20-24 July, Worlds in the lab, gd:c summer school
Experimental sites of dis:connectivity
The Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect (gd:c) invites master’s students and doctoral candidates in the humanities, as well as creative professionals at any career stage, to participate in a week-long summer school in Munich, Germany. There are no participation fees. Accommodation and travel expenses will be covered for all participants coming from outside Munich.
Please apply until 1 March 2026. You can find all details in the call for participation.
About the theme “Worlds in the lab”
Worlds in the Lab explores laboratories as spaces where worlds—and their fragments—are reconfigured. These are experimental sites of dis:connectivity in which the ‘global’ is disassembled into analysable parts, imaginaries of planetary conditions fabricated, or alternative futures modelled, rehearsed, and resisted. Laboratories range from scientific observatories and sensor-equipped environments to landscapes, archives, exhibition spaces, cultural institutions, and art/design/film studios. Across these diverse settings, elements of the world are isolated, scaled, narrated, simulated, transformed, or imagined otherwise. Such experimental conditions open possibilities for new forms of inquiry and speculation; they also produce distortions and expose the limits, exclusions, and dis:connections that arise when complex environments are translated into manageable forms. Rather than treating laboratories as self-contained scientific spaces or metaphorical abstractions, the summer school approaches them as experimental infrastructures through which environments, ecologies, bodies, and planetary conditions are constantly re/made.
Building on recent scholarship in the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, the history of science, global history, media and visual studies, art/design/architectural theory, anthropology, and decolonial and Indigenous studies, the summer school explores how worlds-in-the-making emerge through laboratory practices such as modelling, prototyping, display, simulation, and field experimentation. It brings the laboratory—as a concept, practice, and space—into dialogue with the spatial, visual, and material cultures of world-making, including e.g., archives, lieu de mémoire, planetary analogues, atmospheric observatories, geoscientific proxies, environmental monitoring infrastructures, and exhibition architectures.
What happens when “the world” becomes a laboratory object, a test setting, a scenario, or a speculative prototype? How do laboratory sites mediate between global and local scales, between human and more-than-human realms, and between imagination and material constraints? What frictions, asymmetries, and disruptions may arise? Which affordances, knowledge, and opportunities can be drawn from these experimental sites of dis:connectivity?
The summer school will take place on July 20-24, 2026 at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect in Munich.
Organized by: Clemens Finkelstein, Susanne Quitmann, Aliena Guggenberger
Please apply until 1 March 2026. You can find all details in the call for participation.