Lecture, June 1 | If cultural analysis is to continue to contribute to our understanding of the cultural fabric through which we live, we must both acknowledge, and work with, this new situation, called “globalization” and be alert to resistances. For this we must develop new sensitivities, attuned to different forms of differences, or alterities, than the usual ones. While neither “culture” nor, as a consequence, the classically defined fields within it that the Humanities study can be easily maintained, the need for in-depth insight has only become more urgent. This makes analysis even more needed than ever. I will focus on mobility, or movement, or rather, the qualifier “moving”. With mobility becoming the norm rather than the exception, we must redesign the contours of our objects of study, but not refrain from engaging it in detail. The question is, then: what is a detail, of an object of analysis that is not a stable object

Lecture and Masterclass, June 12 and 13 | The figure of the minority in India can be marked through several axes of minoritarian identity – the woman, sexual minorities, the Dalit, the adivasi, the disabled, the Muslim, the Christian, the Northeasterner, the Kashmiri Muslim, the informal labourer. The lecture examines the limits of minority identity in the framework of the liberal state and explores different paradigms of constructing these figures, and minority politics, from within their own articulations. In the masterclass class, we will look at the history of the figure of the minority in the context of the liberal nation-state. When did this idea emerge? What does it mean? What are the limits and the possibilities of the category of the minority? What is the politics of minoritisation?

Atelier, June 7 | Fashion is considered a symbolic system of signs and meanings, as well as an embodied practice and a material culture. The recent material turn may help to bring those different aspects together by a focus on the material aspects of the art and aesthetics of fashion, the body that dresses, and the consumption of clothing. This study day means to explore the ‘stuff’ of clothing, dressing and fashion as an expressly material culture. THIS EVENT IS FULLY BOOKED

Public Lecture and Masterclass, May 31 | The public lecture will examine the contemporary state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists to create counter-archives and interventions in public history. The masterclass aims at engaging with Ann Cvetkovich’s work by focusing on two of her books: An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures and Depression: A Public Feeling. In both of them, Cvetkovich aims at opening alternative accounts on/of trauma and depression, respectively, which are dominated by medical and psychiatric discourse. Ann Cvetkovich is Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

NICA/OSK Summer School, June 17th-18th, 2013 | What role do museum practices play in encouraging societies to remember or, in some cases, to repress their past? In this two-day interdisciplinary Summer School we will examine museums not just as repositories of collective memory, but as spaces in which memory is made, contested, and re-interpreted.