In Past events

12 October 2026, Introducing the new global dis:connect fellows

A new fellowship year begins at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect: 14 international scholars and artists are coming to Munich for up to 10 months to work on their projects on globalisation and dis:connectivity – bringing perspectives from history, art history, literary studies, Islamic studies, theatre studies, and artistic practice.

We warmly invite you to meet the new cohort of fellows and their research projects: on 12 October 2026, 4:30–6:00 pm, the fellows will present their work in a poster session at our library (Maria-Theresia-Straße 21, Munich).

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15-17 september, global dis:connect at the Europaeum Summer School: Decolonising Europe’s Past

Europe's histories have long been shaped by perspectives that marginalise the experiences and agency of colonised peoples. Scholars and institutions across Europe are now re-examining them critically to rethink methodologies, boundaries, categories, and periodisation to recover lost voices.

This Europaeum History and Classics Seminar will bring together Master's and PhD students to ask how historical narratives inform contemporary inequalities, cultural representations, and political debates.

global dis:connect will be part of the seminar, with Clemens Finkelstein and Roland Wenzlhuemer presenting the Centre and its work on dis:connectivity in processes of globalisation.

More information and the full programme: Decolonising Europe's Past

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27 september 2026, Workshop by Alumna Franziska Windolf: The Memory Person

Visual artist Franziska Windolf, an alumna of global dis:connect, developed The Memory Person project, curated by Mareike Schwarz, during her joint residency with the research center global dis:connect and the ERC-funded project METROMOD. She will lead a workshop on September 27, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM at Bellevue di Monaco.

The Memory Person is a collector of memories and a collaborative role taken on by different participants. Originally commissioned as a 2022 public project commemorating local creatives who fled into exile during National Socialism, it has since grown into a framework for connecting individuals with experiences of migration and exile, both in Munich and abroad.

Through workshops, the project offers a space to create artwork that embodies these memories and shares their stories. It reflects on methods of remembering and explores sites with absent and overlooked histories of migration and exile during curated city walks.

Inspired by Karl Valentin's photography collection Munich Originals, which features quirky characters from the city's 19th- and early 20th-century subcultures, The Memory Person celebrates diverse expressions and interactions, turning fleeting moments into a growing, collaborative monument.

📍 Bellevue di Monaco 🕚 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM 📅 September 27, 2026 🔗 More info & registration

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3-21 August, global dis:connect at Mini-München

This summer, three postdoctoral researchers from the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect are bringing their research to the Hochschule of Mini-München, a temporary city run by children and young people.

Susanne Quitmann, Clemens Finkelstein and Aliena Guggenberger will explore questions of mobility, global connections and future spaces through talks and workshops: “Children on the Move: Tracing Histories”, “Mini-Mars” and “Global Fashion History”.

The contributions reflect key questions at the heart of global dis:connect: How do people, ideas and materials move across borders? Where do global connections emerge, and where are they interrupted or transformed?

By bringing their research into the experimental setting of Mini-München, our postdocs open up new ways of engaging with complex questions of globalisation beyond conventional academic contexts.

Find the full programme on the Mini-München website.   Continue Reading

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20 july, gd:c annual lecture 2026

Asif Siddiqi (Fordham University), Departure gates: histories of space on Earth  

Venue: Historisches Kolleg, Kaulbachstr. 15, 80539 Munich

  Please register by 7 July HERE.   Through a reading of the considerable ground infrastructure built in the Global South to support space exploration, this talk offers some preliminary conceptual interventions into the forms in which techno-scientific infrastructures have produced human, natural, and epistemic displacements on a global scale. These ‘departure gates’—places where humans have placed launch sites, tracking stations, communications dishes, radar installations, etc.—are typically obscured from view once the space mission begins, but yet render an indelible imprint on local ecologies.   In looking at the history of this infrastructure in several locales, including Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, Kazakhstan, and India—the talk offers insights along three threads. First it explores the ways in which the selection criteria for locating such technoscientific infrastructure derived from a certain kind of ‘logic of location’ which naturalized exclusionary practices as being ‘rational’ and opposition to them as being against the greater good. Second, it restores ‘history’ to these sites by situating them outside of the space program, thus linking them to broader political economies, rendering visible the seams of a larger story of the (re)appropriation of colonial geographies for space exploration. Finally, the talk offers a methodological intervention, situating this kind of technoscientific ‘passive’ infrastructure (and often, their abandoned ruins) as part of a global (and postcolonial) history of technology, one legible at multiple and overlapping registers, including the social, the technological, and the environmental.   Continue Reading

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15 july, La buena vida (The Good Life) – film screening and artist talk with director Jens Schanze

Join us for a screening of the award-winning documentary La buena vida (the good life) by German filmmaker Jens Schanze, followed by an artist talk with the director, moderated by Filipe Dos Reis.

Set in the forests of northern Colombia, La buena vida follows the Wayúu community of Tamaquito, whose traditional way of life is threatened by the expansion of the vast El Cerrejón coal mine. As the mining project continues to grow, community leader Jairo Fuentes enters negotiations with the mine's operators in an effort to prevent the forced relocation of his people. While the villagers are promised the benefits of modernity and development, the Wayúu challenge prevailing notions of progress and prosperity, asking what constitutes a "good life" and who gets to define it.

The documentary has received numerous international awards, including the Bavarian Film Award for Best Documentary, the Robert Geisendörfer Award and several international prizes for sustainability and environmental filmmaking.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/118427382?fl=pl&fe=sh Continue Reading

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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 note that the call for participation is closed as of 1 March. You can find the programme here.     Continue Reading

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11 july, Image Weaving Workshop with Artist Fellow Luísa Telles

In this hands-on workshop, Artist Fellow Luísa Telles introduces participants to the technique of weaving images through paper strips. Drawing from her artistic research on the circulation of tropical plants and colonial histories, she invites participants to explore image weaving as a method of transforming photographs taken at the botanical garden.

Through cutting and interlacing paper strips, participants will create new images that reveal unexpected connections, fragments and narratives. The workshop reflects on the journeys of tropical plants that were brought to Europe through colonial networks and economic interests, while offering insights into Telles' artistic research and practice.

The workshop takes place as part of Der Fahrende Raum at Harthof Plaza and is open to everyone present on site. No prior experience is required.   Saturday, 11 July 2026, 4–7 pm Harthof Plaza, Munich Languages: German and English (spoken languages) with interpretation into German Sign Language (DGS) Continue Reading

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18-19 June, In/tangible connections

material, embodied and sensory stories of global dis:connection

Global interactions do not only create connections; they also produce friction, delay and breakdown. Dis:connection is not simply the absence of relation, but a condition that shapes how exchange unfolds across human and more-than-human worlds.

This workshop explores how different ways of living, knowing and remembering meet and sometimes clash in moments of exchange. Speakers will examine how past interactions have shaped dis:connections in cultural, political and environmental contexts and discuss the infrastructures, bodies, documents and environments through which relations are made and unmade.
Drawing on material and sensory approaches from various disciplines, the event highlights the gaps, silences and disruptions through which dis:connection becomes visible. Participants can expect interdisciplinary perspectives on how tangible and intangible experiences shape encounters between people, species, places, things and ideas.

Co-coveners: Kate Stevens (University of Waikato, Fellow gd:c) and Erika Zerwes (Fellow gd:c)

The programme can be downloaded here.

Date: 18–19 June 2026
Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Munich.

 

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15 june, Film Screening: Boalândia (2024)

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