Participants:
Ariel Efraim Ashbel – Berlin based performance maker, collaborating with his transdisciplinary, international team of friends to make challenging, entertaining compositions at the intersection of theater, visual art, dance, and music. Since 2011, he’s based in Germany, and his work is presented in HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, FFT Düsseldorf, as well as the festivals Impulse (NRW), Spielart (Munich) steirischer herbst (Graz) donaufestival (Krems) and more. In 2013 he presented his first German-produced piece “All white people look the same to me”, followed by “THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK” (2015) , “DO THE RIGHT THING” (2018), and “no apocalypse not now” (2019). Since 2019 he’s been on tour doing lights for “Sénsa”, a collaboration with artists Nkisi and Paul Maheke. Further recent collaborators include Alona Rodeh, Ligia Lewis, Constanza Macras, Apparatus, Wojtek Blecharz, Melanie-Jame Wolf and more. Ashbel is a graduate of the School of Visual Theater, Jerusalem (2006) and holds a BA in History and Philosophy from Tel Aviv University (2010).
Monika Bobako – Philosopher, profesor of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, graduate of UAM and Central European University in Budapest. Author of Islamophobia as a technology of power. A study in political anthropology (Universitas, 2017) and Democracy and Difference. Multiculturalism and Feminism in the Perspective of the Politics of Recognition (Poznan, 2010), and editor of the volumes Emancipatory Theologies (Theoretical Practice, 2013) and Islamophobia. Women (Theoretical Practice, 2017). She is interested in the anthropology of power, issues of race and racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and problems of the postcolonial world, especially Muslim societies. She also works on feminist issues, especially in the context of political theory and philosophy of religion. In 2018, her book Islamophobia as a technology of power. A study in political anthropology was awarded the Jan Długosz Prize and nominated for the Tadeusz Kotarbiński Prize. Her current research project funded by the National Science Centre is entitled „Genealogies of peripheral whiteness. Polish identities in the perspective of racialisation theory”.
Romm Lewkowicz – Anthropologist and a migrant rights’ activist. He is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Center CUNY (The City University of New York), a Visiting Research Fellow at Trafflab, and a lecturer at Baruch and John Jay colleges. Lewkowicz’s research and teaching draw on political theory, critical legal studies, and ethnographic methodologies in an effort to reevaluate our understanding of the history and experience of forced migration, asylum regulation, and post-war European integration. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation titled: “Documenting the Undocumented: Experimenting Europe’s Future at the Biometric Migrant Archive.” His dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of Eurodac, a pan-European apparatus for the biometric documentation of Europe’s asylum seekers. Since 2013, Lewkowicz has been collaborating with director Ariel Efraim Ashbel, supervising research and concept formation.
Amber Jamilla Musser is a professor of American Studies at George Washington University. Her research focuses on the intersection of queer studies, critical race studies, and aesthetics. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (2018). She has published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of color critique. She has an MSt in Women’s Studies from Oxford University and received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. She has held fellowships at New York University’s Draper Program in Gender Studies and Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her research has been supported by grants from the Ruth Landes Memorial Fellowship and the Arts Writers’ Grant from the Warhol Foundation. She previously taught gender studies at New York University and Washington University in St. Louis. She also writes art criticism for The Brooklyn Rail.
Hosts: Dorota Sosnowska, Katarzyna Bojarska
