Seminar SoSe 2023
Dr. Moritz Ahlert,  Prof. Anke Hagemann

Kiosk of Solidarity

This seminar accompanies the urban practice format ›Kiosk of Solidarity‹. Six selected Berlin initiatives, each of which understands itself as a practice of solidarity, will each occupy the kiosk for one week in the summer of 2023 at different locations in Berlin and with the formats of their choice (workshops, talks, screenings, bar, cooking events, etc.).

The kiosk, as a low-threshold everyday typology, thereby marks a special form of solidary urban production: it becomes an inner-city laboratory, a moving place of resistance, and a place of knowledge exchange.

The ›Kiosk of Solidarity‹ creates a place to engage inter- and transdisciplinarily with the fields of work, housing, and health in Berlin, which we understand as central areas of the often diagnosed crisis of social reproduction, in which solidarity(s) are negotiated politically, socially and materially today.

The ›Kiosk of Solidarity‹ will be built by ConstructLab and brings local initiatives and neighborhoods together at the various locations, becomes a platform, collects local knowledge, and initiates transformative processes of solidarity-based urban development or strengthens them.

Students will analyze the selected case studies in the multi-scalar fields of work, housing, and health, to understand the conditions for enabling solidarity, as well as the practices and infrastructures in which (old and new) solidarities are negotiated, as well as the multiple interdependencies between them.

Readings will introduce current debates on solidarity in urban and social science studies. Seminar participants are invited to co-produce formats of 'Kiosk of Solidarity' together with the selected initiatives.

This seminar is a close collaboration with Prof. Dr. Sabine Hark, Professor for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin and part of the interdisciplinary research group ›Transforming Solidarities‹. This seminar is part of the research project ›Transforming Solidarities. Practices and Infrastructures in the Migration Society‹ (Berlin University Alliance). The Kiosk is additionally funded by Projektfonds Urbane Praxis and Hans Sauer Stiftung. More info: transformingsolidarities.net

Photo: © Anastasia Kuznetsova X ConstructLab 

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