This project studies the shifting trajectory of pro-Palestinian activism in West Germany, between the 1950s and 1980s. At its center is the question of how we can explain that contemporaries in West Germany began to support Palestinian politics and later withdrew their solidarity. In order to answer this question, the project will study for the first time Palestinian and German archives together. With this approach, it proposes a new focus on the role of migration and ties to the Middle East for solidarity politics in the West German left. The reasons for the rise of Palestine solidarity movements during the 1960s and their decline in the 1980s are a much-discussed topic in the history of the Western European left. With the legacy of the Holocaust and an earlier support for Israel in the West German left, this trajectory is particularly puzzling in the case of the Federal Republic. Historians have sought to explain this puzzle by focusing on continuities in the history of Antisemitism and a changed perception of Israel after the Six-Day War of 1967. PalSol breaks new ground by studying Palestinian sources on the solidarity movement in West Germany. These sources provide a fresh vista on everyday interactions and the role of the Palestinian diaspora in bridging leftist politics between places like Beirut and Bonn. Pursuing a transregional approach, the project promises to shed light on how political struggles in Europe and the Middle East became integrated and disintegrated between the 1950s and 1980s

ENART is an integrated research and training programme for innovative knowledge transfer and career development. It will be implemented at the Department of Society and Global Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark (Beneficiary, host of the Incoming Phase), the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan, USA (Partner Organisation hosting the Outgoing Phase), and SALT, research and exhibition centre in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey (host of the intersectoral Secondment). The interdisciplinary constellation of these organisations and the supervision they provide complements the researcher’s own art-historical formation and endorses her research project in transregional Islamic Art History around which ENART’s comprehensive dissemination and public-engagement activities are built: The research project is entitled “Engagement Art: Regional Islamic and Global Pragmatist Aesthetics”. “Engagement art” is a new concept that this project introduces in order to define a hitherto overlooked approach to art. This approach conceives of art as a practice and medium which is continuous with everyday life. This project asks what ideas informed engagement art and what practical and historical circumstances interfered with its development and actual enactment. To answer these questions the project traces the development of engagement art from its conception in Istanbul in 1909 to its implementation at the Art-Craft Department in Ankara in 1932. Thereby the research centres on the modes of confluence of regional Islamic and global pragmatist aesthetics. Apart from introducing a new concept to Islamic Art History, the project seeks to develop a new method for the study of non-canonical art and strengthen ties between the history of art made in and outside of Europe, as well as between Art History and its subdiscipline Islamic Art History. The aim of the project is to contribute to the development of an art historiography worthy of a diverse and inclusive society.

When speculation becomes the dominant modality of contemporary capitalism, what happens to speculative fiction? What kind of worldbuilding does speculative finance do, and, once we acknowledge its narrative features, how might we use the tools of speculative fiction to intervene in this process? Can speculative fiction help us recognise the ways in which speculative finance takes effect and, from that vantage point, reveal the contradictions of financial speculation and the possibilities that lie hidden within the present? Through close analyses of novels and films, SF-SF explores the degree to which speculative finance and speculative fiction operate according to similar narrative and imaginative strategies, and how they remain distinct. Its purpose is twofold: firstly, it explores how the logic of financialisation relies on fictions whose representations materialise the worlds it envisions. Secondly, it explores a better understanding of how speculative fiction can make legible finance’s fictions and reveal its underlying contradictions. By employing critical literary analysis and symptomatology as methods, SF-SF will thus result in a better understanding of how speculative finance seeks to narrow and constrain the possibilities for the future, and how speculative fiction challenges speculative finance’s ongoing attempt to configure all aspects of political and social life in economic terms.

RightFutures inquires into the ways future-oriented activities shape the political experiences of youths (18-35 yo) who identify with the self-defined ‘Real Right’ in Italy and Chile. RightFutures research question (RQ) asks: “how and why do Youths who identify with the self-defined ‘Real Right’ in Italy and Chile engage with multiple futural orientations through political performances, events, activities, and materialities?”. RightFutures investigates the RQ through three specific objectives, focusing on security and defence, the (dictatorial) past, and the nation. It uses the method of comparative ethnography (data will be collected through participant observation, extended interviews, participatory mapping, and secondary sources). RightFutures will focus on Youths who identify with groups that have inherited the countries’ dictatorial legacies, acknowledging that the existence and practices of these groups become pivotal points used to renew the dictatorial past’s rightfulness. These groups thus preserve, perpetuate, and renew the dictatorial past’s contemporary relevance and permanency within democratic structures. Its innovative contributions are: i) investigating the ‘Real Right’ using a novel analytical focus through a futural temporal perspective; ii) proposing a novel ethnographic comparison between Italy and Chile to explore the global relevance of this topic; and iii) producing novel understandings of the ‘Real Right’ in Italy and Chile.

Arguably 80% of all data is spatial. This calls for highly efficient and effective spatial data operations. Among them, spatial joins are frequently needed as a key primitive in various applications such as traffic management, robotics control, location-based services and even human brain modelling. However, existing spatial join approaches follow the traditional filter-and-refinement paradigm that is data distribution-oblivious. As a result, existing approaches are increasingly inefficient as spatial datasets to be joined become larger and more complex. The project LEJO is intended to make use of machine learning techniques to better understand the distributions of spatial data, and accordingly design learned approaches for highly efficient spatial join processing. Specifically, the research actions of LEJO include (1) learned approaches for binary spatial joins of memory-resident data; (2) learned approaches for binary spatial joins of disk-resident data; (3) learned approaches for multi-way spatial joins. The research actions will mainly concern analysis of the bottlenecks of existing approaches, design of distribution-aware space/data partitioning, design of learned model based indexes and join algorithms, and implementation and evaluation of the proposed techniques. These research actions, as well as project planning and management, will significantly strengthen the fellow’s research profile and manage skill. This in turn will put him in a considerably better position for future career development after the project. Moreover, a two-way knowledge transfer is expected as LEJO combines the fellow’s expertise in machine learning and the host university’s expertise in spatial data management. Focusing on the challenging intersection of spatial data management and machine learning, LEJO will not only advance the frontier research in the academia but also bring about potential impacts on many spatial data application domains in and beyond Europe.