People

Adriana Rodrigues Novais holds a PhD in Social Science, acquired at the Graduate Program in Social Science at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). She has an MA degree in Sociology from Universidade Federal de São Carlos and a BA degree in Social Science from the Sciences and Arts Faculty at Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho. She is an activist at the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra – MST).

Ahmad Baba is a Lebanese theater / dance performer, social artist, and master’s student in dance movement therapy, living in Berlin. His performances are mainly ritualistic, political dance movement pieces that revolve around the question “What is a queer Arab identity(s)?” as well as around issues of stereotyping, orientalism, and fetishization in connection with his own personal immigration history. Since 2018 he has been part of / founded theater and dance story-based projects such as “10/01 Queer nights (de-orientalized edition)” and “QueeЯevolutions”. Since 2019 he has been a member of the collective “Queer Arab Barty” and works with various underrepresented groups to facilitate change.

Alice Pontiggia is an architect, artist and researcher from Valtellina, Italy. She is currently working on the constitution processes of cosmologies, on the eco-technical-symbolic relationships between human and land, on alternative futures for architecture and about the role of body memories in the definition of identity. Her investigations, which depart from spatial disciplines, philosophy and field work, are presented through writing, architecture, film, psychophysical practices and sound.

Antonio Romero is currently pursuing his PhD at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, FU Berlin. In his research work he analyzes the role of affect and emotions on the doing of migration discourse in digital media spaces combining computational and qualitative methods.
He also has experience creating Science Communication content for digital platforms, designing media literacy workshops and implementing gender mainstreaming projects.

Ariel William Orah is a Berlin-based Indonesian artist and community catalysator.His practices and research focus include socially engaged art creation, social and climate injustice, as well as identity, memory, and scarcity. An MA graduate from Steinbeis University Berlin with a major in Sustainability Management, he has also completed a degree in human-centered, empathy and experience-driven design from the School of Design Thinking Potsdam/Stanford and KAOSPILOT Århus. In his artistic practice, Orah works with different kinds of mediums from sounds, installations, movement, and other performing and visual arts mediums, and is heavily influenced by his experience as an Indonesian diaspora and migrant in Germany. He co-founded the empathy-driven sound artist collective L-KW, multi disciplinary art and culinary collective Soydivision Berlin and non-profit cultural organization Diantara e.V. (ravenative.com / soydivision.berlin).

Ariel contributed to our event “Everyday Life in an Imperial Archipelago”, the launch of the digital exhibtion created by our digital fellows Jacinta Kaipat and Theresa Arriola.

Photo credits: Irma Fadhila

Arjunraj is a filmmaker, visual storyteller and digital media producer. He engages with the medium of cinema and video art to emotionally engage and intellectually stimulate his audience sparking value-creative dialogues. Arjunraj is on a long-term journey understanding how bodies are read and counter read and its effect on our bodily belonging. In his early years of his filmmaking practice, he traveled across India on rail, road and foot working extensively with marginalised communities finding narratives that encompass the Indian identity. His stories dwell at the intersection of lived experience and imagined scenarios and are told by blurring the narrative divide of fiction and documentary. Arjunraj heads the digital media production of Oyoun, a cultural space in Neukölln that aims at bringing queerfeminist, decolonial and migrant perspectives. He is a Crossing Borders Fellow 2019 with the Robert Bosch Stiftung. When not filming, he goes for long walks or would be seen talking to a bird or a tree.

Camilla Kussl is active in interdisciplinary and artistic projects. Her research interests include art and global social justice with a focus on Southeast Asia. Currently she is studying art history in a global context at Freie Universität Berlin and investigates the work of artist collectives in relation to perspectives from the Global South and participation. Camilla is also working as a research assistant in the DFG funded research project Image Protests on Social Media at the Technische Universität Dresden.

Carolin Greifenstein studied art and visual history and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is currently completing her master’s degree in art history in a global context, with a focus on Europe and America, at Freie Universität Berlin. Her main areas of interest are feminist art history, posthumanism, and the importance of art for community and identity formation. She works as assistant curator at SOMA Art Space Berlin.

Award-winning , Alternative Hip Hop artist and songwriter, Caxxianne has been honing her skills on stages across Berlin for the past few years. Caxxianne blends her Music skills with her lifetime of Poetry writing experience, bringing about the perfect marriage of two of her passions.

Caxxianne’s evolution into music allowed her to express herself freely and boldly, daring to say what others won’t. Her music is created to liberate the rebel in every soul. She is a self-proclaimed peoplelutionist advocating for the rights of her people and all people. Caxxianne’s work takes you to a place where words become freedom, a place of elation for Black and Brown Humans.

Caxxianne contributed to our event “Everyday Life in an Imperial Archipelago”, the launch of the digital exhibtion created by our digital fellows Jacinta Kaipat and Theresa Arriola.

Photo credits: Ciao De Siervi Barcellos

Charlotte studies English Philology and Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin. She supported the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab with the event planning of the Web Lab´s third digital exhibition “Everyday Life in an Imperial Archipelago” by Jacinta Kaipat and Theresa Arriola. She remains in close contact to the team and will continue to support the Web Lab’s projects and ideas.

Acting diploma (1989); studies in German and American Literature, and Philosophy at Universität Hamburg and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1991-1997). Fellow at Graduate School „Codierung von Gewalt im medialen Wandel“ at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1998-2001). Between 2007 and 2021 interim professorships at the University of Hamburg, TU Dresden, TU Dortmund, and lecturer at the Universities of Bern and St. Gallen in Switzerland. Main topics/expertise: sexual violence & literary/cultural economic studies.

Cihan Küçük (b. 1987) is a museologist & visual anthropologist. He currently lives, researches and produces in Berlin. His main research area focuses on “museum politics” including topics such as the decolonization of the museums, art washing and art workers’ rights. He continues to write about these topics on e-Skop and in various other publications.

Daniel Pineda was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia. He studied journalism at the University of Antioquia and worked as a press reporter in the remote regions of Colombia and later, as a researcher in the region of Urabá, northwest Colombia. He currently resides in Münster, Germany where he is studying Visual Anthropology and Documentary Practices. He is on a learning journey to reconcile the pursuits of journalism and the constancy of social sciences.

Débora Medeiros is a postdoctoral researcher at the project “Journalism and the Order of Emotions” at the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. She wrote her doctoral thesis, titled “Engaged Journalism: Contesting Objectivity through Media Practices during the Alternative Coverage of Brazil’s June Journeys”, at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies at FU Berlin. Her research focuses on the multiple potentials for change in journalism, from cutting-edge, progressive alternative media to demands for democratization of communication and for more diversity in legacy media newsrooms. She is also a member of the Institute for Social Movement Studies (ipb).

Denise Ferreira da Silva is a philosopher and artist. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Ferreira Da Silva has published several books in English and Portuguese, most recently “Unpayable Debt” with Sternberg Press. Denises work offers a theory of race (Towards a Global Idea of Race, 2007) that goes through a deconstruction of Enlightenment philosophy and identifies the separation between self determined subjects and affectable others as a main axis for the reproduction of racial violence. Her artistic practice includes three movies she made with Arjuna Neumann Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018) and Sooth Breath/ Corpus Infinitum (2020) and a lasting collaboration with Valentina Desideri with whom she gives workshops on practices and orders of sensing in formats like the Sensing Salon and Political Therapy.

Derya Özkan works as an Assistant Professor in Cinema and Digital Media at Izmir University of Economics. She received her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies in 2008 at the University of Rochester, NY, USA. From 2008 to 2016, she worked at the Institute of European Ethnology, LMU University of Munich, Germany, first as a Postdoctoral Researcher, and then as the Director of a DFG Emmy Noether Research Project titled “Changing Imaginations of Istanbul. From Oriental to the Cool City.”

Dong Wei is currently a doctoral student at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She got a master’s degree in Communication from the School of Journalism and Communication at Wuhan University, China. She has just completed her doctoral dissertation titled “The Cultural Politics of Affect and Emotion in Chinese Reality TV: A Case Study of X-Change”.

Edith Sampa Chiliboy is a self taught photographer that specializes in fine art photography. She believes photography is a journey in which she not only gets to explore and understand the elements of environments she lives in but also gets a chance to explore her own existence and what roles she plays in order to make a meaningful contribution to the curent times she’s existing in. Each project she takes part in is a chance for her to explore her art.

Esther Allen is a graduate student in the Global Studies Program at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her M.A. thesis takes a look at the emotions behind the opposition to Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the U.S. Specifically the emotions and feelings pertaining to ‘Abstract Liberalism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2014), and how this shapes conservative whites’ relationship to CRT. During her graduate program, she studied at FLACSO (Argentina) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India). She completed her undergrad in political science at San Francisco State University. Her research interests include social theory, the history of neoliberalism, and how emotions shape the affective life of social inequality and race in the U.S.

Eva Riedelsheimer studied International Development and Comparative Literature in Vienna and Berlin and is currently responsible for the public relations of CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. In that capacity she manages social media and press for the Affect & Colonialism Web Lab and will also be first responder for messages and mails that you might send to the core team. The Affect and Colonialism Web Lab hits the mark of her personal interest in the linkage between art, knowledge production and activism. That is why she tries to explore feminist and decolonial practices of writing in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa in her master thesis, that she is currently working on.

Fabian Bernhardt studied Philosophy, Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Literature. In 2018, he received his PhD from the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin. In his work, he is primarily concerned with historical injustice, violence, guilt, vulnerability, the affective afterlife of troublesome pasts, and colonial specters.

Friederike is a political theorist and urban sociologist. She currently works as an Assistant Professor for Cultural Geography in the Netherlands. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political and spatial theories of conflict. She conducts empirically grounded research on mo(ve)ments of artistic activism and contested public spaces. As part of her conflict-oriented understanding of politics, Friederike constantly wrestles with ghosts that visit her academic and everyday life, and as a result, writes poetry, mostly on Sunday afternoon walks.

Gabriel Scheidecker is an anthropologist at the Free University of Berlin. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research about childrearing, and emotion socialization in Madagascar and about immigrant parenting and parenting support within Vietnamese migrant settings in Berlin. In July 2023 he will take up a post as Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich and launch the SNSF Starting Grant project: “Saving Brains? Applying Ethnography to Early Childhood Interventions in the Global South.”

Henrike Kohpeiß is a PhD candidate in philosophy and a research assistant at the collaborative research center “Affective Societies” at Free University, Berlin. Her dissertation unfolds an affective analysis of the bourgeois subject and engages in an encounter between Frankfurt School critical theory and Black studies. She has been teaching on among other things Sylvia Wynter, philosophy and the Shoah, and bourgeois society and its critique. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer.

Hinemoana is a writer, researcher, recording and performance artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She links ancestrally to Māori tribes in the North and South Island, as well as to settlers from England, Germany (Oberammergau, Bayern) and Australia. Her creative projects include several albums of original music, field recordings and text-based sonic art, as well as four published collections of poetry. Her 2020 poetry book, ‘Funkhaus’, was a finalist for the Ockham New Zealand Book National Book Awards. A bilingual English/German edition of ‘Funkhaus’ (with poet, performer and translator Ulrike Almut Sandig) was released by Voland & Quist | Edition AZUR in Autumn 2023. Hinemoana has lived, written and performed internationally for many years, most recently on Guåhan, where she worked with Humanities Guåhan to offer workshops and other events. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany, writing and working with museums and other cultural institutions, among other things towards the repatriation of Māori ancestral remains still held in these locations.

Hinemoana contributed to our event “Everyday Life in an Imperial Archipelago”, the launch of the digital exhibition created by our digital fellows Jacinta Kaipat and Theresa Arriola.

Ida Danewid is an interdisciplinary scholar, working across the fields of political theory, sociology, and works as a lecturer at the Department for International Relations at the University of Sussex. Danewid has been part of an extensive strike action across Universities in the UK, fighting against severe pension cuts for university staff. She earned her PhD from the London School of Economics in 2018. Danewid is the co-editor of “The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, Citizenship”, published last year with Palgrave Macmillan together with a group of scholars and published several articles on Racial Violence and capitalism in Europe.

Cinta is an indigenous Refaluwasch-Chamorro community advocate, artist, songwriter, filmmaker, attorney, former lawmaker and soon-to-be published author. She was born in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). She went to college in Chicago, Illinois, where she earned her BA in Liberal Arts from DePaul University and her JD from the University of Minnesota Law School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Cinta studied and worked in the United States for nearly 20 years before returning home to her island roots and resettling on Saipan.

Jaider Esbell (41, born in Normandia-RR) was an artist, writer, cultural producer, curator, and independent researcher. He had been working for over 10 years in various artistic fields. In addition, his research focused on developing a terminology for conceptualizing contemporary indigenous art. Jaider held various prizes in the fields of literature, cinema and visual arts. He lived between São Paulo (Brazil) and Boa Vista (Roraima, Brazil), where he also maintained a studio and his own gallery, the Jaider Esbell Gallery of Contemporary Indigenous Art.

Jan Slaby is Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Emotion at Freie Universität Berlin. His expertise includes social and action-oriented approaches to the mind, philosophical emotion theory, affect studies and critical perspectives on the human sciences and on their societal impact. He is a co-PI and member of the governing board in the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität. With Suparna Choudhury, he was Co-Editor of Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Wiley 2012). With Christian von Scheve, he co-edited Affective Societies: Key Concepts (Routledge 2019). Among his journal articles are texts “More Than a Feeling: Affect as Radical Situatedness (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2017) and “Affective Arrangements” (Emotion Review 2019, with Rainer Mühlhoff and Philipp Wüschner).

Jana Spiller is a student of the Masters Degree Art history in a global context with focus on Africa at the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied German Literature, Art, Philosophy and Museum Studies. Her interests lie in provenance research and digital matters of art.

JC Dozal studied Social Anthropology in Mexico City (ENAH) and in Berlin (FU-Berlin). His main areas of interest lie in the intersections between Ideology, Politics, Religion, Technology and Decolonial Queer Feminism. He is interested in Montage and Sound art as ways of investigating the relationship between archives and the contemporary.

Dr. phil. Johannes Siegmund is a political theorist based in Vienna. His research is on migration, racism, solidarity, and political ecology. He teaches at the University Vienna, in schools, organisations and institutions. His first book “Wir Zukunftslosen” was published in 2022.

Jonas Bens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on law, indigeneity, statehood, and colonialism in capitalist modernity.

Juana Awad is a Colombian-Canadian artist, curator and culture/research manager based in Berlin. She studied Semiotics, Theatre Studies, Fine Art Media and Cultures of the Curatorial in Canada, England and Germany. Her principal interests lie in the intersections of knowledge and artistic practices, the effects of institutional processes on the production and reception of art, and the political potential of arts and culture presenting. She has programmed for various arts and media organizations, and directed large research projects internationally.

Julio Pattio was born in Brazil between (Western funded) dictatorships and globalization. He left for Europe still young to join the Modernity he had so much heard about, just to find out he was marked from the onset as incomplete. He, nevertheless finished a Ph.D. in Philosophy (CESR) focusing on rationality and language in the 15th and 16th centuries West Europe. He is interested in the tensions between theory and biography as instruments to deconstruct 500 years of Western world domination. He still dreams of going back home.

Kamai is a musician and musicologist focused on African culture from the continent the Diaspora. His main interest is to deepen and spread the understanding of the spiritual-political power of African musical cultures, especially in its implications to the unfinished African Revolution.

Karin Louise Hermes is a Filipina-German storyweaver on climate justice, Indigenous rights, and political philosophies. She writes, thinks, and drops seeds of ideas in public media and academic settings, as well as into community spaces.
Her PhD dissertation (2021) titled “Growing Intercommunalist ‘pockets of resistance’ with Aloha ‘Āina in Hawai’i” is a philosophy of spirit and relationality, now revealing further seeds of theory to tend to in non-linear and spiral spacetime since.
She has lived in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i, and is currently based in Germany.

Katharina Brunner is a master‘s student in Interdisciplinary Anthropology at the University Freiburg. She supported the administration and public relations for the AaC fellowship-program in April 2022 when the exhibition “Umupashi bwa Namfumu – The Spirit of the Queen” by Kerstin Hacker, Edith Sampa Chiliboy and Patrick Chilaisha was launched. With her background in Social and Cultural Anthropology, she is very interested in the effects (and affects) of colonialism on societies and people worldwide and the power of artistic practices being able to address these pressing questions of decoloniality and resistance.

Kaur Chimuk(they/zie) is considered a queer flexitarian majorly performing as a curatorial researcher with a special interest in trans-disciplinary curatorial practice. Other than collective practice zie also likes to engage with radical performative actionism. Currently working from India also have a working base in Sweden(meteor international). Currently, zie’s one of the ongoing research projects about post-cinematic expression for non-binary viewership are in IDFA DocLab Forum, 2020.

Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher based in Germany. He conducts research with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture and is currently working on the manuscript for his next book, AmeRícan Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism Among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam.

Kerstin Hacker graduated from FAMU, Czechia in 1995. She became Female Photojournalist of the Year (Germany) in 1994. In 2009 she, together with the University of Zambia, received the Educational Partnership in Africa Grant and she collaborates with the Zambian National Visual Arts Council since 2016. Hacker is currently completing her practice-based PhD which explores un- and re-learning of photographic practices through decolonizing methodologies to dismantle an imagined visual familiarity with the African continent and its inhabitants.

Khadijah-Catherine Taylor is a Muslim-Puerto Rican Journalist with a vision to bring community awareness through storytelling. She is the first Puerto Rican-Muslim woman CEO of a Media companay in Newark, New Jersey. She graduated from Rutgers University with a Bachelor degree in Journalism and International Affairs.

Kilian Jörg works at the multimedial interfaces between art and philosophy. Academically trained in both fields, Kilian employs the expression of text as well as those of installation, performance, and music. Kilian’s main research interests are that of the ecological catastrophe and how to invent life forms that can deal with it in a plural and queer manner. Currently, Kilian is working on a book about the car as a metaphor for our exhaust(ed) entanglements with modernity.

Kukasina Kubaha is a graduate student of Southeast Asian Studies at the Asien-Afrika Institut, Universität Hamburg. Her research focuses on Queer Muslims in Patani, Thailand, through contemporary art and literature. She earned a BA in English Literature at Chulalongkorn University, where she was also a research assistant in Translation studies. She currently works as a translator and curator.

Laibor Kalanga Moko is an anthropologist. Formerly at the University of Dodoma, Tanzania he joined Freie Universität Berlin for his doctoral research. He has been conducting ethnographic research on affective dynamics and sentiments surrounding source communities’ encounters with colonial objects of their origin housed in the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. He uses visual methods, qualitative interviews and focus group discussions to carry out his research.

Lea Ebeling is a social anthropologist (M.A.), illustrator, mural and comic artist. Working interdisciplinary, she combines science and art to make scientific findings more widely accessible and uses her ethnographic expertise to enrich her artistic endeavors, for example in collaborative murals or comics based on ethnographic field work. For her master thesis in Modern South and Southeast Asian Studies, she collected anti-capitalist future imaginaries with activists and employed drawing as a creative research method and a mode of representation.

Lennart Dührsen has degrees in Computer Science and North American Studies from Free University Berlin. In 2018/19, he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his thesis on intimate partner violence among same-sex couples. He currently works in research data management at the CRC 1171 »Affective Societies« and as a freelance web developer.

Lilian Bankiyan-Monfard is an MA graduate in Migration and Diaspora Studies from
SOAS, the University of London based in Berlin. She has a bachelor’s degree in
Geography and International Relations from the University of Exeter. Her work
focuses on migrants’ forms of resistance and strategies of survival in the neoliberal
economy.

Lisa Guenther is Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. Guenther specializes in feminist philosophy, critical phenomenology, and political philosophy. Her authored works include Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics and Reproduction (2007). She also co-edited Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015).

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work examines themes around reproduction, herbal medicine, coloniality, gender, and race. In her doctoral dissertation she approaches the control over fertility and reproduction as a foundational biopolitical gesture for the establishment of the colonial/modern gender system, theorizing the emergence of “technoecologies of birth control” as a framework for resisting, disrupting, and troubling colonial domination. Her ongoing artistic research project, “A Topography of Excesses”, looks into encounters between human and plant beings in herbal medicine through the lenses of radical care. She is part of the curatorial board of transmediale 2021 and an assistant professor and vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon. She is a founding member of Decolonising Design.

Madhumita Nandi is a photographer, researcher and visual anthropologist deeply invested in re-examining and reforming practices of how we say, save and share our collective memories. Her work centers around investigating and subverting the impact of the colonialist archival practices on contemporary society. Her current research mediates the visual and ethno-histories of indigenous communities in Samoa and Greenland.
Madhumita currently works as the artistic co-director of Berlin based cultural organization Oyoun, where she leads projects at intersections of post-colonialism, indigenous education, environment with a special focus on preserving and curating intangible heritage and ephemeral art. Here she curates and creates projects collaborating with artists and practitioners around the world invigorating customs, rituals and embodied memories, pivoting process driven methodologies, decolonial representations and shared healing practices. In her free time, Madhumita enjoys cooking and dancing.

Makossiri is a Kenyan-born electronic music producer/dj who makes club music that defies genre limitations. Rich in narration and soaked in a cinematic atmosphere, her sets are a blend of experimental music, hardcore techno, psy-trance, industrial noise, and african rhythms often mixed in with her own live vocals, outerworldly sounds, and elements of Afro-Futurism and Egyptian mythology.
Makossiri started her musical and artistic journey at a very young age in the church choir in Kenya, then later developing a passion for poetry, acting, songwriting and acoustic guitar. In 2018,she decided to move from Kenya to Kampala and be part of its vibrant artistic scene. In Kampala ,she started organizing fashion pop ups and music events and later on got into deejaying and producing music. Her latest Ep, Juicy Juicy with Hakuna Kulala (under Nyege Nyege Tapes) was released, 1st October 2021.

contributed to our event “Everyday Life in an Imperial Archipelago”, the launch of the digital exhibtion created by our digital fellows Jacinta Kaipat and Theresa Arriola.

Photo credits: KrasaGlobal Photography

Mala Badi is a gender non-conforming performance artist, writer, and political activist from Morocco. Performances and writings arise from Mala’s personal experiences in daily life. Mala wants to increase the visibility of the queer and trans* North African, Imazigh, Muslim and refugee communities. Mala believes that decolonizing art is a necessary political act of affirmation of existence against the global attack and marginalization of the cultures, stories, and collective artistic work of POC and people from the south.

Manuel Bolz is a Master’s student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hamburg and is finishing his ethnographic Master’s thesis on the cultural technique of revenge. Previously, he studied German and Cultural Anthropology and completed his Bachelor’s degree with a thesis on health strategies in Hamburg’s sex work at the intersection of knowledge anthropology, medical anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
In addition to his studies, he was able to gain initial work and teaching experience as a student and research/student assistant and tutor at the Institute for German Studies and the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture History at the University of Hamburg, as well as a student employee and the Equality Office. After his graduation he plans a dissertation project.

Marckie, as fondly called by his peers, is a former communication and media lecturer and currently finishing his second master’s degree in Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices. His works center on media history, environmental communication, diaspora studies, LGBTQ studies, media ethnography, religious studies, and digital ethnography. His video on colonial nostalgia is a homage to his first love, History, and his teacher, who stirred his curiosity about Philippine colonization, world affairs, and historical events. Coming from a multiracial background, Marckie wanted to unpack in his future works the holistic effect of race on an individual’s personhood and the impacts of colonization on one’s mentality and identity.

Maximilian Apel is a master’s student in Ethnography at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Working as a student assistant at the CRC 1171 Affective Societies he supports the administration and public relations. His involvement in the production of podcasts and videos meets his interest in Public Anthropology and Science Communication. To challenge the idea of an academic ivory tower through accessible diction, artistic engagement and digital tools is an approach he is thrilled and passionate about. Living and studying in Berlin he developed a curiousness about Urban Anthropology.

Meryem Özel is an M.A. student at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she studies Art History in a Global Context with a focus on the art of Africa and the diaspora. She completed her undergraduate studies at Indiana University, where she majored in Art History and International Studies. At present she is working on her master’s thesis about the Nigerian potter Ladi Kwali and the history of African art history.

Noemi Molnar studied art history and religious studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin. She is currently completing her master’s degree in Art History in a global context, Europe and America. Her research focuses mainly on theories of affect and the staging of affects in photography and film. She currently teaches film and photography at a high school in Berlin alongside her studies.

Olivia is a BA student in Media and Communications studies as well as Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin. As a student assistant, she is managing the AAC Weblab’s social media accounts. At the moment Olivia is working on her BA thesis about Platform Governance in EU policy.

Omar Kasmani is a post-doctoral research associate in social and cultural anthropology at the Collaborative Research Center, Affective Societies at Freie Universität, Berlin. His work pursues critical and queer notions of intimacy, religious affect and post-migrant be/longing via the study of contemporary Muslim lifeworlds.

Opal Palmer Adisa (PhD), Writer, Gender Specialist, and Cultural Activist, is​ ​the Former University Director of The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, RCO at The University of the West Indies. Adisa believes that literature and the performance arts are the best approaches to interrogate gender inequality and formulate an approach to gender justice. Adisa is the Principal Director of Adisa Consulting.
A feminist/activist for over four decades, Adisa has published 22 collections, that includes, essays, novels, short stories, poetry collections and children’s books. Her areas of focus are gender-based violence and ending child sexual and physical abuse. Adisa the initiator and organizer behind Thursday In Black, an island-wide campaign to educate and bring awareness about gendered-based violence.

Patrick Kabunse Chilaisha is a 28 year old Zambian photographer who specializes in fine art photography and fine art photo manipulations. He is a self-taught photographer and graphic designer. He is a free spirit and because of that has been drawn to photography because it helps him express himself differently from what people see, this journey has taken him to self-discovery and exploration and has made him question a lot who he is and how he wants to live.

Pepe Dayaw is a performance artist, researcher and designer homebased in Berlin. Born (1981) in Manila and raised in a small island by the Pacific, he has resided in more houses than his age. For seven years from 2003, he worked in Manila in a church for seven years as a ritual dancer and researcher. He moved to Europe in 2010 as a theater studies scholar in Amsterdam and began to reform his life as an artist. In 2012, he moved to Madrid and initiated a project based on the simple game of cooking with leftovers or Nowhere Kitchen. It would evolve into a nomadic laboratory and a way of storytelling. In 2013 he migrated to Berlin where he introduced the Sari-Sari style, or the theatre and fashion of many things.

Pepe contributed to our event “Everyday Life in an Imperial Archipelago”, the launch of the digital exhibtion created by our digital fellows Jacinta Kaipat and Theresa Arriola.

Photo credits: Umi Maisaroh

Rilaben is a multi-disciplinary artist working with body, installation, visual elements, and voice. Tina Salvadori Paz is a multimedia artist working with video, photographs, and installations.
Our collaboration started a long time ago, in Prato, Tuscany, between dance and art /video works and documentation. Recently, we discovered a common experience of family members who fought in Ethiopia in the colonial army, so we started dealing with this past together.

Riyadhus Shalihin is an artist/researcher based in Bandung, Indonesia, who creates artworks inspired by site-specific archives, objects, and memory—using drawing, photography, film, and a performative approach as a body of the story.

Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo is an anthropologist and engaged scholar based at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute for Asian and African Studies. She works on peace and conflict studies, with a focus on violence and subjectivity, othering, moral and ethical self-formation, affect and emotions, resistance, and solidarity in national and transnational contexts. She is also interested in and writes on the anthropology of Islam, state and religion, decoloniality, critical research ethics, and engaged scholarship. She received her PhD at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, Freie Universität Berlin. Born and raised in the Philippines where she was trained in anthropology and taught at the University of the Philippines, Rosa continues her research on the country and its diaspora. She is also the founder of Philippine Studies Series Berlin and project leader of Advancing Philippine Studies at HU.

RUSS LIGTAS is a visual artist, performer, actor, and choreographer living in Manila. In 2017, he received the Alvin Erasga Tolentino Choreography Award, a KoryoLab grant from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and an Asian Cultural Council fellowship. His work has been presented across the Philippines, the US, Europe, and Asia, most recently at the Yokohama Triennale 2020. Currently, his art practice has expanded towards filmmaking with his debut short film PLUTO to be released later this year (2022).

Dr. Sebastian Schirrmeister is a literary scholar and translator whose research focusses on Jewish literatures, German-Hebrew Studies, migration and translation in literature. He studied in Potsdam and Haifa, was a doctoral fellow in Jerusalem and a postdoctoral fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen. For many years he worked as research associate at the University of Hamburg where he received his PhD in 2017. His current project “Legitimate Passions” investigates reflections on revenge in post-Shoah Jewish literatures.

Seçil Yersel is an artist with a background on sociology and art. Since 1994 she works with and within photography; in search for third spaces and new perceptions of place making; she walks, collects, sounds and shares her productions in exhibitions, publications, in different occasions and moments. Yersel has been in the field of “writing” since 1994; she is documenting, recording and noting the daily life and producing texts on exhibitions & performances. Since 2000 Seçil Yersel is the co-founder of the artist collective Oda Projesi (İstanbul) with Özge Açıkkol and Güneş Savaş. Oda Projesi situates itself specifically into the energetics of the city of İstanbul and its main objective has been to look at the rapid physical and social changes in the urban texture by creating alternative modes of space making and establishing links of solidarity through relationships. Yersel is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA)-Turkey.

Sonji Shah is a trans non-binary writer and community researcher. They are concerned with imagining alternative, decolonial futures through creative writing, poetry and literary criticism.

Suelen Calonga is a visual artist and researcher in arts and culture. Her interests revolve around knowledge transfer, investigations of black cultural heritage, the relationship between Archive-Knowledge-Memory, and counter-ethnography, a concept she develops to deepen the discussion about the role of museums and national archives and their collections. Suelen has a master’s degree in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar); a bachelor in Social Communication (PUC Minas), and a specialization diploma in Images and Media Cultures UFMG).

Susanna Jorek specialised in Urban Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Migration and Diaspora, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Intersectionality and Qualitative/Interpretative Research. For her PhD research, she conducted an ethnography on different heritage practices in a city titled ‘Heritage Communities and (Street) Heritage in Contemporary Urban Spaces. On the Role of Museums, Communities and Neighbourhoods’, where she presented and analysed heritage practices in relation to different communities and urban spaces.

She is particularly interested in exploring and comprehending collaborative practices, social realities, communities and cultural productions through the application of participatory and ethnographic methods.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian and curator with a focus on Ukrainian and Eastern European art. She holds her PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. In 2019-2020, she curated a large-scale exhibition “At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019” in Mexico and Canada (together with Hanna Deikun). She has published her work in such academic and media outlets as October, Art Margins, Revue Critique d’Art, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper, among many others.

Szu-Ni Wen earned a diploma in puppetry at HfS Ernst Busch, Berlin. In 2015, she came back to Kaohsiung and founded C-turtle tactic. Recently, she focuses on the interactions between urban development and people, memories, imaginations and identifications of places. Currently she collaborated with sound artist Yu Liao on the audio walk How is the Lasagne Formed? which explored the humanistic and geological history of Hualien City. Her stop motion film Kern was invited to International Uranium Film Festival 2014.

Dr. Tamar Blickstein is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Venice – Ca’ Foscari, and an associate researcher at the SFB1171 Affective Societies, Freie Universität, where she co-leads the Ecology and Affect Working Group. She has published and conducted ethnographic research on colonial modes of dispossession, racialization, and contested memory politics in Latin America and Europe, and is starting a new project on the affects of environmental loss in the agribusiness and deforestation frontiers of the South American Gran Chaco.

Tanja-Bianca Schmidt is an Afro-German artist, curator, and art historian with a focus on African Art. Her work engages with aesthetics of protest, notions of migrations, racism, and black identity. She currently works for Stiftung Humboldt Forum and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Tatiana Quintero was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. She studied Political Science and Law at Rosario University and worked as a social researcher, emphasizing topics associated with human rights, ethnic communities in Colombia, and communitarian strategies to resist and re-exist after the internal armed conflict in the country. She is studying Social Anthropology at the University of Münster, Germany, and is learning about the contributions of Latin American thought regarding social research and anthropological critical perspectives.

Isa is an indigenous Chamorro woman who was born and raised in the Northern Mariana Islands. Her early encounters with military personnel in her youth inspired her to learn more about her islands’ role in the broader process of militarization. She earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles. She is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University in Tiohtia:ke/Montreal where she teaches about militarism, indigenous sovereignty and the sociopolitical realities of Oceania more broadly.

Tyrone S. Palmer’s teaching and research concerns Black critical thought, poetics, and negativity. His current book manuscript, “Felt Antagonisms: Blackness, Negativity, and the Grammars of Affect,” explores how key Black literary texts theorize the failures of a universalist conception of affect to account for the grammars of feeling that emerge from the singularity of Blackness. Palmer’s scholarship has previously been published or is forthcoming in Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Critical Ethnic Studies, Philosophy Today, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Post-45, Discourse, and the edited volume The Affect Theory Reader II: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. In addition to his scholarly work, Palmer has published cultural criticism and poetry in a number of venues, including The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Offing, and Callaloo.

Ulrike Geiger studied History and French Literature. After working as a freelance translator for some years she started to involve herself in third party funding management at Freie Universität Berlin and is currently operating in this field at Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies. She is also supporting the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab with any workload related to finances, such as the fellowship program among others. Besides finances she is much interested in strategies of organizing working processes, i.e., management of complex work settings by using tools of change management, digital communication, and agile project management.

Unstern studies art history in a global context with a focus on America and Europe at the Free University of Berlin. She is particularly interested in contemporary art and photography, postcolonial issues, activist art, and the institutional absurdities of the art world.
She wrote her bachelor thesis on Savvy Contemporary’s Colonial Archive, which invites citizens to engage with racist and colonial objects in their environment.

Verena Straub is an art and image historian in Berlin. Her research focuses on images in the context of political agitation and popular image practices in social media. In 2019, she completed her PhD at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin on the actuality and history of martyr testimonies of suicide bombers. Most recently, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC “Invectivity” at the Technische Universität Dresden and at the CRC “Affective Societies” at the Free University Berlin.

Verlernen is a collective of people from different academic and professional backgrounds with experiences in activism and educational work based in Berlin, Germany. Building on their shared theoretical and practical knowledge, they create and implement different learning methods in the context of critical and anti-discriminatory education for different target groups.

I’m a human being, a Middle Eastern, an Iranian millennial, a woman, and a social science researcher, who has important stories to tell, like thousands of people have. As the co-founder of AVA, a social research network (www.avasocial.net), I decided to create a community as a bridge between academia and life knowledge. We also participate in the “Iran Ambassador at W.W.N.A. Network (Why the Worlds Needs Anthropologists)” program. My research interests are women issues, methodology and psychoanalysis.