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International Summer Academy in Istanbul Living Together: Plurality and Cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond
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| AKU-ISMC Assistant Professor Stefan Weber is one of the Academy chairs. |
AKU-ISMC, in collaboration with Bogaziçi University, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in cooperation with the German 'Orient-Institute Istanbul', the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, and the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Leiden has launched an International Summer Academy in Istanbul.
From September 21st to 28th, 2008 at the Ottoman Bank Museum in Istanbul (www.obmuze.com), 24 young scholars will be given the opportunity to present and discuss their current research on cities, pluralism and cosmopolitanism. The Summer Academy will be chaired by a group of prominent scholars: Asef Bayat (ISIM), Edhem Eldem (Bogaziçi University, Istanbul), Ulrike Freitag (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), Nora Lafi (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), and Stefan Weber (Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London).
Partnerships with universities in a variety of countries and environments provide AKU-ISMC with greater access to knowledge about Muslim cultures within their local contexts as well as enhanced opportunities for collaboration on research and academic programmes.
The International Summer Academy, based on the theme of Living Together: Plurality and Cosmopolitanism in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond, will relate debates on cosmopolitanism to the historical experiences of cities in the Ottoman Empire, its successor and its neighbouring states - in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab and Muslim world.
Questions that the Academy will explore include: How did people of different cultural, ethnic, social and religious backgrounds live together in these cities? How are such examples of conviviality, conflict, migration, urban regimes of governance and stratification imagined and conceptualised? How were plural social relations organised and translated into space and material culture? To which degrees were social groups of different strata and regional settings part of a 'cosmos' of interacting, interconnected and competing ideas and knowledge systems?
An exploration of social history and questions of spatial organisation, local agencies and vernacular modernities in the cities of the Ottoman Empire and surrounding regions will offer perspectives of cosmopolitanism from below. Such an approach allows for a contribution to contemporary debates and conceptions of the city, civil society, multicultural societies, migration, and cosmopolitanism.
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