Overview

The event originally was part of the Cornelia Goethe Colloquia 2026 and has been rescheduled.

The Istanbul Convention defines “violence against women*” as a form of human rights violation and discrimination. Its implementation is a mandatory responsibility for all levels of government—federal, state, and local.

This workshop explores how Afghan women activists use social media platforms, particularly X, to construct narratives of resistance in response to the Taliban’s gender apartheid regime following August 2021. The workshop aims to examine the role of digital spaces in fostering transnational solidarity, political visibility, and resistance, while also critically engaging with narratives of abandonment and geopolitical indifference. The workshop will allow for reflections on how Afghan women position themselves as political actors within global feminist and transnational networks.

What does it mean to be politically and literarily active in the 21st century? What challenges and opportunities does this entail? How does one engage in artistic resistance when the entire country is increasingly embracing a far-right ideology, while friends and colleagues in other countries are caught up in wars? Playwright, essayist, novelist, and curator Sasha Marianna Salzmann reads excerpts from a work currently in progress and discusses the idea behind the Utopia Osteuropa festival and the Radical Jewish Culture Days. The focus is on questions of cohesion and division, and on the political significance of friendship and alliance. How can we remain active in seemingly hopeless times?

Colonialism and its ongoing conflicts have caused trauma as well as material and immaterial wounds in ecosystems and social ecologies. The lecture aims to highlight ecofeminist and artistic practices of resistance, remembrance, and archiving as effective aesthetic forms that resist forgetting and demand both political participation and historical and cultural recognition.

In an age of polycrisis, the invocation to embody “hope,” in spite of it all, might seem like a ridiculous proposal. Imperatives to be “hopeful” about the future often signal or produce complicity with the status quo and its structuring violence, speaking as though social progress is an inevitable and natural part of history. For those of us whose futures have never been guaranteed, it is tempting to reject hope and embrace its seeming opposite: cynicism, hopelessness, or despair. Yet these refusals, too, have their problems; namely, they risk foreclosing forms of political dissidence and experimentation through complacency and resignation about the seemingly-inevitable. This talk analyzes both of these orientations toward and against the future, and suggests that each falls short because of a shared presupposition that hope and refusal must be mutually-exclusive and oppositional political affects.

This workshop aims at a critical perspective of the dominant understanding of care not just within the medical institutions, but also other institutions of care and how this understanding affects interpersonal relationships that shapes the reality of people with disability and chronic illness.
Participants will dive into deeper complexities of different care givers and care infrastructures inquiring how the lack of justice isn't a matter of an event or a situation but gets translated into an inevitable systemic limitation ending up becoming the norm.