The event Research Lounge on the topic of “Participatory Approaches in Research” will take place on Tuesday, June 3, 2025 from 2 to 5 p.m., at the Central Institute Center for Cultural Techniques (ZfK) on Campus North. Organized by the team of the Vice President Research in cooperation with the HU office for “Knowledge Exchange with Society”, researchers from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and its partner institutions are invited to network at this event: Register here
Knowledge exchange with society is becoming an increasingly important part of knowledge production in research through participatory and transdisciplinary approaches. While these approaches are standard in some research areas, such as sustainability and innovation research, there is less experience and exchange in other areas. Among other research methods, participatory and transdisciplinary research methods are seen as a particularly good way to contribute innovative solutions to current societal challenges. To this end, cooperation with citizens, organised civil society, culture or politics can open up new research topics and strengthen trust in science through their active participation.
There are many definitions, methods and experiences of participatory approaches to research, as well as a wide variety of actors and forms of participation. The Research Lounge “Participation in Research” therefore aims to promote scientific exchange and networking in this area and to highlight the diversity of current research activities and examples of success at Humboldt-Universität.
Programme
2:00 p.m. – Welcome
Prof. Dr. Christoph Schneider (Vice President for Research) Xenia Muth, Leonie Kubigsteltig, Zentrum für Kulturtechnik
2:20 p.m. – Keynote speeches
Dr. Saskia Schäfer (Institute for Asian and African Studies):
Participatory research on democracy: Insights from civic education and local decision-making
Dr. Silke Stöber (Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences):
Participatory action research for food systems transformations: methods and challenges
Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild (Institute for European Ethnology):
Postcolonial Neighborhoods: A new experiment in collective ethnography and trans-academic collaboration
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Verhoeven (Institute for German Language and Linguistics):
Sprachen Berlins – Languages of Berlin: mapping the city’s linguistic diversity
Prof. Dr. Miriam Bouzouita (Institute for Romance Studies):
Using Citizen Science to examine geospatial and sociolinguistic variation and change
Break
Prof. Dr. Robert Arlinghaus (Integrative Fisheries Management, IGB, IRI THESys):
Co-production of knowledge in participation changes attitudes, norms and behaviour of practitioners: Examples from fisheries research
Prof. Dr. Heike Wiese (Institut for German Language and Linguistics):
Shaping multilingualism together: Participatory research with Berlin pupils and HU students
Dr. Constanze Saunders (Professional School of Education):
‘Learning schools’ and research-based teacher training
Indrawan Prabaharyaka (Institute for European Ethnology):
Animation and Prototyping: Two transdisciplinary tools for knowledge exchange with more-than-human society
Dr. Stefanie Alisch (Institute for Musicology and Media Studies):
Reasoning Sessions und Dubdampfer – Sound System Epistemologies networks in Berlin
We are excited to announce, that as part of the Conference „Borderless Museums: Redefining Museum Narratives and Inclusivity“ starting this Sunday on International Museums Day, inherit director Sharon Macdonald will give another keynote lecture titled “Museums Across Borders: Connective Potentials”!
📍 EPICenter, Transalpina Square, Nova Gorica
📅 18 May 2025, 18:00
🎟 For registration, agenda updates, and inquiries: epic@go2025.eu
Starting on International Museums Day, the GO! Borderless Museum Conference will explore how museums can redefine narratives, foster inclusivity, and serve communities in today’s evolving world.
Further topics addressed by the conference will include how museums can become borderless platforms of knowledge, discussions on museum ethics, curatorial roles and dilemmas, community collaboration, as well as transnational and cross-border museum cooperation.
We are delighted to announce that inherit director Sharon Macdonald will give the keynote lecture – Recentring and resocializing collections: connective potentials – this Friday at the Anthropology Day 2025, with the theme “Anthropology, Collections, Restitution“!
📍 Wereldmuseum Leiden
📅 16 May, 11:00
The past decades have witnessed growing concerns around collections in Western museums and archives. Amid broader post- and decolonial critiques of heritage institutions, objects and practices, museums were confronted with demands to look critically at, or investigate possibilities for the restitution of (parts of) their collections. While the focus has tended to be on ethnographic collections, other collections that include objects, human/ancestral remains, photographs, audiovisual material, botanical specimens, field notes, indigenous knowledge, etc. raise similar concerns. Anthropology and anthropologists are deeply involved in these developments. Anthropological collecting as a colonial and extractive method has played a significant role in the establishment of ethnographic and other collections. At the same time, anthropologists are also actively involved in finding ways to address this past and push for decolonial work, developing novel ways of doing ethnography as well as looking for alternative methods, epistemologies and forms of collaboration.
This year’s Anthropology Day provides an opportunity to reflect on past contributions and look ahead. What have anthropologists contributed to debates on restitution and the evolving practices of museums, archives, and the arts? How do anthropologists collaborate with scholars and professionals from other fields—such as art history, museum studies, archaeology, history, and law—as well as with activists, artists, and stakeholders, also from the Global South? What future directions do anthropologists envision? Can ethnographic fieldwork help reshape the history and practice of ethnography as a form of collecting? How can anthropologists contribute to research on (colonial) ethnographic collections, and how might these contributions reshape the way we do anthropology?
On May 28, 2025 at 18:00 we invite you to the next date of the lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters):
Becoming kin: the making of kinship in Indigenous Amazonia
Prof. Dr. Aparecida Vilaca (Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social Museu Nacional, São Paulo)
In this lecture, Prof. Dr. Aparecida Vilaça intends to discuss, based on her personal experience recounted in the book Paletó and Me. Memories of my Indigenous Father (Stanford 2021), how Amazonian indigenous peoples conceive of kinship not as something given from biological relationships, but to be produced in perpetuity through acts of care and recognition.
The lecture will be held in English.
Participation is possible without pre-registration and is open to all interested parties.
Organiser:
Prof Dr Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Dr Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Dr Laura Goldenbaum (Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace)
Place and time:
28 May 2025,
6 to 8 pm
in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor, Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.
Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology/MuseuNacional/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a researcher for the National Science Research Council (CNPq). Since 1986 she works among the Wari’ Indians of South-Western Amazonia, Brazil. Her fieldwork has been financed by the Ford Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She was Professeur Invité at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1999, Directeur d’Études Invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the same city in 2000, Visiting Professor of the Centre of Latin American Studies of the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2001 and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Social Anthropology at the same University in 2004.
On May 14, 2025 at 18:00 we invite you to the next date of the lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters):
The Creativity of Kinship
Prof. Dr. Janet Carsten (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh)
This lecture questions conventional understandings of the family by reflecting on the imaginative, ethical, and creative qualities of everyday kinship over time – qualities that are often ignored by social scientists. Rather than constituting a realm of conservatism and normativity, as is generally assumed, I instead propose a historically nuanced understanding of kinship and relatedness that has change and transformation at its core. Here I revisit themes from my work over several decades, including research in a Malay village in the early 1980s, a study of adoptees’ searches for birth kin in Scotland, later urban research in hospital blood banks and clinical pathology labs in Penang and, most recently, work on the texture of marital lives in the ethnically and culturally diverse world of contemporary Penang in Malaysia. I consider the ways in which ethical imagination, care and creativity expand the seemingly closed, conventional bounds of kinship. Searches for birth kin undertaken by adoptees expand their horizons of familial relations, demanding ethical reflection about family relations and about the constitution of the self. Marriage draws new elements into the heart of kinship, and is a source of change and renewal under the persuasive guise of continuity and convention. It requires a constant process of adjustment and accommodation – or refusal of accommodation – to a spouse and their relatives. Selectively and cumulatively, intimate familial processes of ethical imagination constitute and enable political transformation. These processes, I argue, are at the heart of the generativity and creativity of kinship, and its contribution to historical and political change.
The lecture will be held in English.
Participation is possible without pre-registration and is open to all interested parties.
Organiser:
Prof Dr Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Dr Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Dr Laura Goldenbaum (Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace)
Place and time:
14 May 2025,
6 to 8 pm
in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor, Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.
Prof. Dr. Janet Carsten is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the anthropology of kinship with particular reference to Malaysia and Britain; it encompasses domestic relations, gender, historical migration, the house, adoption reunions, and kinship and memory. She has worked on ideas about bodily substance, and the interface between popular and medical ideas about blood in Malaysia and Britain. Janet Carsten is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Member of Academia Europaea. She has recently held an ERC Advanced Grant to examine contemporary transformations of marriage in global perspective. Among other works, she is the author of After Kinship (2004) and Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang (2019).
Wetlands emerge where water encounters land. Activists recording endangered migratory bird sounds in mudflats, people dancing bare feet in wetlands, soil scientists sticking tools in the peat, farmers draining peatlands for agriculture, artists putting their hands in marshes.
muddy measures. when wetlands and heritage converse experiments with wetlands becoming spaces for debate and engagement inviting people with their situated knowledges, to learn from one another. It welcomes audiences to exhibitions and events, and asks: How can a heritage perspective can reshape our understanding of wetlands? Conversely, how does engaging with wetlands in transformation alter our understanding of heritage? How are wetlands measured and what counts as measurement? What and who falls out of the grid?
The muddy measures exhibition at the Tieranatomisches Theater opened on 27 March 2025 at 18:00. The exhibition features materials from the Humboldt Universit’s collection Moorarchiv, as well as the Land Prints series of Teresa Pereda, and documentations from the Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group.
Monthly changing guest exhibitions which feature Berlin-based research projects form an integral part of muddy measures. It will include “If you take care of birds, you take care of most of the environmental problems in the world” from June 12 – July 19 by anthropologist and HZK Member Magdalena Buchczyk (Institute of European Ethnology), as well as “Swamp Things!” from March 27 – April 30 and “Latent Accumulations” May 10 – May 31, developed with project partners.
There will also be several events including the workshop “Listening to the Mallín” with the artist Teresa Pereda (29 March), the workshop “MoorFit” with the artist Daniel Hengst (25 April, Häsener Luch), the roundtable event of Latent Accumulations (9 May) and workshop by artist-researcher Alice Jarry (10 May), and the film screening of “Sura. A Love Song” by Hwang Yun (12 June, Kino Central).
Laurentiu Constantin measures a soil sample in Bieselfließ, Germany, November 2024
Contributors: Anahí Herrera Cano (CONICET-UBA), Ayelen Fiori (Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco), Charlett Wenig (Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces), Daniel Hengst, Dongpil Oh, Heejung Jung, Seongsil Lee and Seungjun Oh (Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group), Doohee Oh (Peace Wind), Eugenia Tomasini, Clara Tomasini and Milagros Córdova (Centro MATERIA IIAC-UNTREF), Yun Hwang, Iva Rešetar (Matters of Activity), Juana del Carmen Aigo (INIBIOMA-CONICET), Jutta Zeitz (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin – HU), Laurentiu Constantin (HU), Léa Perraudin (Matters of Activity), Lucia Braemer (HU), Lucy Norris (Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin), Magdalena Buchczyk (HU), Moorarchiv (HU), Paula Vogt (University of Potsdam), Rosa Blens (HU), Saemangeum Citizen Ecological Investigation Group, and Teresa Pereda.
Curated by Yoonha Kim, Juliana Robles de la Pava, Margareta von Oswald
On April 30, 2025 at 18:00 we invite you to the next date of the lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters):
Family and other forms of cohabitation in urban India
Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften)
Nadja-Christina Schneider’s presentation will examine the extent to which housing planning in India has changed in recent decades to accommodate new social and demographic developments. Although the trend, especially in larger cities, is clearly moving towards housing forms for smaller family units, multi-generational households continue to exist. A rapidly growing market has also emerged for age-appropriate housing and care facilities. Households and communal living are still closely associated with the ‘family living model’, particularly from a state perspective. Does this in turn offer room for alternative forms of family and kinship alongside heteronormative extended and nuclear families? And conversely, how accepted are individual or communal forms of living that deliberately do not define themselves in terms of family or kinship? The lecture will take a closer look at these questions using selected examples.
The lecture will be held in German.
Participation is possible without pre-registration and is open to all interested parties.
Organiser:
Prof Dr Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Dr Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Dr Laura Goldenbaum (Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace)
Place and time:
30 April 2025,
6 to 8 pm
in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor, Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.
Prof. Dr. Nadja-Christina Schneider is a South Asian Studies scholar and teaches as a professor at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at HU Berlin. The results of her research on family, reproduction and housing in India can be found in the two book publications ‘Reimagining Housing, Rethinking the Role of Architects in India’ (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2024)(open access) and ‘Family Norms and Images in Transition. Contemporary Negotiations of Reproductive Labour, Love and Relationships in India (ed. with Fritzi-Marie Titzmann)(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020).
The TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater invites you to an evening of dialogue and presentations on the preservation of bird habitats through activism and visual art. Featuring conservationist and activist Nick Byaba (Parrot Tree Caretakers Association, Uganda) and artist duo Maria Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik (Morgenvogel Real Estate, Germany/Finland), the event explores the intersections of interspecies care and the shared agency of birds and humans in urban and rural environments.
Event details Date: March 25, 2025 Time: 6–8 pm Location: Tieranatomisches Theater, HU Berlin, Campus Nord, Philipstr. 12/13, 10115 Berlin Language: English Admission: Free
With Nick Byaba (Parrot Tree Caretakers Association), Kampala, Uganda Maria Leena Räihälä & Manuel Bonik (Morgenvogel Real Estate), Berlin
Moderator: Felix Sattler, TA T
The event is part of the exhibition Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories (on view at TA T until March 29) by artists Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger in collaboration with Nick Byaba and CMUK.
While operating in distinct contexts—Uganda’s tropical forests and European urban landscapes—both initiatives reflect a commitment to birds as valued co-inhabitants.
Parrot Tree Caretakers Association (PTCA) Founded in 2020 by Nick Byaba, the PTCA is a community-based organization dedicated to conserving grey parrots and their habitats. Through tree-planting initiatives, educational outreach, and scientific monitoring, the PTCA works with local farmers and conservationists to ensure the survival of this endangered species. Key achievements include planting over 6,000 indigenous trees, monitoring parrot flyways, and integrating rehabilitated parrots back into their original habitats.
The PTCA also runs educational programs for children, fostering a new generation of conservationists who advocate for the protection of parrots and their ecosystems. Looking ahead, the PTCA aims to establish the world’s first Grey Parrot Museum in Uganda, serving as a hub for education, research, and awareness. greyparrotmuseum-uganda.org
The exhibition Hörner/Antlfinger: Parrot Terristories includes the joint work SEEDS by Hörner/Antlfinger and Nick Byaba.
Morgenvogel Real Estate Morgenvogel Real Estate (M0RE) is a long-term artistic initiative by Maria Leena Räihälä and Manuel Bonik, addressing the loss of nesting opportunities for urban birds in the wake of urban redevelopment. For over a decade, the Berlin-based art project Morgenvogel has engaged in ecological urban interventions by producing and distributing handcrafted birdhouses tailored for species like tits, sparrows, and pied flycatchers.
With support from conservation foundations, Morgenvogel has placed over 1,000 nesting boxes across Berlin and other European Cities, often accompanying installations with art events such as BirdChurch, Avanti Natura!, and BirdTalks.
Beyond Morgenvogel Real Estate, Maria Leena Räihälä and Manuel Bonik have been engaged in landscape restoration, most recently by their MAJAVA project (2021–2024), an initiative inspired by beavers as ecosystem engineers (Majava is the Finnish word for beaver). Through dam-building and water filtration structures, Morgenvogel seeks to counteract environmental degradation in Finnish wetland and forest areas. morgenvogel.net
Keynotes organized by Roxana Coman, Gizem Zencirci, Dr. Belgin Turan-Ozkaya, Dr. Malte Fuhrmann, Habiba Insaf, Emma Jelinski.
Since heritage has a complex relationship with the concept of inheritance, and hence it presumes the notion of ownership, it has been at the center of various political projects; imperial, local, national and civilizational. Through a focus on (post)-Ottoman lands and imaginaries, this workshop aims to engage with civilization, empire, nation, and heritage as constructs in flux, forever dependent on individuals, objects, ideas, and places that carry inherited meanings and become catalysts for new kinds of meaning making, as well. By studying the reimagination and reproduction of the Ottoman empire across time and place, we examine how multiple political projects have engaged in memory-making and heritage-making practices.
During the keynotes, Dr. Belgin Turan-Ozkaya and Dr. Malte Fuhrmann will approach the multiplicity of heritage(s) in the Ottoman Empire and its former imperial center, Istanbul. Dr. Turan-Ozkaya will engage with the ethnic, cultural, religious plurality, and how its post-imperial framework had shifted the conversation to one increasingly Turkified. Dr. Fuhrmann will breach the commodification of heritage in Istanbul via the current audio-visual digital trends, and how this complicates further the discussion on and around the archaeological and historical legacies.
