conversations with engaged thinkers and doers

The Minor Constellations Podcast is the podcast of the Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms. Hosted by RTG doctoral fellows Yael Attia and Kathleen Samson, the podcast features conversations with thinkers whose work touches on the current moment and who are interested in the ways in which our theories and practices shed light on the relations between knowledge, politics, and power.
The podcast starts from within the RTG’s rich network to offer an outlook of the vast array of interests and activities that come together under this programme. The podcast may start from this location, but it reaches outward, enabling us to disembark from our base in Berlin, and create an eclectic constellation of voices and thinkers.
__________________________________________
Organised by:
Yael Attia and Kathleen Samson


Yael Attia is a doctoral fellow at the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms. In her current project, she seeks to trace the constitutive role of Jewish colonial experiences in North Africa as formative to modern Jewish thinking, as it emerged in a series of Francophone intellectuals: Hélène Cixous, Albert Memmi, and Jacques Derrida. An edited volume she co-edited, titled: Minor Perspectives on Modernity Beyond Europe: an Encounter Between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Theory is forthcoming from Nomos Verlag. For many years, Yael has worked as a guide at museums in Israel and Germany, among them, Yad Vashem, ANU museum of the Jewish people, and Jewish Museum Berlin. She is currently a resident scholar at LABA Berlin Fellowship: Laboratory for Jewish Culture.
Kathleen Samson is a doctoral fellow at the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms. After her undergraduate training in English Literature and Anthropology at Rhodes University, Grahamstown in South Africa, Kathleen completed her MA in Language, Literature and Modernity at the University of Cape Town in 2016. The project considered the ways in which contemporary Black South African writers speak together and differently on the possibility or the impossibility of writing new narratives for post-apartheid Johannesburg. In her current project, Kathleen works with contemporary South African literature to think about a temporal-affective formation that attends to the disjuncture between the past’s hopeful promises for the future, and the troubling encounter with the present.
Our Amazing intro track is by Shane Cooper: “Bass in the Bathroom”, from the album Small Songs for Big Times, March 2020. For more, please visit shanecooper.bandcamp.com/