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Organized by:
Forum Transregionale Studien, Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Rethymno (Crete), Centre Marc Bloch

Call for Applications
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Program brochure [pdf download]

Recent developments ― revolutions and crises, new social movements, migrants and refugees, interventions and border regimes, civil wars and authoritarian restorations― have transformed the Mediterranean into a zone of fragmentation and disaster. Perceptions of the Mediterranean have long been shaped by European perspectives. The Mediterranean has been seen as an idyllic space of civilization, of exchange and mobility, a view related to re-translations of the Roman mare nostrum; to those nostalgic visions of nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial cosmopolitanism; and to modern practices of tourism and food consumption. Other discourses, also mainly shaped in Europe, consider the Mediterranean to be a zone of long-lasting conflicts extending from the Phoenicians to Arab expansion in the seventh century and from the Crusades to contemporary demographic and social disparities. In view of newly emergent political and strategic challenges, current European approaches to the Mediterranean have increasingly focused on issues of (dis)order and security. However, Europe itself has become part of a more global Mediterranean space that extends far beyond its shores.

The Transregional Academy “De-Framing the Mediterranean from the 21st Century” aimed at gathering a group of doctoral and postdoctoral scholars from fields of anthropology, migration and urban studies, cultural and area studies, economics, political science, law, geography and history whose current work relates to the Mediterranean so as to probe, discuss and generate new ideas, concepts, tools and methodologies for a better understanding of current dynamics. The idea was to provide a laboratory for rethinking and discussing the history of the Mediterranean, the Mittelmeer, the “White Sea” from todays’ perspectives and challenges. We invited participants to share approaches, insights and theories from a variety of disciplines and regional traditions in order to contribute a more inclusive position. While combining local and transnational perspectives, the Academy sought to reconsider not only the usual disciplinary divisions but the spatial ones as well (North/South and East/West) so as to encourage new research approaches from still dominated or marginalized areas and perspectives. We aimed to enhance participants’ digital savoir-faire through studies of data networks and the circulation of information while also closely heeding the concrete dimensions of space, geography and agency in its concrete contexts, dimensions and scales.

The Transregional Academy was chaired by a group of scholars that included Leyla Dakhli and Teresa Koloma-Beck (Centre Marc Bloch), Zaal Andronikashvili (Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin; Ilia State University Georgia), Marinos Sariyannis and Apostolos Delis (Institute for Mediterranean Studies), Carolina Kobelinsky (Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, Paris), and Mayssoun Sukarieh (King’s College London).

The Transregional Academy invited 21 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars from different countries and academic backgrounds to present and discuss their current research within an international and multi-disciplinary framework. The Academy was designed to support scholarly networks. The program will focus on the following themes: 1) “the production of space,” 2) “routes and borders,” 3) “actors and agency.”