Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly

Talks, workshops, installations etc.

Centered on the concept and practice of assembly as a gathering of heterogeneous entities, the Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly brings together a series of academic, artistic, and activist interventions over the course of three days. The Assembly seeks to facilitate lively encounters and exchange across disciplines, based on the core values of conviviality, geopolitical decentering, and social commitment of the research training group minor cosmopolitanisms.

The RTG minor cosmopolitanisms seeks to establish new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies. While the cosmopolitan ideal articulated during the European Enlightenment embraced the social promises of a globalizing economy, it has remained oblivious to, and even complicit with, capitalist exploitation, slavery, and colonialism. Yet should we abandon the cosmopolitan idea because of this corrupt history? Or should it rather be reviewed and rethought in the face of rising nationalist and far-right movements, escalating military conflict, and ongoing economic and environmental crises? Which alternative traditions and practices of the cosmopolitan can be found across the globe? The members of the minor cosmopolitanisms RTG grapple with these questions in their research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences, united by a commitment to social justice within and outside academia. Through talks, workshops, installations, films, and performances, the Assembly explores these urgent issues, experimenting with interventions in doing, undoing, and redoing the cosmopolitan project by challenging its neoliberal, neocolonial, racist, heterosexist, ableist, late capitalist configurations.

Program

The Minor Cosmopolitan Assembly is organized by the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms with funding from the DFG (German Research Foundation). The RTG minor cosmopolitanisms is a cooperation established among the University of Potsdam, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin.

Instagram: @minorcosmopolitanisms
Twitter: @minorcosmo
Facebook: Event Page
Event hashtag: #minorcosmoassembly

Thursday, November 10 – Saturday, November 12
Kuppelhalle/Ateliers
Free admission