Organisation: Nikolai Brandes and Burcu Dogramaci

Facilities for remote participation via Zoom are available.
Please register for the conference by 4 October 2023
https://www.globaldisconnect.org/registration

The creation, provision and application of knowledge depends on subjects, geographies, events and wider contexts. ‘All stories at least are not the same’, noted the writer Bernadette Meyer in 1968 in her volume ‘Story’, in which various novellas intertwine. Taking stories as diverse and non-hierarchical forms of producing and transferring knowledge, Meyer’s statement could be adapted as follows: knowledge as the totality of one’s abilities moves and is moved between continents, regions, countries and societal contexts. Educational institutions, publishing houses, companies and state institutions, as well as social groups and individuals, organise and archive knowledge stocks, and they translate, convey and re-contextualise them in (global) transfers. These processes cannot be reduced to a linear narrative of boundless, irrevocable epistemic globalisation of permanently increased interconnectedness and universal availability. Rather, transnational and transcultural knowledge production is articulated precisely in dissonant registers as, for example, through interruption, absence and digression.

Not least due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the realignment of geopolitical blocs, political think tanks, editorials and other opinion leaders have recently postulated increasing ‘deglobalisation’. However, instances of dis:connectivity that emerge through various forms of interruption, absence and detours can also be understood as foundational dynamics of historical and contemporary globalisation. Dis:connectivity means the coexistence of non-connection and connection as, for example, in constellations of local and global knowledge and of traditional/indigenous and futuristic/technological knowledge production. Our perspective on dis:connectivity thus necessarily includes hierarchies, power relations and inherent norms of global knowledge circulation.

The dis:connective conditions of global knowledge production are the starting point for the second annual conference of our centre, structured in three sessions: ‘unlocking knowledge’, ‘bodies of knowledge’, and ‘challenging knowledge’ with visits to Munich museums and cinema.

Venues:
11 October 2023 Film screening Arena Filmtheater Hans-Sachs-Str. 7 80469 Munich
12/13 October 2023 Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect Maria-Theresia-Str. 21 81675 Munich
12 October 2023 Exhibition tour ‘Archiv 451. Trikont Verlag’ Haus der Kunst Prinzregentenstr. 1 80538 Munich
13 October 2023 Visit & artistic intervention Münchner Stadtmuseum Sankt-Jacobs-Platz 1 80331 Munich