Starting 14 OctoberWritten Artefacts across World Regions

23 September 2024

Photo: Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Buckminster Fuller Mural Painting project realised by URBANA in the frame of JRSLM - Paradise Lost Again exhibition at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, curated by Hans Maria De Wolf, 17 Oct – 19 Nov 2019. Project produced by Visit.Brussels in collaboration with VUB, ULB Architecture, Ixelles & Buckminster Fuller Institute. Photo © VUB. See www.urbana-project.com & www.vub.be.

This winter semester, we present the third edition of our Equal Opportunity Lecture Series, this time exploring ‘Incommensurabilities and Comparisons’ between research approaches from different regions of the world. The multilingual series also features lectures in Arabic, French, and Spanish.

Not only the production of but also the research on written artefacts always takes place within a particular cultural setting, which comes with its specific norms, focuses, and values. Inevitably, this cultural embeddedness also comes with certain blind spots and omissions. Some aspects of written artefacts will remain invisible if we always approach them from the same scholarly perspective – in particular the Euro-American perspective predominant in contemporary academia. With its Equal Opportunity Lecture Series, the CSMC aims to provide a platform for alternative ways of studying written artefacts, and to bring to the fore the ‘untold stories’ that lie dormant in these objects.

Starting on 14 October, we start a new series of these lectures, which is devoted to ‘Written Artefacts across World Regions: Incommensurabilities and Comparisons’. As the title suggests, the series brings together materials and perspectives from all over the globe and to shed light on the connections – the similarities, entanglements, but also incommensurabilities – that emerge when we look at research on artefacts from different regions or informed by different scholarly and conservation traditions as well as by different cultural and political contexts.

Cross-cultural comparisons are a productive yet also potentially limiting approach in written artefact research. They can sharpen our sensibility for the cross-cultural diversity of written artefacts and writing practices, but also stifle our capacity to convey radically diverse modes of knowledge and practice to our audiences. What aspects of written artefacts and of writing practices invite or, instead, defy comparisons? What insights can comparisons yield, what understandings might they obscure? And what thematic, methodological, and epistemological expansions can a focus on cross-cultural or cross-regional incommensurabilities help us envision? Lectures in the series will explore these questions by looking at case studies from Algeria, India, Iran, Mali, Mexico, Thailand, and Yemen.

The series is organised by Mariapaola Gritti and Martin-Jörg Schäfer. For the first time, there will also be lectures in Arabic, French, and Spanish, which will be translated into English. All lectures take place on Monday evenings (6:15 pm to 8:00 pm) at Erwin-Panofsky Hörsaal (ESA C), main building, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1. People from outside Hamburg are welcome to attend the lectures online. The full schedule of the lecture series as well as a link to register for online participation is available on the event’s website.