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76518-01 - Research seminar: Inherited Futures: Ruptures and Contestations (3 CP)
| Semester | fall semester 2025 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers |
Kadiatou Nenein Diallo (k.diallo@unibas.ch, Assessor)
Julia Rensing (julia.rensing@unibas.ch) Lorena Rizzo (lorena.rizzo@unibas.ch) |
| Content | In the fall semester 2025, the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel hosts a winter school in cooperation with the Universities of Strasbourg (FR) and Freiburg (im Breisgau, DE). The winter school explores how individuals and communities imagine and build their futures through processes of inheriting. We link these processes to material heritage and the passing down of objects, a continuation of rituals and practices as well as to a negotiation of the burdens and voids of inheritance, including the legacies of debt, loss, violence and the absence of what has once been passed down. We reflect on a paradox that seems to be emblematic of the current times: on the one hand, there is a stable and growing investment in inheritance – seen in durable attachments to land, territory, houses and conceptions of identity or genealogical continuity; and on the other we are confronted with an increasing sense of futures displaced, ruptured and threatened by climate change, technological transformation, a shifting global political order, and large-scale migration. The winter school will be a platform for cross-institutional and interdisciplinary debate on these pressing concerns. We will foreground creative and artistic practices and inquire how artists and cultural practitioners conceive and negotiate (im)material inheritances and engage these in various forms of future-making. For this, we invite artists to join our conversation and offer creative interventions as impulses to foster the discussion on inherited futures. Their work and practice link questions of inheritance and future to the body and forms of embodiment, and the media they work in – performance, video, and sound – also prompt fresh interrogations of temporalities, multiple meanings, materialities and immaterialities of inheritance. The winter school will be open to Master and PhD students from the University of Basel, Strasbourg and Freiburg. Our partners are experts in the sociology of knowledge production, theories of material culture, histories and politics of archives and collections, restitution and cultural heritage. Interdisciplinary conversation, site visits – around the city and in museums and archives – and public performances, book discussions and film screening constitute some of the formats and activities that ground the cross-institutional academic and artistic exchanges and enrich the learning experience for students. |
| Comments | Block course 1.-5.12.2025 |
| Admission requirements | Selection upon application |
| Course application | The number of participants is limited to 5 students from each university. MA and PhD students in Basel, who wish to register for the winter school are asked to send a motivation letter to one of the following email addresses: julia.rensing@unibas.ch; Deadline for submission of motivation letter: 31. October 2025 |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|
No dates available. Please contact the lecturer.
| Modules |
African Studies: Recommendations (PhD subject: African Studies) Modul: Praktiken (Master's degree program: Cultural Techniques) Modul: Research Skills in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Master's degree subject: Anthropology) Module: Europeanization and Globalization (Master's Studies: European Global Studies) Module: Fields: Governance and Politics (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: Fields: Knowledge Production and Transfer (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: Fields: Media and Imagination (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: Interdisciplinary and Applied African Studies (Master's degree program: African Studies) Module: The Urban across Disciplines (Master's degree program: Critical Urbanisms) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Zentrum für Afrikastudien |