Alumni Hour

ALUMNI HOUR | Julia Martínez-Ariño (University of Groningen): "Building an Academic Career as a Work-in-Progress: Insights from my 'Unplanned' Journey"

  • Date: Jan 15, 2025
  • Time: 02:30 PM - 03:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Julia Martínez-Ariño (University of Groningen)
  • Location: Zoom Meeting
Julia Martínez-Ariño is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Religion at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and Director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalization. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the MPI in 2013 and in 2014-2017. Her research focuses on public policies on religious diversity, secularism, Jewish heritage practices and religious disaffiliation and nonreligion. [more]

ALUMNI HOUR | Magdalena Suerbaum (Universität Bielefeld, Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies): "The in-between: navigating academic (non-)belonging"

  • Date: Oct 30, 2024
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Magdalena Suerbaum (Universität Bielefeld, Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies)
  • Location: Zoom Meeting
Magdalena Suerbaum is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. Her research interests are on forced displacement, gender, legal precarity, and belonging, with a current focus on parenting practices and intergenerational transmission of knowledge among Syrians living in Turkey and Germany. Previously, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. She has co-edited three Special Issues (Ethnic and Racial Studies 2023; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 2022; Citizenship Studies 2022) and is the author of “Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian refugees in Egypt” (I.B. Tauris, 2020). [more]

ALUMNI HOUR | Dana Schmalz (MPI for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg): “Writing about migration in troubled times: academic projects and public interventions"

  • Date: May 29, 2024
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dana Schmalz (MPI for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg)
  • Location: Zoom Meeting
Dana Schmalz is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Her work sits at the intersection of international law and legal theory, with a focus on refugee law and human rights. Dana holds a Ph.D. in law from the University of Frankfurt and an LL.M. in Comparative Legal Thought from Cardozo Law School, New York. Her book “Refugees, Democracy and the Law. Political Rights at the Margins of the State” was published in 2020. Her book “Das Bevölkerungsargument” (the population argument) is forthcoming with Suhrkamp in 2024. [more]

ALUMNI HOUR | Gabriele Alex (University of Tübingen): “To, for, and on behalf of whom do we speak? Collaboration, participation, and questions of representation around research and publishing"

  • Date: Dec 5, 2023
  • Time: 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Gabriele Alex (University of Tübingen)
  • Gabriele Alex is full professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. She was one of the earliest Research Fellows at MPI MMG from 2009 until 2011. Before joining the Max Planck Institute, she was Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology while also serving as Director of the Master’s Program Health and Society in South Asia at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. She has taught at various Universities in Germany, Slovenia, and Switzerland. She is one of the editors of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
  • Location: Zoom Meeting

ALUMNI HOUR | Maria Schiller (Erasmus University Rotterdam): “Ideas, networks and power in European local diversity policymaking: a personal account of my research trajectory"

  • Date: Oct 5, 2023
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Maria Schiller (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  • Maria Schiller is Associate Professor of Public policy, Migration, and Diversity at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her work is motivated by the desire to understand and capture public policymaking on migration and diversity, with a focus on Europe, often comparing across countries and cities. In her research, she is interested in the practices and networks involved in governing migration-related diversity and investigates the role of officials, civil society, and private actors therein. Previously, she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, a Substitute Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen, a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Kent, and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna. She holds a Ph.D. in Migration Studies (2014) from the University of Kent.
  • Location: Zoom Meeting

ALUMNI HOUR | Benjamin Boudou (University of Rennes): “On academic hope”

  • Date: May 9, 2023
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Benjamin Boudou (University of Rennes)
  • Benjamin Boudou is a professor of political science at the University of Rennes. He is the editor of the political theory journal Raisons Politiques and a fellow at the French Collaborative Institute on Migration. He is the author of Politique de l'hospitalité: Une généalogie conceptuelle [Politics of hospitality: A conceptual genealogy] (CNRS Éditions, 2017) and Le dilemme des frontières [The Border Dilemma: Ethics and politics of immigration] (EHSS Editions, 2018). He has recently published in Social Research, European Journal of Political Theory, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Migration and Society, and Essays in Philosophy.
  • Location: Zoom Meeting

ALUMNI HOUR | Sahana Udupa (University of Munich): “Surviving or thriving? Work and life in Germany as an ‘international’ scholar”

  • Date: Feb 14, 2023
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Sahana Udupa (University of Munich)
  • Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology at the University of Munich (LMU München) and Principal Investigator of the For Digital Dignity Research Network. She teaches and researches online extreme speech, politics of artificial intelligence, critical digital studies, news and journalism, and media policy. Her latest publications include the research paper on digital technology and extreme speech commissioned by the United Nations (2021), co-authored monograph, Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (New York University Press, 2023, with E.G. Dattatreyan), co-edited volume, Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech (Indiana University Press, 2021). Udupa is the recipient of Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, European Research Council Grant Awards and Francqui Chair (Belgium).
  • Location: Zoom Meeting

ALUMNI HOUR | Anna Cieslik (University of Cambridge): “Research Funding Opportunities and Applications”

  • Date: Sep 28, 2022
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Anna Cieslik (University of Cambridge)
  • Anna Cieslik received her PhD in Human Geography from Clark University. From 2011 to 2013 she worked as a postdoc at the MMG-MPG and then as an assistant professor at New Jersey City University. Currently she is a Research Facilitator for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Anna is involved in analyzing funding trends and seeking funding opportunities. She provides advice and feedback on grant applications. Her work includes supporting research strategy development, running workshops and training sessions, and helping researchers develop their projects. She is a Course Director for a Postgraduate Certificate Course on Research and Innovation Leadership.
  • Location: Zoom Meeting

ALUMNI HOUR | Marian Burchardt (Leipzig University): “Configuring Diversity: Infrastructures and Affinities in Pandemic Spaces”

  • Date: Jun 9, 2022
  • Time: 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Marian Burchardt (Leipzig University)
  • Marian Burchardt is Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. Previously, he worked as research fellow at MMG from 2012 to 2017 and published extensively on “Diversity”. Moreover, he was a senior researcher at the Centre “Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. He is the author of Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West (Rutgers UP, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).
  • Location: Zoom Meeting

ALUMNI HOUR | Fran Meissner (University of Twente, Netherlands): “Superdiversity in times of big data technologies – social scoring, socio-spatial sorting and the future of urban diversity”

  • Date: Feb 16, 2022
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Fran Meissner (University of Twente, Netherlands)
  • Fran Meissner is an Assistant Professor of Critical Geodata Studies and Geodata Ethics at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Before starting at Twente, Fran was an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Leiden. Amongst other positions, she has previously held a highly competitive Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship at the TU Delft and a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is also a long-term research partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. Her research focuses on contemporary urban social configurations and how – in times of datafication – these are transformed through international migration. Based on her expertise in complex urban diversities, her most recent work grapples with questions about how data technologies – specifically geodata applications – shape the way migrants get to access urban spaces and how those technologies exclude migrants from urban life. Her work aims to make visible the migration information infrastructures behind increasingly data-mediated experiences of urban diversity.
  • Location: Zoom Meeting
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