Vienna Humanities Festival 2016

Where does the idea that someone who has committed a crime can be considered “not quilty by reason of insanity” come from historically? When have certain ideological or political positions and behaviours been viewed as insane by contemporaries?

Holly Case (Associate Professor of History, Brown University and Visiting Fellow, IWM) in discussion with Miloš Vec (Professor of European Legal and Constitutional History, Vienna University and Permanent Fellow, IWM).

What does the memory of the Shoah mean for Turkish–Germans? And, what forms of solidarity might be able to exist between Muslim and Jewish communities? This video sees Michael Rothberg in conversation with the director of the Wien Museum, Matti Bunzl, as they look to answer some of these questions.

Michael Rothberg is the leading Holocaust theorist in the United States and Saul Friedländer’s successor in the prestigious chair of Holocaust studies at UCLA. The pioneer of a post–colonial approach to the Shoah, he has, for example, explored the meaning of the Holocaust for the civil rights movement. His latest research addresses the role of the Holocaust in the lives of Europe’s migrants.

Few scholars have had more influence on the conception of globalisation than Arjun Appadurai. The Indo–American cultural anthropologist, a professor at New York University (and currently also a guest professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University), has developed an entire critical apparatus for its analysis. At the heart of this approach, which Appadurai first presented in the early 1990s, are five overlapping and diverging flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.

At the Vienna Humanities Festival, Arjun Appadurai presented an update to his thinking on the dynamics of globalisation, with particular reference to the backdrop of ever–increasing populism. This recording shows him presenting this update in conversation with Shalini Randeria (Rector of the IWM & Research Director and Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at Geneva’s IHEID).

In discussion with Dessislava Gavrilova (Co–Founder of The Red House, Sofia & Time to Talk), Monika Mokre (Political Scientist & Activist in the realms of asylum and migration) and Nataliya Gumenyuk (Ukrainian Journalist, Co–Founder & Head of hromadske.ua) looked at the forms of solidarity which emerge within and with refugee groups, with particular reference paid to migration from Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea & to Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.