"Critical Peace and Civil Society,” led by @dr-ferda-fa.bsky.social is an interactive online lab examining how mid-level actors connect communities and decision-makers in conflict settings.
ℹ️ offuniversity.org/current-cour...
🗣️ KURMANCÎ
@rosaluxstiftung.bsky.social @humboldtuni.bsky.social
Gender-based violence is structural, political, and contested. This course explores its dynamics in West Asia, from domestic abuse to conflict-related violence, while highlighting activism, survival strategies, and spaces of resistance across the region.
➡️ offuniversity.org/current-cour...
In our History Textbook Workshop we will have Elena Monke with us this week. She will explore how textbooks are built, using examples from her work in preschool pedagogy and children’s literature.
Feel invited to join us
🕓 April 1st, 16:00 CET by signing-up now
offuniversity.org/current-cour...
What does it mean to live through historical rupture? This course explores war, displacement, and crisis through performance ethnography, using Playback and Documentary Theatre to transform lived experience into collaborative, research-based performance.
Register: offuniversity.org/current-cour...
Exile, Activism and the University with Alexander Kalgin, Magnolia, 15.04.2026 - 22.07.2026, 6 ECTS
This course examines the role of universities as spaces of protection for human rights defenders in exile, focusing on how academic institutions can provide protection for activists. Today, authoritarianism is rising globally, and those who dare to contest authoritarian governments are often forced into exile. Traditional measures of human rights protection may not be sufficient. In this context, universities have the capacity to function as semi-safe spaces that offer resources, networks, and communities that allow human rights defenders to sustain their work.
Amid rising authoritarianism, can universities offer refuge and continuity for human rights defenders in exile? Join an interdisciplinary, practitioner-led course examining real-world strategies, networks, and challenges across global contexts.
Register here:
offuniversity.org/current-cour...
Check our our latest newsletter full of courses in this upcoming Spring Semester 2026: mailchi.mp/a5a93ce4d926...
We are happy to have Yadviha Lukashyk in our History Textbook Workshop. Her research explores everyday life on the Eastern Front during the First World War through photographic sources.
Sign-up here: offuniversity.org/current-cour...
#Universitywithoutborders
At a time of incessant wars, widespread mass displacement and rising authoritarianism, the dissemination of knowledge is under threat. Join us in sustaining spaces where learning, solidarity, and critical inquiry can continue despite violence and repression.
offuniversity.org/current-cour...
We are inviting proposals for an online laboratory on the Memory of the Syrian War to be taught by scholars at risk.
Check the details of the application requirements, what you should submit to apply and how here on the call page
ℹ️ offuniversity.org/call-for-an-...
📆Deadline: April 13th, 2026
Call for Course Proposals on War, Memory, and Gender
We are inviting proposals for an online course on War, Memory, and Gender to be taught by scholars at risk.
Check the details of the application requirements, what you should submit to apply and how here on the call page
ℹ️ offuniversity.org/call-for-cou...
📅 Deadline: April 13th, 2026
In our History Textbook Workshop we have Daryna Zhyvohliadova with us to explore Ukraine’s history and culture through key artifacts, texts, and artistic works. You are invited to join this Wednesday, March 18th, 4pm CET.
Just a quick registration here:
offuniversity.org/current-cour...
There are only few places left in our History Textbook Workshop. Please write to (our proton mail account) mail@offuniversity.org until March 2nd, 2026 if you want to join us next Wednesday!
WOMEN, LIFE, FREEDOM, HOPE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
20 February, 16:00-18:00
Lichthof Ost, Humboldt University, Berlin
This talk, moderated by Alice von Bieberstein, will introduce the Academy of Social Science, its research communes, and the Journal Democratic Modernity.
JIN JIYAN AZADÎ
HÊVÎ JI BO SEDSALA 21'EMÎN
21.02.2026
16.00-18.00
Komel Berlin
(Residenzstraße 53-54, 13409 Berlin)
This lecture examines the lived experiences of Kabul’s residents amid the enduring legacies of conflict, emphasizing the intersections of spatial justice, social cohesion, and participatory urban planning. By integrating gamified urban design models with ethnographic insights and geospatial analysis, it outlines pathways for strengthening resilience, equity, and collective memory in fragile urban environments.
In the next-to-last session of our lecture series Cities at War, we are welcoming Aimal Formolly speaking on "Spatial Justice and Everyday Resilience: Navigating Post-Conflict Urbanism in Kabul". Join us on January 28th, 4pm CET time: offuniversity.org/current-cour...
#universitywithoutborders
We are a partner of the universities in #Rojava. Our thoughts and solidarity are with the students and scholars in the region who are facing escalating violence and deteriorating humanitarian conditions. Please read this statement of solidarity here: drive.google.com/file/d/1aEdK...
Scholars and students at the universities in Rojava are part of our Online Lecture Series Cities at War. Their education is disrupted, they had to flee the approaching violence and now live under deteriorating and dangerous conditions. Stop the War now!
Scholars and students at the universities in Rojava are part of our Online Lecture Series Cities at War. Their education is disrupted, they had to flee the approaching violence and now live under deteriorating and dangerous conditions. Stop the War now!
This lecture advances the argument that urban recovery can start during war in many forms and practices, one of which is the act of archiving. Archiving the city does not only preserve but also enable the emergence of multiple narratives through unarchiving, a process that disrupts and re-organizes the archival collection, leading to the formation of future imaginaries tied to the recovery of sites of urbicide. This proposition is explored through two cases: Gaza, Palestine, and Nabatieh, Southern Lebanon, where a team of the Beirut Urban Lab has engaged in planning amid complex conditions of war.
Join us for Batoul Yassine and Mariam Bazzi's lecture "From Archiving to People-Centred, Heritage-Led Urban Recovery. The Cases of Gaza and Nabatieh" this Wednesday, January 21st at 4pm CET.
-> more offuniversity.org/current-cour...
#universitywithoutborders
Thanks to @urbanstudiesfoundation.org
USF flyer with USF logo for the Call for Applications "Urban Urgencies" Grant on a picture via Flickr by Hanif Omar, and the quote "The Urban Studies Foundation is launching a major new grant to support rapid-response collaborative research on the world’s most pressing urban challenges."
USF flyer with USF logo for the Call for Applications "Urban Urgencies" Grant on a picture via Flickr by Hanif Omar, and the quote "The Urban Studies Foundation is launching a major new grant to support rapid-response collaborative research on the world’s most pressing urban challenges."
⏰ Reminder: Urban Urgencies funding call now open
There’s still time to apply for the Urban Urgencies grant from the Urban Studies Foundation — supporting rapid, collaborative research on pressing urban challenges worldwide.
🗓️ Deadline: 23 March 2026 (23:59 UTC).
🔗 ow.ly/FUIn50XGtgz
Dating back to the 5th millennium B.C., Diyarbakır is one of the rare urban centers where the evolution of urban history and the cumulative layers of the past can be observed in all phases up to the twenty-first century. Between October 2015 and March 2016, however, this deeply layered urban fabric was violently disrupted. Following declarations of self-governance in twenty Kurdish cities, intense armed clashes broke out between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and Turkish state security forces, involving heavy weaponry leading to widespread urban destruction. This paper examines the dynamics of armed urban conflict and the subsequent practices of urbicide through the case of Diyarbakır’s historic core, Suriçi. It analyzes the socio-spatial consequences of this violence, with particular attention to its erasure of historical layers, transformation of the urban fabric, and displacement of local communities.
We are happy to welcome Nevin Soyukaya this week in our Lecture Series "Cities at War". She will speak on "Diyarbakır/Suriçi: Conflict and Urbicide as the Erasure of Collective Memory" on January 14th at 4pm CET.
register here -> offuniversity.org/current-cour...
#universitywithoutborders
@kharkivisadream.bsky.social
In 2022, Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine withstood months of relentless Russian artillery strikes that razed entire residential districts of the city, with its population dropping from 1.6 million to 800 000. A short Ukrainian counteroffensive in summer 2022 eliminated the fears of occupation. People started to return, and grand plans involving foreign architectural bureaus for rebuilding have appeared. But are we allowed to think of the future when Kharkiv continues to be attacked by drones, guided bombs, and missiles every day? During this lecture, I invite you to dream and think of the future of a war city with me.
The first session in the Cities at War Lecture Series in 2026 will be given by Viktoriia Grivina on #Kharkiv is a Dream. Planning a Future During War". Join her timely talk on Wednesday, 07.01.2026 at 4 pm CET.
offuniversity.org/current-cour...
@urbanstudiesfoundation.org
#universitywithoutborders
Enthusiastic about history and between 14 and 25? Join our History Textbook Workshop to learn how and by whom history is written, engage with history textbooks from different parts of the world and understande the uses of history in political narratives.
ℹ️ offuniversity.org/call-for-par...
This lecture examines how decades of conflict have profoundly affected the daily lives of Damascus's inhabitants by limiting access to running water. The massive destruction of infrastructure during the armed conflict has exacerbated a water scarcity already evident at the turn of the century, forcing residents to reinvent everyday practices around water use. Drawing on NGOs reports, media accounts and testimonies of residents’ coping strategies, this lecture reflects on how memories of these coping strategies can inform future approaches to water management, both at individual and political levels, in a city marked by chronic scarcity and still bearing the scars of war.
This week we have Sarah Husein with a talk on "Water Practices in Conflict-Torn Damascus: Distressing Memories to Overlook or Coping Strategies for Climate Resilience" in our Cities at War Lecture Series.
Join us December 17th, 4 pm CET. Everyone is welcome: moodle.offuniversity.org/course/view....
The lecture examines how militarization, tourism, and cycles of violence shape everyday life in Jaisalmer, a city on India’s western frontier. By focusing on the strategies of adaptation and resilience employed by local communities facing displacement, heritage commodification, and the blurring of war–peace boundaries, it highlights the agency of ordinary people in sustaining memory and cultural continuity. Drawing on ethnographic insights, the session situates Jaisalmer within comparative discussions on cities negotiating survival amidst conflict and globalization.
We are looking forward to Naman Agrawal's lecture Beyond the Golden Walls: Memory, Survival, and Everyday Life in Jaisalmer’s Borderlands" in our Cities at War Lectures Series on
📅 10.12.2025 🕓 16:00 CET
Join us here: offuniversity.org/current-cour...
@urbanstudiesfoundation.org
This lecture explores how the eastern Yemeni region of Hadhramout has become a frontline of a different kind of war, not through military confrontation, but through resource extraction, infrastructural collapse, and sustained foreign intervention. Deeply entangled in geopolitical competition and economic exploitation, Hadhramout has since 2021 experienced waves of protest fueled by electricity blackouts, inflation, and the collapse of public services. This unrest has unfolded in a region that is among the most resource-rich in Yemen, yet these benefits rarely reach the population.
We are looking forward to Shada Bokir's lecture "The Other War: Economic Occupation and Civic Resistance in Hadhramout" in our Cities at War Lectures Series on
📅 03.12.2025 🕓 16:00 CET
Join us here: offuniversity.org/current-cour...
War leaves deep and visible scars on the urban landscape, but it also profoundly transforms how residents emotionally perceive their city. In this lecture, we will explore the concept of the emotional landscape and emotional places in wartime cities, and present the types of emotional places identified in contemporary Kyiv and Kharkiv.
This week in our lecture series "Cities at War": Emotional Landscapes of Ukrainian Cities in Times of War
by Olena Kononenko and Oleksandra Nenko.
📆 26.11.2025
⏰16:00 CET
-> offuniversity.org/current-cour...
In our panel "Common Struggles, Unequal Terms." @ygmarshall.bsky.social, Aslı Vatansever and Felicia Kompio discussed the latest developments in US academia and what they mean for precariousness, abuse of power and academic freedom in Germany.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY00...
Good news: We have extended the deadline for ten days until November 28th, 2025.