Sommersemester 12
Hier finden Sie eine Übersicht über das Programm des Think&Drink Colloquium im Wintersemester 2011/2012. Das Kolloquium findet in der Vorlesungszeit immer Montags von 18 bis 20 Uhr in Raum 002 in der Universitätsstraße 3b statt.
Eine Gesamtübersicht über das Think & Drink Programm ist hier als pdf downloadbar.
Programm
Montag, 23.04.2012: Prof. Steven Vertovec, Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung multireligiöser und multiethnischer Gesellschaften.
When new diversity meets old diversity 
The seminar will explore the themes and methods of a new comparative research project called ‘Globaldivercities’. Using a variety of research techniques spanning social anthropology and human geography (including conventional ethnography, GIS tracking and map-making, photography and film-making), the project addresses the question: ‘In public spaces compared across cities, what accounts for similarities and differences in social and spatial patterns that arise under new conditions of diversification?’ Here, moreover, diversification refers to the changing relationships between a variety of variables (including ethnicity, language, gender, class and legal status). Research sites include neighbourhoods in New York (a classic city of immigration with new global migrant flows in a broadly supportive political context), Singapore (dominated by racial-cultural politics, and wholly dependent on new, highly restricted migrants), and Johannesburg (emerging from Apartheid with tensions around unregulated new, pan-African migrant flows).
Montag, 30.04.2012: Prof. Adrian Favell, Sciences Po, Paris.
Art & the City: The political uses of creativity and art in urban Japan today 
Art and creativity in Japan have taken on ever more political and social relevance in the difficult years since the bursting of the nation’s financial bubble in the early 1990s. As contemporary artists, and architects working with the art world, have responded in complex ways to the decline, trauma and decadence of this period in Japan, politicians and urban developers have seized on this archetypal global high culture for their own ends. They use it as a means for enacting their urban dreams or their social alternatives, and as a response to the uniquely dramatic polarisation of the country between urban over-development and desperate rural decline. This presentation compares and contrasts three interlinked cases that offer a guide to the uses of art and creativity in urban Japan today. First, it examines the famous philosophy of Minoru Mori that lies behind the Roppongi Hills development and its use of art, design and the art museum as an icon of a new visionary Tokyo of the future. It then shifts to Yokohama, which has played its part in the failed internationalisation of Japanese contemporary art via the Triennale, but is also a city that has enacted a range of original creative city policies designed to address poverty and inner city degradation. Thirdly, it looks at the anti-urban rural alternative established by Fram Kitagawa with the Echigo-Tsumari “Big Field” festival and Setouchi inland sea island festival, and his attempt to use art to create a different kind of artistic landmark in Japan. The presentation finishes with a reflection on emergent forms of “sustainable” art and architecture, alive to the constraints and challenges of present-day urban and rural conditions, that are being forged as part of the educational mission of number of leading Japanese creative figures in cooperation with local authorities in big cities.
Montag, 07.05.2012: Prof. Andreas Farwick, Ruhr Universität Bochum.
Kontexteffekte von Wohnquartieren auf den Eingliederungsprozess von Migranten – Empirische Befunde und methodische Herausforderungen 
Seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten zählt die Problematik der individuellen und gesellschaftlichen Folgen der Zuwanderung nach Deutschland zu einem der zentralen Themenfelder der politischen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Debatte. Dabei spielt die Frage der Eingliederung der Migranten in die funktionalen gesellschaftlichen Systeme eine entscheidende Rolle. Insbesondere den ethnisch geprägten städtischen Wohnquartieren der Zuwanderer wird eine negative Wirkung auf den Eingliederungsprozess beigemessen. So ist häufig von einem Rückzug der Migranten in die eigene ethnische Gruppe und von einer Abschottung der Zuwanderer in sog. Parallelgesellschaften die Rede.
Vor dem Hintergrund bisher unklarer empirischer Befunde zum Einfluss der räumlichen Konzentration von Migranten im Wohnquartier sollen neuere Befunde zur Thematik vorgestellt und auf der Grundlage einer eigenen Befragung türkischer Migranten in der Stadt Bremen ein möglicher Zusammenhang zwischen der ethnischen Segregation und dem Ausmaß sozialer Kontakte zu Personen der Aufnahmegesellschaft analysiert werden. Abschließend werden methodische Herausforderungen für zukünftige Analysen von Wohnquartierseffekten benannt.
Montag, 14.05.2012: Prof. Kevin Ward, University of Manchester, UK.
Transatlantic Travels: mobile policies in the current era 
Cities in industrialized countries of the north presently face significant financial pressures. In this context many are struggling to finance economic development. Some are now looking elsewhere in the world, searching out 'models' that are understood to have worked, taking bits from elsewhere and reassembling them for their own needs. One such 'model' that is on the move is Tax Increment Financing that emerged in the US in the 1950s and is now being introduced into the UK. Kevin Ward outlines its multiple origins, its different pathways, its stops and starts, and its encounters with different cities and what they have meant for its morphing
and mutating. Overall, he argues that the twenty first century is one that is witnessing a relational comparative urban condition, in which cities are increasingly assembled through drawing on bits of elsewhere.
Montag, 21.05.2012: Prof. Ash Amin, University of Cambridge, UK.
Telescopic Urbanism and the Poor 
In 2003 UN-Habitat warned that by 2030 around a third of the world's 9 billion humans could be suffering from multiple deprivations, living in slums like conditions in the world’s cities. Urban attention is beginning to turn to this problem, and to questions of sustainable urban competitiveness and growth, but without much referencing of the one to the other. This paper claims that the city of the future is being looked at through the wrong end of the binoculars, with 'business consultancy' urbanism largely disinterested in the city that does not feed international competitiveness and business growth, and 'human potential’ urbanism looking to the settlements where the poor are located for bottom-up solutions to wellbeing. The paper reflects on the implications of such an urban optic on the chances of the poor, their areas of settlement, and their expectations of support from others in and beyond the city. While acknowledging the realism, inventiveness and achievements of effort initiated or led by the poor, the paper laments the disappearance of ideas of mutuality, obligation and commonality that telescopic urbanism has enabled, in the process scripting out both grand designs and the duty of distant others to address the problems of acute inequality and poverty that will continue to plague the majority city.
Montag, 04.06.2012: Prof. Judit Bodnar, Central European University, Budapest.
Constructing Global Forms and Comparisons 
Globalization has complicated the wisdom of comparative research. It has produced an acute awareness of transnational connections, made the assumption of independent cases less tenable, and reinforced our tendency to compare across contexts in a temporally and spatially compressed world which provides us with a wide array of readily available theoretical tools but shortens the time span of decision-making and reflection associated with writing and conceptual transfer. The talk speculates about the global, the urban and a renewed commitment to comparisons in a discussion of planned residential developments, commonly known as gated communities, which emerged almost simultaneously in various parts of the world and constitute a global form.
Montag, 11.06.2012: Prof. Philip Kasinitz, City Univeristy of New York, USA.
Is 'Illegal' the 'New Black'? Immigration, Demographic Change and Racial Justice in the American City
Montag, 18.06.2012: Prof. Marina Hennig, Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz.
Die Rolle des Habitus bei der Herausbildung von Netzwerkstrukturen 
Obwohl sich das Konzept des sozialen Netzwerkes mit einer Reihe von empirischen Arbeiten in unterschiedlichen Kontexten immer stärker bemerkbar macht, konstituiert sich das Konzept eher als ein „Orientierungsstatement“ (Schenk 1984) und weniger als Sozialtheorie. Die Kritik an der Netzwerkanalyse basiert vor allem auf der Vernachlässigung der Eigenaktivitäten der Individuen eines sozialen Netzwerkes sowie den gesellschaftlich vorgegebenen handlungsrelevanten Normen und Wertorientierungen (vgl. White et. al. 1976, Wellman und Berkowitz 1988). Es kommt immer dann zu einem Erklärungsnotstand, wenn danach gefragt wird, wie sich existierende Netzwerke überhaupt herausgebildet haben, sich reproduzieren oder sich wieder verändern.
Ansatzpunkte für die Formulierung eines theoretischen Konzeptes zur Entstehung sozialer Netzwerken finden sich in der Habitus- und Feldtheorie von Pierre Bourdieu. Der Netzwerkanalyse liegt ebenso wie der Habitus- und Feldtheorie eine relationale Sichtweise zugrunde, die Anknüpfungspunkte für eine Verknüpfung beider Ansätze bieten.
Im Sinn der Habitustheorie können Netzwerkstrukturen als Muster sozialer Praktiken angesehen werden, denen tiefer liegende Strukturen zu Grunde liegen, die durch den Habitus der Akteure entstehen und verändert werden. Damit werden Soziale Netzwerke in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der Akteursposition in der Sozialstruktur und den damit verbundenen Handlungsdispositionen betrachtet und erklärt. Der Habitus als Bindeglied zwischen objektiven und subjektiven Beziehungen, wird dabei einerseits als Ausdruck der gesellschaftlichen Sozialstruktur und andererseits als notwendige Bedingung der Reproduktion der Praxis in Netzwerkstrukturen angesehen. Er liefert die Tiefenstruktur die nicht nur Ursache für bestimmte Formen des Denkens und Handelns ist, sondern auch der Interaktionsbeziehungen.
Im Rahmen des Vortrages werden die Grundannahmen der Habitus- und Feldtheorie von Bourdieu sowie der Netzwerkanalyse in ihren Begrifflichkeiten und Zusammenhängen skizziert, bestehende Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede identifiziert, Verknüpfungsmöglichkeiten aufgezeigt sowie empirische Ergebnisse zum Einfluss des Habitus auf die Netzwerkstrukturen vorgestellt.
Montag, 25.06.2012:
Diese Woche muss das Think and Drink leider ausfallen!!
Montag, 02.07.2012: Prof. Frank Eckardt, Bauhaus Universität, Weimar.
Ubiquitous urbanity: cities beyond place 
The lecture will explore an emerging mode of urban life that is both familiar and startlingly new: a continuum of places, technologies, and performances that meld disparate enclaves into a seemingly coherent whole. We may access this convergence of terminals to the same place by way of interstate ...highways, internet connections, and personal media devices, even as we encounter ever more unyielding barriers to meaningful human communication. This lecture is meant for anyone who recognizes the odd and frightening pleasures of urbanity. Flowing from airport to hotel to coffee shop to chain restaurant, we glimpse the alienation and fascination of looking, consuming, and communicating in the staccato rhythms of contemporary urban life. It will investigate this phenomenon, this structure and perception of an emergubiquitous urbanity, by investigating its origins in Parisian arcades, world’s fairs, and military-industrial superslabs, its manifestations in airports, hotels, and shopping malls, and its potential undoing through performance, placelessness, and reverence.
Montag, 09.07.2012: Prof. Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Kanada.
Austerity urbanism 
The presentation will explore the origins and meaning of austerity urbanism, locating this in the lineage of neoliberal or market-based forms of governance. The rise and repeated reconstruction of neoliberal forms of urbanism over the past three decades have in fact continuously drawn on notions of austerity as a defining feature of “free” market rule. Austerity was a governing principle during the “roll back” phase of neoliberalism (the inaugural period of social-state retrenchment and “cuts”), but it would also shaped the ensuing phase of “roll out” neoliberalism (as neoliberal policymakers became increasingly mired in the task of managing the contradictions of earlier waves of marketization, privatization, and commodification), during which time institutional reforms were authorized under conditions of permanent fiscal restraint and market-oriented selectivity. The Wall Street crash of 2008, far from marking the end of neoliberalism, as some speculated at the time, has ushered in a more revanchist but also “roiling” phase of neoliberal development: the age of systemic austerity.
