Organized by Stefan Kirmse

The ZMO winter colloquium engages with materialities and their everyday experience in the context of empires and post-imperial or post-colonial statehood. In doing so, it asks crucial methodological questions about the scope of materiality and the nature of archives required to study such experiences in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences.

Both empires and their successors become visible and tangible in material form: through built infrastructure, practices of documenting and bureaucracy, and discursive socio-cultural productions. These materialities and their everyday experience constitute an important axis of state-society relationship(s), encompassing not only economic, socio-political or cultural domains but also extending to sensory experiences and the body.

The diversity of such experiences, rooted partly in cultural, social, class, and gender differences, among others, can only be richly captured by examining multiple perspectives, not only through the use of multiple languages and by paying specific attention to vernacular terms, but preferably also by innovatively expanding the notion of the archives.

Placing actors on centre-stage, the lectures in this colloquium will critically engage with how materiality can be a fruitful lens to explore the experiences of both those who design and frame forms of control (e.g. state authorities), as well as those who engage with, negotiate or even subvert them in the everyday.

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Poster