transnational concept of justice. To article...
It seems that one of the defining features of the technosphere is activity around a threshold between the “real” and digital realms. In a conversation with musician and writer Annie Gårlid about his latest full-length album Hesaitix Producer James Whipple (aka M.E.S.H.) elaborates on sonic world-building, commons, and ambiguous territories. To article...
With every transformation in the media, images negotiate between levels of the visible and the invisible anew. In 1986 the art theorist and pioneer of the image theory W.J.T. Mitchell ventured an examination of the connections between the visible and the sayable. An excerpt from his legendary essay on the reproduction of cultural knowledge in images—which in light of the contemporary image politics of techno-capitalism is more relevant than ever. To article...
They were difficult times when Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein met in 1981. Shortly after the Front National won their first important election, the themes of “race”, “nation”, and “class” assumed a new urgency throughout France. The sociologist and the philosopher seized the opportunity to discuss all three social constructs and their interdependencies with their students in a long since legendary series of lectures. The later book Race, Nation, Class: Ambivalent Identities (1988, published in English in 1991) summarizes Balibar and Wallerstein’s research and reflects on the connection between racist structures and now newly established global class systems, both past and present. The Cultural studies scholar Manuela Bojadžijev spoke with both authors about the book and why it continues to be relevant. To article...
When Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities from Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein was published in German in 1990, the reviews were effusive. At the time, the book’s interdisciplinary engagement with society was perceived as ”without competition” and “forward-looking”, however this was largely restricted to a left-wing, academic public. Decades later the migration researcher and journalist Mark Terkessidis has taken a new look at the publication, concluding that the history of its reception proves particularly fascinating, especially against the background of the debates on the concept of racism in today’s Germany. To article...
For the launch of the program series State 1-4 (2016-2018) from Rimini Protokoll in December 2016, the philosopher Boris Buden asked whether democracy is dead. Just over one year later, on the occasion of the presentation of the entire tetralogy in Berlin, he again poses the question of the diminishing of state influence in the political sphere and the historical “truth” of modern democracy. A homage to Rimini Protokoll’s “Experts of the Everyday”. To article...
