Welcome to the Cluster of Excellence at the
Bonn Center for Dependency & Slavery Studies
"Beyond Slavery and Freedom:
Asymmetrical Dependencies in Pre-Modern Societies"
We are a research cluster within the framework of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments.
We investigate profound social dependencies such as slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, and other forms of permanent dependency across epochs, regions and cultures.
Our focus lies "beyond slavery and freedom", i.e. we aim to overcome the binary opposition of "free" and "unfree".
Instead, we propose the new key concept of "asymmetrical dependency" to explore all forms of bondages across time and space.
Debt Bondage
Watch what playwright Natassa Sideri thinks about our reading and discussion evening on her play "Gefesselt"
Women's emanciption and Jewish assimilation
"All they wanted was to study..." exhibition opening at Frauenmuseum Bonn
International Cooperations
Spokesperson Stefan Conermann explains the role of international cooperations for the cluster
Join us for the screening of Salaam Bombay on November 24, 2022, at 20:00 CET!
Don't miss the after-screening talk with Sigrid Limprecht, Förderverein Filmkultur, BCDSS Professor Claudia Jarzebowski, and further members of the Cluster as well as the public!
This is the third film in our dependency-related film series cooperation "Who's Got the Power" with Förderverein Filmkultur Bonn.
The film "Salaam Bombay" by Mira Nair, India 1988, engages with varying forms of asymmetrical relationships that are forced primarily upon children and women. They are pushed to megacity by various factors but mainly by poverty. Here, the city is not just a place of arrival, it becomes a dreamscape. People initially conceive it as a place of hope; hence the allure of (push towards) the city. However, soon after their arrival, they end up bound in extreme forms of asymmetrical relationships. i.e. brothels or slums where their lives further unravel. As a social formation, like villages, the city has its underlying logic of patriarchy and casteism which deeply structure people’s lives. The movie clearly portrays how people are forced into extreme forms of asymmetrical dependencies. Money, men, and power are inextricably connected to the lives of the socially destitute and deprivations flourish, while those on the streets become interchangeable.
For the academic year of 2023/2024 the Cluster will put a thematic emphasis on Research Area E “Gender and Intersectionality”. Research Area E investigates dependencies associated with gender, sexuality, status, class, ethnicity, religion, age and other historical, anthropological, and representational aspects relevant to explaining differences among persons and human groups, both in past and present societies.
Showcasing women's fates in black-and-white photography
Together with the Frauenmuseum, we invite you to the opening of the exhibition "All they wanted was to study... The Numerus Clausus and the young women". The photo exhibition highlights young Hungarian Jewish women affected by the so-called Numerus Clausus law of 1920 and explores its impact on women's emancipation and Jewish assimilation.
Marion Gymnich and Béla Bodó will place the exhibition, which was first shown in Budapest in 2021, in the context of the cluster's dependency studies, and explain how it was adopted for the Frauenmuseum in Bonn. Visitors will then be taken on a tour of the exhibition by Judith Szapor, the curator and Associate Professor of History and Classical Studies at McGill University, Montréal.
We're delighted to announce that BCDSS Professor Claudia Jarzebowski and doctoral candidates Joseph Biggerstaff and Lisa Phongsavath, who have been awarded a fund for the German-Australian collaborative project Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500-1800).
We're excited to share that BCDSS professor Julia Hillner has been awarded a grant by the AHRC and DFG for Connecting Late Antiquities (CLA).
We are happy to announce that Christoph Witzenrath's monograph and habilitation thesis "The Russian Empire, Slaving and Liberation, 1480–1725" was recently published by De Gruyter. It is the fourth volume of the BCDSS Book series "Dependency and Slavery Studies" and available in print and via open access.
We are tremendously pleased that the first volume of our “Dependency ad Slavery Studies” (DSS) Series was published by De Gruyter earlier this month:
Jeannine Bischoff and Stephan Conermann: Slavery and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies Semantics and Lexical Fields (De Gruyter, October 3, 2022)
Download as PDF via Open Access
This series is based on BCDSS research projects and aimed at a wide professional readership, the books reflect the cluster's research methods and wide-ranging interests in history, regional studies and cultural science. Manuscripts submitted for publication in the book series undergo a double-blind peer review process. The editors of this book series are Jeannine Bischoff and Stephan Conermann.
Join us on Monday, November 7, 2022, for a reading and discussion evening with playwright NATASSA SIDERI, whose play GEFESSELT addresses the problem of debt bondage in present-day society.
Contact Us
Managing Director: Dr. Abdelkader Al Ghouz
Email: dependency@uni-bonn.de
Press and PR Manager: Cécile Jeblawei
Email:pr@dependency.uni-bonn.de
Address
University of Bonn
Niebuhrstraße 5
53113 Bonn