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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.
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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.
Continue Reading
9 January 2026
Silences and absences that articulate the world
Blank space in visual and textual media and associated concepts such as silence and absence have long been overlooked or perceived as negative space, lack of information, or mere nothingness. Instead, ideas, practices, and habits of ontology, epistemology, academic disciplines, and quotidian observations have focused on “positive” articulations in these media as the shaping mechanisms of perception, knowledge, and reality. Yet increasing awareness among a growing number of scholars – in the history of cartography, philosophy, architectural history and theory, literature, Black and Indigenous studies, international relations, art history, musicology, and other fields – acknowledges the agency of blank space, silence, and absence and the integral roles they play in constructing perception and knowledge of the world. The historian of cartography J. B. Harley’s seminal 1988 article “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe” draws on philosophical and psychological considerations of silence to identify how blank spaces and displaced knowledge have historically been integral to the development of modern cartography. In the 2007 introduction to From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, the historian-theorist of architecture Marco Frascari advances the fundamental realization that the substance of structures represented in two-dimensional architectural plans is the blank space in-between the lines that merely trace the outer edges of construction, substance that our eyes have been conditioned to disregard.
Harley’s works have alerted scholars to the erasure that accompanies processes of representation and the political claims behind them. In his 2023 book Blancs des cartes et boîtes noires algorithmiques, Matthieu Noucher further asserts that “Les blancs de la carte, coulis ou subis, regrettés ou revendiqués, savamment construits ou naïvement oubliés, sont le symptôme constitutif de toute opération cartographique.” Likewise, scholars in fields such as Black and Indigenous studies have strived to recover the hidden experiences and epistemologies covered over by blank space. With such approaches in mind, this international workshop sets out to examine how blank space, silence, and absences were themselves articulations/renderings that played an active role in the shaping and forming of epistemology. We ask: how do blank space and the knowledge latent in or conveyed through them both inform and disinform to create perceptions of the world?
Revisiting Harley’s still-powerful thesis, the core of this workshop focuses on presentations addressing the history and study of maps. It also welcomes research in other disciplines/fields, including visual and performance art, that connects to or furthers the study of blank space, silence, and absence in maps or elucidates new perspectives and understandings of these phenomena. The workshop embraces any geo-historical context and, particularly, traditionally under-represented areas of study. We encourage a variety of innovative or experimental presentation formats.
The workshop will take place on March 19-20, 2026 at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect in Munich.
Co-Conveners: Toby Yuen-Gen Liang, Academia Sinica, Taiwan; Camille Serchuk, Southern Connecticut State University; Filipe dos Reis, University of Groningen
Please register 
Performance, representation, and display
The concept of dis:connected histories challenges traditional narratives and the limitations of global history, both internationally and locally, by foregrounding the asymmetries of power and ruptures that have shaped it. Dis:connected histories underscore the need for diverse temporalities, epistemologies and sociopolitical contexts to engage with colonial, postcolonial and decolonial histories that have shaped “planetarity” (Spivak 2015). The lens of dis:connected histories is a critical tool for engaging with marginalised and/or excluded subjects, voices and histories that would otherwise not be considered in historical trajectories. This approach attunes us to elements that would otherwise be absent, fragmented or non-linear. By centring performance, representation and display in dis:connected histories, it enables us to move beyond analyses of hegemonic definition and status to consider the political and social-discursive forces that construct these practices. We attend to dis:connected histories in diverse historic and contemporary artistic practices from theatre to fine art, in cultural institutions like museums and in other institutional formations that might emerge in commercial and digitised spaces.
Emerging from discussions across the fields of art history, communication studies, and theatre history, we draw from our respective backgrounds with the intention of initiating an interdisciplinary conversation between artists and researchers addressing culture and migration. This focus reflects our respective projects on Brecht’s legacies in German theatre as they relate to global histories of migration and decolonization, and the expansion of community-initiated diaspora museums in North America. We foreground this topic of migration, as well as related themes like diaspora, as significant elements of dis:connected histories, and site where absences, fragments and non-linear narratives are particularly prominent.
The workshop discussions will focus on the following questions:
This workshop hosted at 
An open seminar/gathering with 
In the last few years, restitution has become an urgent topic for museums, politics, and academia. In disciplines like ethnography, art history, and history, the legacy of looting and, more generally, colonial injustice violence, has finally led to a sensitivity for the inequalities between nations and the necessities of repair. While the debate is mostly concerned with material artefacts like statues, paintings, historical sources and documents, the specificities of audiovisual media have not been at the center of attention.
In a workshop with Nikolaus Perneczky (London), we hope to open up an interdisciplinary discussion about the contexts, stakes, and perspectives of the restitution debate when it is approached from the particular requirements of audiovisual media. Responding to the premise that «rethinking restitution through the medium-specific affordances and operations of the moving image compels a reconceptualization of that paradigm» (Perneczky and Valenti), current fellows of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Global dis:connect are invited to share their experiences, questions and propositions.
Reading: Film/Restitution: Rethinking Displacement, Enclosure, and Relations of Care in Global Audiovisual Archiving (Nikolaus Perneczky and Cecilia Valenti)
Inputs, Responses, and Contributions: Nikolaus Perneczky, Hadeel Abdelhameed, Sarah Smith, Toby Yuen-Gen Liang, Katy Deepwell, Fabienne Liptay, Burcu Dogramaci
The event starts at 9:30am, registration takes place at 9:15am at Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect (gdc), Maria-Theresia-Strasse 21, 81675 Munich.
You can find the programme 
An interprofessional workshop for doctors, social workers, researchers, activists and anyone else who would like to participate.
Where: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Straße 21, 81675 Munich
When: 13 November 2025, 9:15–17:00
What’s it about?
Preventing sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted parenthood is part of everyday life for many. Nevertheless, challenges in contraception and counselling remain, particularly regarding contraceptive responsibility and involvement of men*. Researchers, doctors, social workers and activists cooperate to improve care and awareness. However, the reasons why certain contraceptive methods are offered to the exclusion of others, as well as to whom and when they are recommended, are seldom discussed in depth.
This conference marks the beginning of global dis:connect’s second funding phase. It explores the promises and challenges of the concept of dis:connectivity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Serving as a bridge between the past four years of research—during which we sought to unpack and define the concept—and the years ahead, the event will focus on advancing its empirical applicability across both spatial and temporal dimensions. Bringing together current and former fellows, gd:c staff, and partner institutions, the conference fosters dialogue and knowledge exchange across funding phases.
You can find the programme 
Cultural institutions around the world are facing tremendous challenges. Museums, theatres, orchestras, gallery spaces are under pressure to adapt to ever-changing policy directives and wider public discourses. Who do they serve? Do they justify their funding? Do they even receive public funding or are they dependent on private philanthropy and sponsorship? Are they subject to direct political influence or do they operate “at arms’ length”? Are cultural institutions required to respond to touristic-heritage demands rather than artistic imperatives?
The Forum is a new format with which g:dc will explore cultural infrastructure in regions undergoing turbulent transition. The first Forum will be devoted to post-Assad Syria. Once the most important cultural centre in the region, the years of war and mass emigration have left cultural landscapes in disarray. The workshop gathers together artists and curators from Syria and neighbouring countries to rethink how cultural infrastructures might be reconceived going forward. The challenges facing cultural infrastructures globally pose themselves in Syria in extremis, as much material infrastructure has been destroyed and the former institutions of a largely state-controlled arts scene no longer function. The workshop focuses on the following questions:
What remains of existing cultural infrastructure—both material and immaterial—and what new forms can still be imagined and built?
What possibilities and promises can emerge from these shifting landscapes? Which networks can be activated or reconfigured, and how might the region's cultural life position itself within broader regional and global artistic ecologies—particularly in relation to questions of alliances, dependencies, and hierarchies in the arts?