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Lecture, Lecture Series, News, Theorie und Praxis des interdisziplinären Kuratierens

Lecture series “Beziehungsweise Familie” (Family Matters) – February 11, 2026 with Dr. Michael Slepian

Having and Keeping Secrets 

Dr. Michael Slepian (Associate Professor at Columbia Business School)

Common wisdom suggests that secrecy harms relationships and well being because active concealment is hard and stressful work. Multiple studies of thousands of participants keeping tens of thousands of secrets reveals otherwise. The problem with having secrets is often not that we have to hide them, but rather that we have to think about them, and live with them alone in our thoughts without others’ help and perspectives. Whereas instances of concealment can be construed as effective goal pursuit (i.e., successful secret keeping), having secrets intrude upon one’s thoughts is taken as a signal of relational and personal problems, including reduced relationship quality and reduced authenticity. At the same time, secrets can improve well-being, when managed well and kept for the right reasons. Secrets kept on behalf of collectives can foster feelings meaning, confiding secrets in others and being confided in can bring feelings of closeness and intimacy, and keeping positive secrets can enhance feelings of autonomy and vitality. The multifaceted nature of secrets will be discussed, including how to cope effectively, and how to thrive while carrying them.

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:

11. February 2026,

6 to 8 pm

in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor,
Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.

Further information

Michael Slepian

Dr. Michael Slepian is an Associate Professor at Columbia Business School, and author of the Secret Life of Secrets. The leading expert on the psychology of secrets, his research examines how keeping secrets shapes trust, relationships, and well-being, in social and organizational life. He has authored more than fifty scholarly articles on secrecy, truth, and deception, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and NPR. Slepian earned his Ph.D. from Tufts University, was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, received the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and is an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

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Event, Exhibition, News

Paula Doepfner, ‘Out in front of a dozen dead oceans’

Exhibition in the Object Lab

At first glance, Paula Doepfner’s drawings appear abstract, like veils of mist or delicate branches. Only upon closer inspection can one discern the fine lettering that the artist has applied to delicate tracing paper. They are passages from poems by Paul Celan, but also from the Istanbul Protocol. Trauma, torture, traces, memory – all of this is condensed and interwoven, but not only present through the text references. The works are based on sketches that Paula Doepfner made as an observer during brain operations at the Charité hospital.

Located in the Object Lab of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik on the North Campus, not far from the Charité hospital, a selection of these works will be presented in discussions designed to highlight their special impact. In addition to an afternoon devoted to the works of Paula Doepfner in conversation with the artist, another evening discussion will focus on the topics of migration, flight, expulsion and the (psychological) consequences of torture and violence. We would be delighted if you would accept our invitation.

Exhibition: 24–27 February 2026, open 12 noon–2 p.m.

Accompanying events:
23 February 2026, 4pm–6pm: Opening with introduction by the artist

26 February 2026, 6pm–8pm: TRACES OF PAIN. Art, trauma and flight. Interdisciplinary discussion evening with Paula Doepfner – artist, Berlin
Ulrike Kluge – Professor & Senior Psychologist/Group Analyst, Charité Berlin/BIM
Julia Manek – Psychologist & Human Geographer, medico international
Moderator: Pauline Endres de Oliveira – Professor of Law & Migration (HU/BIM)
In cooperation with: Christina Kuhli – Curator HU

Contact: Christina Kuhli, christina.kuhli@hu-berlin.de

 

Chair Theory and Practice of Curating, Exhibition, News

Memory, identity, transmission: an artistic diorama at the Humboldt Forum

How does personal experience become collective knowledge? And what traces do family biographies leave on our identity?

These questions were addressed in a ten-week social workshop held as part of the Beziehungsweise Familie (Family Matters) cluster at the Humboldt Forum. As a collaborative project combining artistic, therapeutic and scientific perspectives, knowledge was not imparted as finished teaching content. Rather, it emerged as a collaborative process in which the participants were involved in a transversal production of knowledge as equal experts and active contributors. The starting point was personal memories, mementos and everyday rituals as carriers of knowledge that is often passed down through generations.

This intensive collaboration resulted in an artistic diorama and an audio work that bring mementos to life. Together, they reveal the complex interrelationships between individual trauma, transgenerational narratives and the influence of political contexts on personal life paths. At the same time, they invite us to take a fresh look at the interplay between identity and origin.

With Florian Hermes, Honorata Nawrocki, Marisol Ozomatli Malinalli, Leila G., Franziska Pierwoss, Diana Krämer, Alia Rayyan.

The result can be experienced from 24 January to 12 July 2026 in the ‘living room’ of the Humboldt Forum, the special exhibition foyer on the ground floor.

Interested parties are cordially invited to visit the exhibition and gain an insight into this special form of knowledge work.

Besuchende vor dem Diorama
© Alia Rayyan 2026
Knowledge Exchange, News, Third Mission, Workshop

Public Engagement Training for Researchers

The Humboldt Graduate School (HGS), in cooperation with the HU Office for Knowledge Exchange with Society and the Berlin School of Public Engagement and Open Science, is offering a Public Engagement workshop for early career researchers:

In this workshop, we will explore the basics of public engagement (PE) and its value for research and practice. Participants will be guided through a combination of theoretical inputs and practical exercises that will help them integrate PE into their work. The first part of the day will focus on the building blocks of PE and identifying the participants’ individual purpose for working with different target groups. In the afternoon, the workshop will delve deeper into the practical aspects of designing PE interactions, including planning and tracking their impact.

  • Time:  February
  • Place: Humboldt Graduate School, Luisenstraße 56, 10117 Berlin, Room 220
  • Format: In-person workshop in English
  • Target Group: Researchers in their final phase of the doctoral studies or postdoc phase

Registration: to participate please register until Feb. 11, 2026, at https://hu.opencampus.com/de/node/12744

Photo: Philipp Plum

Chair Theory and Practice of Curating, Lecture Series, News, Theorie und Praxis des interdisziplinären Kuratierens

Lecture series “Family Matters”: Further Dates during Winter Semester

Focus Family Secrets

The focus Family Secrets turns its attention to hidden dimensions of family relationships, where intimacy, protection, and conflict intersect. At the centre are practices of concealment and disclosure that shape individual life stories as well as social orders.

Secrets are more than concealed information: they condense needs for protection and intimacy, as well as feelings of shame, fear of exposure, and the pressure of social norms. As part of biographical experience, family secrets deeply affect personal life narratives. Practices of telling and withholding make visible how relationships are formed, boundaries drawn, and social orders negotiated — revealing how secrets extend far beyond the private sphere to create belonging, mark boundaries, and stabilise or unsettle social structures.

Geheimnisse sind dabei mehr als verborgene Informationen: In ihnen verdichten sich Bedürfnisse nach Schutz und Intimität ebenso wie Scham, Angst vor Bloßstellung oder der Druck sozialer Normen. Als Teil biografischer Erfahrungen wirken Familiengeheimnisse tief in persönliche Lebensgeschichten hinein. Erzählen und Verschweigen machen sichtbar, wie Beziehungen gestaltet, Grenzen gezogen und soziale Ordnungen verhandelt werden – und wie Geheimnisse weit über das Private hinaus Zugehörigkeiten stiften, Grenzen markieren und gesellschaftliche Strukturen stabilisieren oder irritieren.

Upcoming dates:

    • 11.02.2026: The Secret Life of Secrets
      Dr. Michael Slepian (Columbia Business School, New York)
    • 18.02.2026: “Solo Weddings” as a Secret to Happiness in Japan
      Univ.-Prof. Dr. Annette Schad-Seifert (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Institut für Modernes Japan, Düsseldorf)
    • 04.03.2026: Substitute/Family – Forms of living together beyond natural descent. Aspects from popular culture
      Bert Rebhandl (Freier Filmforscher, Berlin)
    • 18.03.2026: Cultural practices of silence as modes of care
      Dr. Lotte Warnsholdt (MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg)

The lecture will be held in German. One exception is the lecture by Dr. Slepian, which 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:

each at 6 to 8 pm

in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor,
Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.

Further information

Familie-Tischrunde
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Artwork of the month, News, Object of the Month

Object of the Month: Walter Womacka, Conquering science

Object of the Month 01/2026

For now, the large-scale work can only be seen in the evening hours – the colourful stained-glass windows in the east wing of the main building shine into the garden courtyard after dark when the lights in the renovated vestibule of the Audimax are switched on. They tell of a time of optimism, of the importance of science and enthusiasm for technology in the GDR.

There are three stained glass windows in which humans are at the centre, surrounded by elements of nature, science and the cosmos.

Photo of a tall stained glass window, divided into several panes with various motifs depicting socialist man and the nature he dominates.
Walter Womacka, Die Wissenschaft erobern (Conquering Science), left stained glass window, 1962. Photo: Iris Grötschel, https://www.math.berlin/orte/fenster-hub.html

In the left window stands a young man, his left hand raised towards an atomic model, with a dove of peace and the head of Max Planck arranged in the image fields below. The man holds his right hand lowered, with fists raised towards him from below. The peaceful use of atomic energy under socialist leadership is propagated in its global dimension by the wind rose at the top. Nature has its place in the lower fields of the image with ears of corn and a fruit-bearing tree. But here, too, man intervenes, symbolised by a winding tower and an electricity pylon.

Photo of a tall stained glass window, divided into several panes with various motifs depicting socialist people and the technology and art they control.
Walter Womacka, Die Wissenschaft erobern (Conquering Science), central stained glass window, 1962. Photo: Iris Grötschel, https://www.math.berlin/orte/fenster-hub.html

The upper half of the middle window is dominated by a young woman in a red dress striding forward. She is holding an open book, beneath which Marx and Engels are gathered, along with Karl Marx’s 11th Feuerbach thesis, which was already on display in the foyer of the main building on the staircase at that time. In the left-hand strip, raised fists can be seen again, above them a head of Lenin. The GDR coat of arms in front of a sun, accompanied by doves of peace, rounds off the message. The lower fields of the picture are occupied by symbols of the sciences and the arts: an anch cross as a symbol of life, a mask, a harp and a palette, hieroglyphs, but also radio technology and telescopes. The profile portraits of Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt are inserted in the centre, which have become very similar to the symbolic image and corporate design of Humboldt-Universität.

Photo of a tall stained glass window, divided into several panes with various motifs depicting socialist man and the cosmos he has conquered through physics and technology.
Walter Womacka, Die Wissenschaft erobern (Conquering Science), right-hand stained glass window, 1962. Photo: Iris Grötschel, https://www.math.berlin/orte/fenster-hub.html

The right-hand window is particularly relevant to the present day. Here, a man in a space suit is the central figure, surrounded by a rocket hanging from a parachute, portraits of Leibniz, Newton and Einstein, and the dove of peace. In the case of Einstein, the reference is not only significant in terms of scientific history; the physicist and Nobel Prize winner also gave lectures in the main lecture hall of Berlin’s university. The red Soviet star next to the depiction of a black hole and a galaxy refer to the conquest of space, which Yuri Gagarin achieved in 1961 with his space flight. The theme of space conquest is symbolically linked to the importance of physics, scientific research and technical prowess in the lower fields of the image with a refractor, a parabolic antenna and the portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus.

The mastery of nature and technology for the sake of peace is depicted in the stained glass windows as the task of the university in a socialist state in a sequence of individual motifs. Sometimes concrete, sometimes more metaphorical, many of the selected image elements were familiar set pieces from everyday media. Walter Ulbricht regarded innovative technology and science as a prerequisite for ‘the growth of productive forces and economic strength’ (“das Wachstum der Produktivkräfte und die ökonomische Stärke”) so that the ‘successful mastery of the scientific and technological revolution’ („erfolgreiche Meisterung der wissenschaftlich-technischen Revolution“) could be achieved as ‘a major task in the class struggle’ (“eine Hauptaufgabe im Klassenkampf”, Walter Ulbricht: Grundlegende Aufgaben im Jahr 1970. Referat auf der 12. Tagung des ZK der SED 12./13.12.1969). The so-called complex image, the dissolution of a narrative form into coherent individual motifs, artistically creates a world view in which science, technology, nature and society are closely linked and dominated by humans.

The stained glass windows also showcase modern technology, departing from the Christian stained glass tradition of church windows: small plexiglass panes are hung in front of the window bars, and the typical lead strips are only partially real, with some of them merely simulated by black lines. No sacred space is ennobled; rather, modern science and the human spirit of discovery that dominates the world are celebrated. The stained glass windows were created by Katharina Perschel, and the Mahlsdorf glass art workshop still exists today.

Walter Womacka was commissioned not only because of his expertise in architecture-related art, but also because of his socialist convictions, which he demonstrated in other large-scale projects. Not far from the Humboldt-Universität, he designed the stained glass window wall in the former seat of the State Council (the first new government building in East Berlin, now the European School of Management and Technology) in 1964. The main staircase is adorned with the ‘History of the German Labour Movement from 1918 to the Establishment of the First German Workers’ and Peasants’ State’ (Socialism Triumphs) (“Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung von 1918 bis zur Errichtung des ersten Deutschen Arbeiter- und Bauernstaates“ (Der Sozialismus siegt)). The elaborate glass bonding technique used for this was developed by the PGH Kunsthandwerk und Glasgestaltung (Artisans’ Cooperative for Arts and Crafts and Glass Design) in Magdeburg – the artisanal and artistic technique thus underlines the importance of technical progress using one’s own skills.

The stained glass windows bear witness to a very special moment in art history, politics and social history, in which Humboldt-Universität also played a part.

Author: Christina Kuhli
Photos: Iris Grötschel, https://www.math.berlin/orte/fenster-hub.html [last access: 09.02.2026]

Literature:

Jörg Haspel: ‘Vorsicht Stufe’. Konservieren und kommentieren? Sozialistische Denkmalkunst in Berlin als Objekt und Ort künstlerischer Interventionen und Interpretationen, in: Von der Ablehnung zur Aneignung? Das architektonische Erbe des Sozialismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa (= Visuelle Geschichtskultur, 12), edited by Arnold Bartetzky, Christian Dietz and Jörg Haspel, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 2014, pp. 195-213;
Luise Helas: Walter Womacka. Sein Beitrag zur architekturbezogenen Kunst in der DDR, in: Luise Helas, Wilma Rambow, Felix Rössl: Kunstvolle Oberflächen des Sozialismus. Wandbilder und Betonformsteine (= Forschungen zum baukulturellen Erbe der DDR, 3), Weimar 2014, pp. 19-102;
Sigrid Hofer: Kosmonaut Ikarus. Weltall, Erde, Mensch – Die planbare Zukunft als bildnerische Projektion, in: Abschied von Ikarus. Bildwelten in der DDR – neu gesehen, exhibition catalogue, Neues Museum Weimar 2012–2013, edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Wolfgang Holler and Paul Kaiser, Cologne 2012, pp. 2015–215;
Wolfgang Hütt: Walter Womacka, Dresden 1980;
Walter Womacka: Die bildende Kunst – notwendiger Bestandteil der Architektur, in: Bildende Kunst 6, 1964, pp. 305–310.

Event, News

Theme days on family secrets – Hide or tell?

Saturday 24 January – Sunday 25 January 2026 as part of the exhibition "Beziehungsweise Familie" (Family Matters)

Silence and whispering, secret relationships, unknown kinships, inherited stories and hidden heirlooms. Are there secrets in your family? Are you grateful for them, or would you rather let them go? Do secrets connect people—or isolate them? Through playful, artistic and performative formats, we explore the most concealed spaces of community.

Performances

Experience Sarah Ama Duah’s living statues – hidden biographies can be glimpsed beneath their latex surfaces.

Chinese artist Li Binyuan invites visitors to contribute their own voices and hear themselves within a unique soundscape: guided by familiar sounds of family members or friends, you become part of the performance Plaza.

The evening programme also brings together two profoundly different approaches to the hidden. The musical reading from Hewa Rwanda by Rwandan actor and director Dorcy Rugamba is authentic and deeply moving: 31 years after the genocide, he reads letters to the absent and speaks about family and hope.

Humor enters the room with Jürgen Kuttner’s video snippets lecture — look forward to Kuttner’s family stories from both East and West.

In Conversation

Author Anne Rabe invites dialogue about her unsparing East German family narrative Die Möglichkeit von Glück.

Shaped by stories of cultural repression in Turkey, a new film by performer and filmmaker ŞOKOPOP reflects on his own outing as queer and how inherited silence can be broken. We also host a conversation on this topic with ŞOKOPOP (Ekim Acun)andtherapist Umut Özdemir.

Tours, Workshops and Children’s Programme

In the free-entry Living Room, a newly designed activity space on the ground floor, you can explore diverse family stories and transgenerational relationships. Here you will also find a library for all, offering a wide selection of books on family, curated by Black Dads Germany. The craft-based workshop series Gift of the Spider takes place here as well: a large-scale wall collage emerges, a collective artwork made from woven and knitted contributions. Stop by and join in!

The historic Berlin Palace also holds its own secrets. A staged tour provides a look behind the façades of patriarchal history and memory, revealing the lesser-known stories of the Hohenzollern family.

In the live role-playing game Broken Archive, you can speculate in a small group about why a family album was torn apart – and then reassemble it.

Children can dive into stories in the Picture Book Cinema, learn about the nature of lies in a live recording of the Kakadu podcast, and record their own family secrets in the Book Dash Workshop. Children and adults alike can explore self-determination and imagination by painting flags based on designs by artist Na Chainkua Reindorf, whose large-format works will adorn the foyer in January.

 

Theme days on family secrets – Hide or tell: 

Sat, 24.1.2026, 10:30–21:00 
Sun, 25.1.2026, 10:30–21:00 

See here for more information on theme days on family secrets – Hide or tell.

© Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, Exhibition design: Studio Fasson Freddy Fuss / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum und Museum für Asiatische Kunst / (Keyvisual: Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Getty Images / The Image Bank / Karan Kapoor) / Trailer: boheifilm, Musik: INPLUSMUSIC

Chair Theory and Practice of Curating, Event, Lecture, Lecture Series, News

Lecture series “Beziehungsweise Familie” (Family Matters) – January 21, 2026 with Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz

Genealogies, Family Secrets, and a Curious Ethnologist in West Africa

Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz 

(Johannes Gutenburg-Universität Mainz, Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien (ifeas), Mainz)

Family trees, family secrets, and a curious ethnologist in West Africa. Almost four decades ago, Carola Lentz was welcomed into a large Ghanaian family. As in many African families, educational paths and professional careers, places of residence, and lifestyles have diverged greatly over time. This makes the memory of common ancestors and regular visits to the village of origin even more important for the cohesion of the extended family. However, the younger, educated generation has different expectations of a good family history than their rural relatives. The remembered family past is therefore controversial, and some things are marked as “secrets” by some. Memory practices and their media are also new. Memorial services are replacing ancestral sacrifices. Drawn family trees, ancestral tables, and photo albums supplement oral narratives. The lecture explores these changes and the conflicts that accompany them. Family history, it concludes, can not only unite but also divide.

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:

21. January 2026,

6 to 8 pm

in Room 3 (Saal 3), ground floor,
Humboldt Forum, Schlossplatz.

Further information

Carola Lentz

Carola Lentz is an ethnologist and Senior Research Professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her research focuses on migration, ethnicity and nationalism, colonialism and decolonization, state and family memory politics, as well as educational biographies and middle classes in postcolonial societies.

She studied sociology, political science, German studies, and education in Göttingen and Berlin, earned her PhD in 1987 at Leibniz University Hannover, and completed her habilitation in 1996 at the Free University of Berlin. Her academic career includes professorships in Frankfurt and Mainz, where she significantly shaped the Institute for Ethnology and African Studies. From 2020 to 2024, she served as President of the Goethe-Institut, promoting cultural exchange and international understanding. Her research also focuses on social belonging, mobility, and memory culture in West Africa. For her book Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa, she received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize in 2014.

She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

 

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Knowledge Exchange, News, Third Mission

Supporting Exchange Between Science and Society: Insights into a Public Engagement Internship

Interview with Jayun Choi, Brown University

Jayun Choi spent her fall semester 2025 at Humboldt-Universität completing an internship at the Office for Public Engagement and Knowledge Exchange with Society at the Center for Cultural Techniques. She supported university-wide programs for ​​public engagement and helped organize the Fluid Interdisciplinarities Festival. In the interview, she shares her impressions of supporting the exchange between science and society.

 

What is one insight that you got about the topic of Public Engagement at a university, about how an exchange between science and society may work? 

One key insight for me is that public engagement is not primarily about delivering science or translating academic knowledge to the public, but about creating spaces for mutual exchange where people can participate, question, and contribute. This became especially clear during Berlin Science Week, where Irina Demina, the choreographer-in-residence of the Centre for Cultural Techniques, opened her research on the intersection of folk dance and artificial intelligence. Rather than explaining her work in abstract terms, she invited the audience to experience her research through movement, encouraging people to ask questions and reflect on how embodied practice can function as a form of research. This experience highlighted for me how effective public engagement operates as a process of shared inquiry, where science and society meet through lived experience, curiosity, and exchange.

What was a project within your internship that you found most meaningful? Why?

One of the most meaningful projects during my internship was working on the public communication of research and artistic programs through social media and festival materials. In creating content for initiatives such as Berlin Science Week, Open Humboldt Freiräume funding program or the Dance Artist in Residence programme, I focused on making complex research and artistic practices available for wider audiences. This process sharpened my understanding of research and science communication as an act of framing where editorial choices shape how institutions represent knowledge in the public sphere. I also came to see how universities build trust, visibility, and engagement through the intentional communicative decisions that connect scholarship and the public.

Within the Fluid Interdisciplinarities Festival, what was the part of the event that best brought together research, art and society for you?

Within the Fluid Interdisciplinarities Festival, Party of the Panke stood out to me the most as the moment where research, art, and society most visibly converged. As an open event with multiple participatory stations, it offered different ways of engaging with rivers, including archival mapping, guided participatory walks or a movement-based workshop. Rather than presenting research as something to be observed or explained, each station invited participants to relate to the river directly through artistic and embodied methods. This made one’s participation feel like a form of knowledge-making rather than an audience reception. It showed me that research can enter public space by diversifying its modes of encounter, enabling science, art, and society to meet through shared experience rather than one-directional presentation.

During your internship, did you encounter a topic, an idea, a spark that will stay with you or that you will take away for your future research or work?

During my internship, learning about the various approached to research on Water by Berlin-based scientists became a lasting spark that reshaped how I understand environmental policy and governance. Engagement with the Fluid Interdisciplinarities Festival played an important role in shaping this perspective, leading me to explore related water-focused initiatives across Humboldt-Universität and the Berlin University Alliance. This insight was further reinforced through water-related research in the “On Water. WasserWissen in Berlin” exhibition at the Humboldt Labor. Encountering projects on urban rivers, water infrastructure or climate adaptation led me to pay closer attention to how water governance becomes visible to the public. As a student concentrating in International and Public Affairs and on East Asian Studies, this led me to develop a more focused comparative research interest in how urban water governance is framed and shared with the public through public-facing projects across different historical and institutional contexts. This interest emerged through my internship and is something I would like to pursue further in my future research.

 

The interview and internship supervision were led by Xenia Muth, Office for Public Engagement Knowledge Exchange with Society. For a current internship opportunity in Public Engagement and Knowledge Exchange with Society see the Humboldt Internship Program.

Information, News, Research

Two new secondary members at the Zentrum für Kulturtechnik

We are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Marcel Robischon and Dr. Friederike Landau-Donnelly as new associate members at the Zentrum für Kulturtechnik. With their professional expertise and experience in the field of communication and knowledge exchange, they will strengthen the interdisciplinary work at the ZfK and networking within HU Berlin.

Friederike Landau-Donnelly is a political theorist and urban sociologist. She works primarily in the interdisciplinary field of urban cultural geography. Her interests focus on manifestations of political agency and activism in urban spaces.

Marcel Robischon is a forest scientist, plant biologist, and head of the Division of Agroecology at HU. He is also the academic director of the Circle U Knowledge Hub on Climate and director of the Berlin Institute of Cooperative Studies (BICS). Among other things, he is involved in global natural and agricultural heritage in the field of agricultural education and teaching. Last year, he was honored in the Tagesspiegel series “The 100 Most Important Heads of Berlin Science 2024” as an outstanding “communication artist” who shares his knowledge of plants and biodiversity far beyond the university’s boundaries.

Welcome! We look forward to the coming collaboration.
 

Interested researchers at HU who would like to contribute to the profile of the Zentrum für Kulturtechnik can find further information about secondary membership on the ZfK website under “Membership-Members.”