(Re)construction | Repair and Reparation (Achille Mbembe, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor & Sabine Hark)
Channel: medico international
Date: 2021-04-06

Perspectives from the global South and the global North

Discussants:
Achille Mbembe (Political Philosopher, Johannesburg)
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Writer, Nairobi)
Sabine Hark (Sociologist, Berlin)

Facilitator: Anselm Franke (Senior Curator, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin)

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist and public intellectual. After holding positions at various U.S. universities, he now teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Mbembe was awarded the 36th Geschwister Scholl Prize in 2015 for his book Critique of Black Reason (2013). He is one of the most important living authors when it comes to the aftermath of colonialism. He coined the term "necropolitics" to describe the proliferation of power and sovereignty structures whose features include the production of death on a large scale. His most recent publication is "Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization" (2020).

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a Kenyan writer. Her short stories have been published in numerous international literary journals, including McSweeney's and Chimurenga Chronic. In 2003, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor won the prestigious British Caine Prize for African Writing. Her debut novel 'Dust' (2013) was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and she also received the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, Kenya's most prestigious literary award, for it. 'The Dragonfly Seas' is her second novel. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor lives in Nairobi.

Sabine Hark is one of the most renowned gender researchers in Germany and is considered a co-founder of Queer Theory in Germany. The sociologist teaches as a professor at the TU Berlin and has headed the Center for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies (ZiFG) there since 2009. In recent years, she has focused primarily on the nexus between identity, difference, and solidarity. Most recently, in 2017, she published the essay "Unterscheiden und herrschen" (" Distinguish and Rule") together with Paula-Irene Villa on contemporary entanglements of racism, sexism, and feminism.

/// 

The (Re)Construction of the World. Aid. Solidarity. Politics.

A conference not only on the miserable state of the world, but also and above all on the possibilities of its reconstruction into a place that will finally be worth inhabiting. In lectures and forums, the aim is to determine the relationship between aid, solidarity and politics from the promise we made to ourselves in the Declaration of Human Rights: The promise of a global and social order in which the rights granted to us all would be fully realized.

The online conference (February 12th until February 14th, 2021) was organized by medico international e. V. in cooperation with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Sozialforschung Frankfurt, International Institute of Political Murder and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

www.medico.de/en/reconstruction