Contact
Dr. Daniele Cantini
phone: +49 345 55 24077
fax: +49 345 55 27606
verwaltung@scm.uni-halle.de
room E 01.1
Research Cluster
Society and Culture in Motion
Reichardtstraße 6
06114 Halle (Saale)
Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker (Convenor)
phone: +49 345 55-24 200
olaf.zenker@ethnologie.uni-...
room 206
Reichardtstraße 11
06114 Halle Saale
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A.W. Amo Lecture

A. W. Amo
Rekontextualisierung der Anton Wilhelm Amo Gedenktafel und der Bronzeplastik "Freies Afrika“
Anlässlich der offiziellen Enthüllung der neuen Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Informationstafel am Universitätsring befassen sich einige Kurzvideos - u.a. anderem von Prof. Dr. Olaf Zenker (Organisator der Amo Lecture Series) und Raja-Léon Hamann (Amo-Bündnis Halle & Doktorand der Ethnologie) - auf der Amo-Website der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg mit Anton Wilhelm Amo, der Bronzeplastik "Freies Afrika" von Gerhard Geyer und der Bedeutung beider im Lichte der Dekolonialisierungsdebatte in Deutschland.
A.W. AMO LECTURES
The A.W. AMO LECTURES are organised annually since 2013 at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg by the Research Cluster "Society and Culture in Motion". They feature internationally acclaimed scholars presenting their ongoing research on themes connected to the work of Anton Wilhelm Amo.
An Africa-born philosopher of the 18th century, Anthon Wilhelm Amo studied and taught at the University in Halle and Wittenberg before returning to his native land - present-day Ghana. Through his critique of obscure and irrational laws and his insistence on the primacy of humanity in jurisprudence, Anton Wilhelm Amo was a humanist and an early advocate of human and humane rights.
Amo Lecture 9: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni - Genealogies of Decolonization and Tasks of Decolonialityin the 21st Century
22th June 2022 – 18:15h
Vor Ort: Hörsaal IV, Ludwig-Wucherer-Str. 2, 06108 Halle (Saale), Germany
Online: bit.ly/amo-2022 (Passwort: amo-Lecture22)
ANTONIOUS GVILIELMUS AMO AFER was a pioneering African intellectual who endured a questioned humanity and inevitably his scholarship picked up key existential and epistemological issues which formed abasis of decolonization as both an epistemological and political movement. These issues ranged from being human itself, injustices of enslavement, the question of being possessed and named by others, vexed identity questions, to the broader problems of Eurocentric human science with its Cartesian dualism at the centre. These issues which troubled the mind of Afer continue to animate struggles for decolonization and to inform the tasks of decoloniality in the 21st century. Therefore, this lecture situates Afer’s concerns within the genealogies of decolonization as it identifies him as one of the early African scholars who laid a foundation for decolonial thinking and indeed being a giant on whose shoulders those pursuing decoloniality should stand. Through his intellectual and academic achievements, Afer directly challenged Eurocentricand racist notions of black people who were said to be less endowed intellectually and who were designated as naturally slaves. The life story and intellectual pedigree of Afer is used here as a departure point to highlight the genealogies of decolonization and to delineate the key tasks of decoloniality of the 21st century. This is necessary because the modern world is on the cusp of a resurgent and insurgent planetary decolonization ranged against racism, injustices (cognitive, political, cultural, economic and social) as well as hegemonic Eurocentric epistemology and knowledge.
Ankündigung AMO 9.pdf
(1.1 MB) vom 18.05.2022
Amo Lecture 8: Ayelet Shachar - The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility
The border is one of the most important issues of our times. It is also one of the least well understood. We think of a border as a static line, but recent bordering techniques have broken away from the map, as governments have developed legal tools to limit the rights of migrants before and after they enter a country’s territory. The detachment of state power from a fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border. This development upsets our assumptions about waning sovereignty, while also revealing the limits of the push for border-refortification. But while the accelerating mobility of borders cuts against the rights of those who cross them, it also presents a tremendous opportunity to rethink states’ responsibilities to migrants. In her Amo Lecture, which is based on her most recent book, Professor Shachar proposes a new approach to human mobility in a world where borders, like people, have the capacity to move.
Poster_Amo Lecture Shachar 2021.pdf
(152.9 KB) vom 17.03.2021
Amo Lecture 7: Emmanuel Didier - Quantitative Marbling: New Conceptual Tools for the Socio-History of Quantification
Socio-history of quantification is not a simple sub-domain of Science and Technology Studies. On the contrary, it can provide tools for investigating a wide range of social situations from a new and interesting perspective. We begin by providing a new definition of quantification. Next we consider the way numbers permeate society to its very core, forming rich veins of data for social science research. From this process, referred to here as “quantitative marbling,” three distinct categories emerge: data veins produced by governments, those produced by social activists (often contesting the former), and lastly, those produced by non-governmental global networks. We conclude by suggesting that social processes aiming to free certain social aggregates of quantitative analysis are also worthy of attention.
7. Amo Lecture final.pdf
(10.4 MB) vom 13.09.2021
Amo Lecture 6: Achille Mbembe - The Capacity for Truth: Of 'Restitution' in African Systems of Thought
The lecture explores some of the meanings attached to the concept and practice of restitution in precolonial African systems of thought. It dwells in particular on those traditions that considered the most damaging wrongs as those causing harm to one’s ‘vital force’. We elicit the juridical underpinnings of the right to restitution and revisit the relation between ‘persons’ and ‘objects’ it presupposed.
MbembeWilde Objekte_final.pdf
(351.7 KB) vom 31.08.2020
Amo Lecture 5: Werner Schiffauer - Ethos und Wissensproduktion bei Sicherheitsbürokratien
The text discusses the production of security knowledge relating to Islamism in the German internal secret service, the Verfassungsschutz, (literally: office for the protection of the constitution). This knowledge is constitutive for the design of the German "Islampolitik". The text discusses the interrelation of the particular ethos of the office with knowledge production and policy development. The focus is on the construction of a classificatory system with which Islamism is made legible and thus presumably controllable and governable. The text discusses the epistemic assumptions underlying the construction of such a classificatory system. What happens in particular when the classificatory system is applied, i.e. when communities and groups are fitted into to classifications by means of indicators? My hypothesis is that the classificatory system systematically neglects the complexity and dynamism of the field and leads to non-intended consequences when it is translated into governmental strategies. This happens regularly when biopolitical governance is demanded which requires a different type of knowledge. Taking the example of de-radicalization politics I show how governmental strategies become self-contradictory.
Schiffhauer print.pdf
(517.3 KB) vom 11.09.2018
Amo Lecture 4: Souleymane Bachir Diagne - Decolonizing the history of philosophy
In order to decolonize the history of philosophy against the fabrication of translatio studiorum as the unilinear path connecting Greek thought and sciences to medieval European Christianity, we need to pluralize that history. And to manifest in our textbooks that translatio studiorum is not just Jerusalem-AthensRome-Paris or London or Heidelberg … but, as well: Athens-Nishapur-Bagdad-Cordoba-Fez-Timbuktu …. To decolonize the history of philosophy is also to take into account the plurality of languages, in order to consider the perspectives introduced by tongues other than European, and thus undo the “ontological nationalism” upon which rests the assumption that philosophical exercise is intrinsically tied to certain (European) languages
Diagne_final_print.pdf
(203.9 KB) vom 26.06.2018
Amo Lecture 3: Arjun Appadurai - The precarious future of national sovereignty
National sovereignty today operates in changed ecology. The primary reason for this is the erosion of national borders by the flows of ideas, people, technologies and money across national boundaries which has accelerated since the late 1980’s, in what is usually referred to as the period of globalization. In addition, as national economies have become increasingly fictions due to the realities of global finance, nation-states and political elites have had to invent other justifi-cations for their existence and this accounts for the global shift to right-wing ideologies of soil, blood and ethnos. Finally, as the tension between universal human rights and the plight of refugees and other undocumented aliens increas-es, especially in Europe, we see the emergence of a deep divide about the mean-ing of national sovereignty, and a gap between ethnonational views and those of a more liberal variety, which stress inclusion, diversity and hospitality. More than three centuries after the Treaty of Westphalia, Europe (and the world) are in dire need of a new narrative of sovereignty.
Amo_3_Appadurai_final.pdf
(141.4 KB) vom 26.06.2018
Amo Lecture 2: Hans Jörg Sandkühler - Recht, Staat und Demokratie in menschenrechtlicher Perspektive
The question has been often posed concerning the post-1945 human rights, which developed out of the experience of injustice, whether these rights are in need of an “ethical foundation”. Moral claims, which are directed against the violation of human rights, and which owing to moral intuition are held to be good and just, have further contributed to their emergence. Yet, “the” legitimate and universally valid morality does not exist in a pluralistic society, beyond perhaps the general form of legal equality. Thus, the positively conceived human rights have come to have their meaning as a universally binding commitment grounded in the protection of human dignity. Their legal validity is grounded in what has been negotiated in the Covenants on Human Rights, as well as in the universal principle of ius cogens, which is considered “compelling law” in all states. Moral claims are politically transformed in the sphere of neutrally-bound states into positive law, to the extent that they are generalizable. The “charging” of constitutional law with specific ethical opinions or philosophical speculations along the lines of natural law must be avoided in constitutional democracy.
Amo_2_Sandkühler.pdf
(299.9 KB) vom 26.06.2018
Amo Lecture 1: Michael Hutter - Übersetzung und Dissonanz. Innovationsmuster in der Kreativindustrie
Die Zweige der kulturellen und kreativen Industrie bringen einen zunehmenden Strom neuer Produkte und Dienstleistungen hervor. Bei der Produktion dieser Neuheiten lassen sich zwei grundlegende Muster erkennen. Ein Disney-Film dient dazu zu zeigen, wie Formen der Bedeutung, die erfolgreich darin sind, emotionale Erlebnisse beim Publikum auszulösen, auf neuen Inhalt übertragen werden, und ein Beatles-Song dient dazu zu zeigen, wie neue Unterschiede zwischen Welten der Wertschätzung in neue Produkte verwandelt werden.
Amo_1_Michael_Hutter_Druck.pdf
(2.4 MB) vom 26.06.2018