Working Groups

Working Group - URBAN DWELLINGS



URBAN DWELLINGS is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary working group which emerged through various collaborations in the framework of the BUA-funded joint research project “Beyond Social Cohesion - Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO)” and RePLITO’s cooperation with Off-University. Off-University has its base in Germany and was established for and by scholars from Turkey yet addresses itself to threatened academics all over the world.

The working group URBAN DWELLINGS brings together researchers of all levels, from different disciplinary as well as personal backgrounds. It allows them to share their theoretical and methodological approaches to the interrelated questions of housing, dwelling, and living (well) together in plural and highly unequal societies. It provides a space where they can present and discuss their new research as well as publication projects.

Members of the Working Group Urban Dwellings are:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tuba İnal-Çekiç (HU Berlin & Off-University)
Dr. Arshi Javaid (FU Berlin & RePLITO)
Dr. İclal Ayşe Küçükkırca (HU Berlin & Off-University)
Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider (HU Berlin & RePLITO)
Anna Schnieder-Krüger (PhD candidate) (HU Berlin)
Dr. Julia Strutz (HU Berlin, RePLITO & Off-University)

Reading/working Group -Translational Encounters

Translation has been central to different forms of producing knowledge across spaces of difference. It has enjoyed a special focus as a field of study with the emergence of critical ‘translation studies’ and the centrality of ‘cultural translation’ as an essential concept in postcolonial studies. Translation as a concept and as a site of thinking and theorising has travelled across various disciplines to understand, among many other things, religion, identity formation, power relations, different forms of sovereignty, and of ‘living together’. From various epistemic standpoints and theoretical persuasions, translation as theory and practice has been associated with a cluster of multiple related concepts: re-writing, re-framing, re-reading, interpretation, foreignization, domestication, afterlife, appropriation, distortion, betrayal, transcreation, intertextuality, (ir)reducibility, (un)conditional hospitality, (un)translatability, opacity and so on. Any understating of translation indeed presupposes a philosophy of language as such. In this reading/working group, it is intended to think with translation in its linguistic and cultural configurations and examine the presuppositions that enable the articulations of any politics of translation or translation of the political. The idea also is to move beyond the mechanical understanding of language as transparent, as accessed only through grammar and dictionaries, and think with the ‘lingual [ and oral] memory’ of language as a repertoire of prior remembered/embodied texts, orature, voices, silences, sensibilities, that can be imparted into the landscape of meaning upon utterance. The primary objective is to think with (un)translatability and translation as a productive site of thinking and theorising in the humanities and social sciences, with a special focus on Islamic studies.

Conceptualised and hosted by Mahmoud Al-Zayed and Schirin Amir-Moazami