Conference Report of the 5th International Summer School for PhD-Students “Mobility and Cultural Exchange�

By Sarah Ruth Sippel

Mobility and Cultural Exchange was the title of this year’s 5th international summer school for PhD-students in Leipzig, organised by the research training group Understanding Space and Territorialization. World History, Geography and Area Studies in an Age of Globalization[1]. The summer school aimed at focussing on the prerequisites, varieties, and consequences of migration movements. These dimensions of migration research were completed by newer approaches of historicization such as cultural studies that conceptualize migration as processes that are deeply connected with memorial cultures, the study of cultural transfers, post colonial studies, and the analysis of imagined spaces. The thematically broad programme of the five-day long conference (September 24th to 28th, 2007) reflected the interdisciplinary background of the organisers. The summer school is a forum for PhD-students with varying research-backgrounds and subjects, methodologies and approaches. This forum is used to present and discuss their projects. The research projects analysed mobility and cultural exchange in different temporal dimensions (from the 3rd millennium B.C., ancient world, colonial rule, National Socialism, GDR and FRG to the present) as well as with diverse regional foci (like Saxony, Hungary, Australia, Japan or Argentina). The summer school thus demanded not only from the participants but also from the organisers a broad open mindedness regarding the content and the involvement with these varying and diverse research projects. Therefore, often methodological and conceptual issues came up during the discussions. All together it was a methodologically and thematically enriching week which revealed, in how many ways different forms of mobility, cultural encounters and exchanges become relevant. Furthermore, the summer school not only concentrated on the “classical� human mobility, i.e. the recent research on migration, but also elaborated equally on the topics “political regimes of mobility control�, mobility of commodities and objects, as well as mobility from an early historical and archaeological perspective.

The first and major part of the summer school consisted of a number of presentations focussing on recent forms of migration, immigration-emigration, diaspora(s), migration networks and therewith eventually involved processes of cultural exchange. Oliver Kuhn (Leipzig) presented a basic overview on classical sociological migration theories. Marcel Berlinghoff (Heidelberg) showed the unforeseeable consequences of the attempt to control migration movements exemplified by the recruitment stop during the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Considerations regarding the concepts of “Diaspora� were the focus of the presentations by Jenny Kuhlmann (Leipzig) and Laura Casola (Leipzig). Jenny Kuhlmann provided an overview of the concepts of African diaspora(s) and demonstrated, how the notion of “Diaspora“ is subject to historical changes. She stressed that it is used differently depending on the scientific context, but employed by certain groups as a political term. Laura Casola presented her considerations regarding the educated diaspora in MERCOSUR and raised the question, which role processes of brain drain and brain gain play for the countries involved. Daniel Kremers (Leipzig) and Zeynep Sezgin (Leipzig) addressed the issue of migration communities and their political stakeholders. Daniel Kremers presented the results of his research on the foreign members of a Japanese Workers Union and pointed out their different functions and tasks. Zeynep Sezgin elaborated on Turkish umbrella organizations in Germany and Austria and pointed out their limited possibilities to influence political decisions. The migration of highly qualified people was the subject of a presentation by Nina Wohlfeil (Wien), who presented her research project on Polish students in Germany. She focussed on the impact of the abroad studies on the individual biography and questioned how it influences social realities.

David Jünger (Leipzig) and Admantios Skordos (Leipzig) focused on emigration as well as on impeded emigration. David Jünger on the one hand discussed Jewish organizations at the beginning of the 1930s in Germany and asked why the emigration process of the Jews during this period began so hesitant from a contemporary perspective. Admantios Skordos on the other hand analysed the emigration from the central Balkan region Macedonia. He focused on the actions implemented by the Greek state to “protect� its overseas citizens from the so-called “Slavic Propagandas� and thus to guarantee their loyalty to Greece.

Finally, Christof Roos (Bremen) and Adèle Garnier (Leipzig) analysed the topics “migration control� and “boarders/boarder regimes�. Christof Roos raised the question how interaction between cross-boarder migration and political boarder actors are influencing boarder politics from a theoretical perspective. Adèle Garnier presented the changing of national sovereignty – exemplified by the Australian Pacific Solution – and analysed the territorial remapping of the Australian Sovereignty.

A second major part of the summer school consisted of a number of presentations focussing less on the mobility of humans than on the mobility of ideas and concepts, knowledge and information, as well as on commodities and objects emphasizing cultural transfers. From a historical perspective, Eike Karin Ohlendorf (Leipzig) and Helge Wendt (Mannheim) concentrated on the colonial era. Eike Karin Ohlendorf presented a part of her work on the two French colonial cities Dakar and Hanoi. On the one hand, she looked at the violent mobility of the French colonisers and their attempts to control the indigenous mobility, and on the other hand on the mobility of ideas. Mobility of colonial missions was the topic of the presentation by Helge Wendt, who analysed colonial missions as a merging point and a place of activity with manifold relations, interactions and circulations. Mirjam Thulin (Leipzig) presented her research on the mobility of knowledge exemplified by correspondence and information networks of Jewish scholars in the 19th century. Sigrid Kannengießer (Leipzig) then analysed the interrelations between „media – gender – globalization“ and presented her research project, which is dealing with gender constructs transported by mass media and their impact on gender hierarchies in Africa. Klaus Dittrich (Portsmouth) and Kerstin Lange (Leipzig) elaborated on the process of cultural transfers. Klaus Dittrich raised the question, how world exhibitions contributed to the cultural transfer of education politics and Kerstin Lange analysed cultural transfer by looking at the transfer of tango from Buenos Aires to Paris and Berlin. Claudia Müller (Leeds) concentrated on the mobility of travelling GDR-citizens and focussed on how the experiences and impressions of their journeys influenced their perception and images of the “West�. Maria Hidvegi (Leipzig) also addressed travel impacts. She presented the integration of two Hungarian enterprises into the world market and related the biography of the entrepreneurs to their entrepreneurial actions, shown by mental maps. In addition, Mandy Kretzschmar (Leipzig) addressed travelling and thereby changing images of the “European� and the perception and communication of images of the “European� by analysing Australian print media. Europe as well, but rather its spatial conception and re-conception was presented by Fergal Lenehan (Leipzig). He analysed the search for New Spaces by European Intellectuals. Last but not least, two presentations addressed the issue of the mobility of commodities. Sarah Ruth Sippel (Leipzig) focused on the mobility of agricultural products and the implications for agricultural family farms in Morocco and Southern France. Cornelia Reiher (Leipzig) addressed the mobility of porcelain from a peripheral Japanese region as well as discourses on this porcelain. She concluded that cultural transfer is not necessarily involved in this mobility.

The third part of the summer school consisted of four presentations, which dealt with mobility forms from an early historical and archaeological perspective. Matthias Conrad (Leipzig) investigated mobility and cultural exchange in the 3rd pre-Christian millennium in Saxony and analysed the chronological and cultural relations between the archaeological cultures in his research area. He questions the role mobility played in these cultural exchange processes. Patrick Pfeil (Leipzig) stressed the territorial and political mobility of the Germanic military leaders in the Roman Empire, who took leading roles in the Roman society and, he therefore concluded, were at times “secret rulers�. Daniel Syrbe (Leipzig) presented his research results on the structure of “governance� and “state� of the indigenous Moorish tribes during the 5th and 6th century in North Africa who – during the confrontation with the established states in North Africa (Rome, Vandals, and Byzantium) – overtook the military initiative for a while and forced the states into the defensive. Petra Weschenfelder (Berlin) finally presented her research project, which deals with the interaction between nomadic and sedentary societies of the middle Nile valley. She highlighted her interest in analysing the methodological scope and potential of the ethnographic-archaeological approach. Besides this intense discourse between the PhD-students, a certain number of lectures by professors at the University of Leipzig, as well as members of other research institutes from Leipzig (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, The Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe at the University of Leipzig) completed and scientifically enriched the programme of the summer school.

Due to the plurality of the topics as well as the diverse interdisciplinary and methodological approaches of the presentations, it is not easy to draw a conclusion of the summer school.  On the one hand, a real interdisciplinary exchange during the discussions was rare because of the too diverse research topics and specialisations of the participants. Thus, the “central themeâ€� was sometimes missing. Therefore, the summer school was not organised along stringent conceptual work on the discussed concepts: mobility and cultural exchange. On the other hand, especially the diversity of the presentations and the broad ongoing research of PhD-students on mobility show intensively the need and demand for mobility studies. It became clear, that mobility studies do not concentrate any more on the classical migration topics, but rather cover many disciplines, methodological approaches and different aspects of mobility. While the focus still lies on the mobility of humans, mobility of knowledge, commodities, ideas, concepts and cultural elements are increasingly being analysed. The summer school was therefore a challenge and a possibility at the same time: the participating PhD-students and professors had one week of looking beyond their own discipline and research foci – and afterwards went back to their own work full of new impressions.   

Sarah Ruth Sippel is a PhD student at the University of Leipzig