Stories are important epistemically, particularly as a source of other ways of knowing and being. They can open spaces for corporealities and experiences constantly and structurally marginalized and become a place of encounter to see each other beyond the dominant gaze. We thus consider storytelling as a critical methodology of working alongside and with those whose knowledges have been silenced and excluded. As a decolonial praxis, it counters harmful and dominant narratives and epistemic injustice and violence that erase the pluralities of knowing-being. It is grounded on an ethics and epistemology of relationality and accountability and praxes of rehumanization and healing. This seminar expands this understanding and approach by learning about and experimenting with dynamic and creative methods of inquiry, theorizing, knowledge communication, and collaboration that center storytelling. We engage with the following questions:
1. What is decolonial storytelling and what can it do?
2. Whose bodies, voices, and what forms of stories are valid and whose are invalidated? Legitimate and illegitimate? Legible and illegible?
3. What enables people to tell their stories? How are these stories received? What strategies of silencing and exclusion are in place that prevent marginalized voices and bodies from telling their stories and from being heard?
4. What praxes of working alongside with instead of speaking of/about/for can we enact to dismantle inequalities and hierarchies of knowledge production that mark certain knowledges as invalid/illegible/illegitimate and certain people as incapable of knowing?
5. What are the ethics, accountability, and responsibility of telling stories?

In this seminar we investigate the question, how intercultural competence is understood and trained in different fields and perspectives. Which means or tools are helpful, how are competences defined and which is a good way to get hold of them? Beneath reading relevant literature we also try different practical exercises and invite experts. The starting point will be to look into the basic theoretical concepts. Exercises and trainings will provide an insight into the different fields of application. During the course we will also discuss theoretical issues of diversity-studies, intersectional perspectives and decolonial critique.
Our course welcomes international students to join lively discussions about how to handle differences between people and which competences are needed for a future Europe.
The required activities in this course are composed of frequent and active participation, presentation in the course and an essay at the end.
Please note that this course is obligatory to achieve the “Interkulturelle Zertifikat”. More details can be found on our website and will be provided in the first session.

Reading:

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland (2015). Rebuilding the ship at sea: super-diversity, person and conduct in eastern Olso. In: Global Networks 15,1; Global Networks Partnership and John Wiley and Sons Ltd;
p. 1-20.

Nyiri, P. D., & Breidenbach, J. C. (2015). Intercultural Communication: An Anthropological Perspective. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition) (pp. 357-361). Elsevier.

The appointments on friday 19th April and friday 3rd March will take place online!

This course starts off from two core concepts in anthropology – gender and kinship – to explore contemporary issues related to family structure, division of labour, reproduction, care, bodies, sex and sexuality.

This seminar is part of series of seminars, jointly developed with the University of Rojava, with the aim to enable conversations among students of the Universities of Bremen and Rojava. The seminar will be part of the summer school of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Rojava and feed into a workshop on the role of academia in times of crisis.

The idea of the seminar is to collectively engage with questions of nationalism, racism and nation states, and discuss alternative ways of living together in difference. At the same time, the seminar asks what forms of education and academia we need in times of continuing wars and state violence, and the rise of the far-right in Europe and beyond.

The autonomous University of Rojava is based in Qamishlo in North-Eastern Syria (NES)– also often referred to as Rojava. This region has suffered heavily under the war, especially through the attacks from the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and the ongoing bombardment by Turkey. Under the Syrian Baath regime, Kurds were banned from speaking their language, denied the right to education in their mother tongue, and denied their identity as citizens. In response to these politics of nationalism, assimilation and violence, the autonomous region of North and Eastern Syria (NES) has become the site of one of the most interesting current attempts to establish a new form of living together beyond the idea of a nation-state. Despite the hardship, the people in NES are trying to build a society which positively acknowledges its multilingual and multicultural character and is based on ideas of grassroots democracy, feminism, ecologically sustainability as well as on a model of autonomy which strives to be an alternative to the nation-state. In this way, it provides a possible model not only for the Middle East, but also the world beyond.

At the same time, in Germany, we are currently witnessing a rise of the far-right, which is pushing an anti-pluralist, racist, misogynist and homophobic agenda and committing severe acts of violence. Its ideas of white supremacy and fears of 'replacement' feed into fantasies of a homogeneous, pure nation and deporting those you do not fit. It seems Germany has not learnt from its fascist history.

Together we want to reflect on the similar understandings of nation and state that underlie these politics. In which way do they promote or go hand-in-hand with discrimination, assimilation, and various forms of violence? What can we learn from the situations in each of our contexts? And what does this mean for the role of the university? What kind of factor does education play and how can it counter these (ethno)nationalist and racist logics? This is what we want to discuss together.


The Seminar: Structure, Dates & Times
The seminar is divided into three parts: one preparational, one joint seminar part and one reflection session. The first part has the aim to give some background knowledge to the situation in Rojava, the history of the Kurdish Question, and to discuss key issues on collaborative learning, as well as to prepare presentations, which you will hold in the second – joint – part of the seminar. The joint session will be held in two workshop-style blocks. Joint discussions will be enabled through simultaneous translation. As this seminar is a research-based seminar, we develop the topics for the presentations and discussions together. Therefore, we ask the participants to actively engage in the shaping of the seminar.

The Bremen-only sessions will take place on Mondays from 10am - 2pm.
While the six joint sessions will take place on block-dates at the end of May and mid-June: Currently, we would like to suggest: Saturday-Monday, 25-27 May 2024, Saturday-Monday, 8-10 June 2023, each 10:00 am- 2:00 pm. But, we will discuss the exact dates with the participants in class!

Language
The seminar will be held in a combination of English, German and Kurdish. Knowledge of Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic or Farsi is helpful, but not a requirement for this seminar. Simultaneous translation of and to Kurdish will be provided in the collaborative work. No specific level of English proficiency is required.


Literature:


Akkaya A. H. and Jongerden, J. (2012). Reassembling the Political: The PKK and the Project of Radical Democracy. European Journal of Turkish Studies (14) [Online], http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4615
Çağlayan, H. (2020). Women in the Kurdish Movement: Mothers, Comrades, Goddesses, Palgrave Macmillian
Flader, U. & Gürer, Ç. (2019). Building Alternative Communities within the State: The Kurdish Movement, Local Municipalities and Democratic Autonomy. In: Niamh McCrea/Fergal Finnegan Funding, Power and Community Development. Policy Press
Flach, A, Ayboğa, E und Knapp, M: Anja Flach (2016): Revolution in Rojava. Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan.
McDowall, D. (2004). A Modern History of the Kurds. I.B. Tauris.
Welat Zeydanlıoğlu. 2008.“The White Turkish Man’s Burden”: Orientalism,Kemalism and the Kurds in Turkey, in: Neo-colonial Mentalities in Contemporary Europe? Language and Discourse inthe Construction of Identities, edited by Guido Rings and Anne Ife, Newcastle upon Tyne,UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp.155-174.
Schmidinger T: Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria’s Kurds.
Film by Mylene Sauloy / ARTE: Syria stellt Frauen gleich, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEpXUCMSDqA

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