Academy: The Hindukush of the Others

My lecturing on Afghanistan started at Bamberg University/Bavaria, Germany earlier last month, with a seminar on Afghan Cultural Identity reflected through Film, Media and Art and aligning a century of modern Afghan history, picking up the debate on the early Afghan constitutionalist movement and reaching out to the perspectives of a country highly in state of emotional alert at the approach of 2014. Bachelor and Master students in the seminar come from the fields of Oriental Studies and Communication studies. The group work is unique in the sense that I do organise regular skype interventions inbetween others with experts, scientifics and critically thinking youth from Afghanistan in the meetings in order to overcome the usual debate "about" Afghanistan and in which often enough Afghans are not part of, and replacing it by an approach that makes Afghan voices, spectra of argumentation, thinking and identity visible. The seminar is to be repeated in the coming semester at the Free University of Berlin very probably and open to demands from further institutions.