Abstracts der Vorträge

Marcela Torres Heredia (Kollektiv Decolonizing in Vienna!): Border Activism – Interweavings of Strategies, Politics, and Epistemology (21.10.2025)

Abstract: This talk addresses various strategies of political activism including perspectives of Global South in Vienna. These strategies are examined from a decolonial, feminist, and environmental justice-oriented intersectional perspective. The point of departure is Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of La Frontera (the border), which serves as an analytical framework for understanding political space. This perspective highlights, on the one hand, the dividing lines that generate exclusion and hierarchies, and on the other hand, opens up ways of thinking about connections, overlaps, and in-between spaces. The approach proposed here draws on the concept of border activism to analyze the dynamics, tensions, and potentials of diverse spaces of political articulation and alliance-building. Through the interplay of discursive and performative practices, spaces emerge in which social struggles can be transversalized and internationalized. The focus is on the need to understand political strategies in context, as they are always developed within specific structural conditions. This approach makes it possible to grasp the complex processes of translation within political spaces of action. Translation functions as a medium to articulate discursive influences and political practices in the local sphere, while also opening up new political horizons— beyond the essentialization of identities and the outsourcing of social challenges.

Marcela Torres Heredia (Bogotá, Colombia) is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She is a researcher, activist, and engaged in various forms of cultural and political mediation. Her main areas of focus include decoloniality, feminism, social inequality and justice, and intersectionality. She is currently co-director of Viena Latina, a research project on Latin American migration to Vienna since 1945 at Wien Museum. She is also co-editor of the Journal for Development Studies issue titled “Disturbing Europe – Struggles Between Coloniality and Decolonization.” She is involved in several activist initiatives, including Decolonizing in Vienna!, a group that critically engages with colonial continuities in Vienna’s public space.

Hanna Al-Taher Bodies out of place: space invaders and imagining Palestinian Futures (4.11.2025)

Abstract
This lecture draws on Nirmal Puwar's concept of Space Invaders to examine how Palestinians are erased from Palestine, and also from educational and intellectual spaces. Cast and recast as aliens and trespassers, Palestinians are rendered impossible subjects. In 'Space invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place' Puwar adapts feminist geographer Doreen Massey's concept to analyse bodies historically excluded and deemed alien to elite institutions as space invaders. Such bodies are marked out as trespassers and perceived as being 'out of place'. Their mere presence in privileged occupational spaces (such as the university) causes dissonance and disorientation, unleashing shock, surprise and surveillance. The threat they are seen to pose to the spaces they enter amplifies their presence, making them concurrently hyper visible while marked as taboo. Tamed subjects / bodies might be conditionally accepted, while those marked out as radical are expelled and erased. These exclusions require us to rethink and reclaim the existence and positions of a revolutionary and/or feminist subject. This lecture troubles the relationship between anticolonial and feminist struggles to ask, if it is it possible and desirable to retain both? What would an anticolonial feminism and feminist look like, one that resists both settler colonialism and the co-optation of a feminist discourse?

Hanna Al Taher is a political scientist, writer and researcher. She is a research associate at the chair for Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at TU Dresden, where she teaches political theory

from an anti-colonial perspective. Hanna is also a research associate at the University of Kassel and Queen Mary University London and their current work focuses on state theory, borders and passports through a queer-Marxist lens and is dedicated to researching up to power.

Tayla Myree: Black Afro-Futurism as a Practice of Liberation (18.11.2025)

Abstract
Tayla Myree's lecture will explore Black-Afro Futurism as both an artistic methodology and a practice of liberation. Drawing from their own work, Myree will examine how speculative aesthetics expand possibilities for Black representation while challenging dominant cultural frameworks. Situating Afro-Futurism within wider traditions of Black thought, the lecture highlights its power to reimagine subjectivity, community, and futurity, positioning art as a transformative site for envisioning insurgent feminist futures.

Tayla Myree (she/they) is a visual artist, cultural worker, and researcher based in Vienna, Austria, whose work primarily deals with the politics of memory and identity through video, prose, spoken word, and sound. They hold a Master of Arts in History from Central European University and currently work as an independent cultural worker on many projects, such as Representations of Blackness at the Belvedere Museum, as well as coordinating and contributing to eSeLschwarm, a Vienna-based arts and culture platform. They currently attend the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and are a part of the Video and Video Installation studio.

Oluchukwu Akusinanwa aka LoveMore for Planet 10: A good Intention deserves a Yes! (02.12.2025)

Abstract
At Planet 10, we believe that redistribution is a fundamental pillar of a thriving community life. It's more than just a financial concept. In general we practice sharing of resources by creating opportunities through a system that actively rebalance wealth and power, by so doing we can dismantle the systemic inequalities that hinder progress. This doesn't mean taking away from some to give to others out of spite; rather, it's about recognising our shared interdependence and building a more resilient, equitable society where collective well-being is the ultimate goal. We believe that When communities embrace redistribution, they cultivate trust, foster solidarity, and unlock the full potential of every member, creating a stronger and more vibrant planet for all.

Oluchukwu Akusinanwa a creative soul who thinks outside the box, Oluchukwu Akusinanwa has been passionate about art since childhood, with a particular love for expressing creativity through performance. After migrating to Austria in 2014 due to gender nonconformity and sexual orientation, Akusinanwa also became an activist for human rights. His passion for music led him to the Brunnenpassage Choir, where they began building community through artistic collaboration. Today, Akusinanwa works across hysical theatre performance, dance, choreography, song writing and singing. He performed at Wienwoche 2019 in Goddesses in Diaspora and at Wienwoche 2020 in How Long Are You Planning to Stay with Physical Theater Complicit, as well as in the project Silencing Gaze. That same year, he joined the QM&A Artist Collective, advocating for diversity and supporting artists new to Vienna.

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur: ”one does not get used to the masked resentment, harassment, intimidating silence” Disrupting the active forgetting of the early 60s resistance of Unokanma Okonjo & the Pan-African Students Union of Austria (PASUA) today

Abstract: Founded and dissolved at the crossroads of decolonization and neo-colonization, during the Global Cold War, the Pan-African Students Union of Austria’s activism and critique in post-Nazi Austria, was embedded in a larger Pan-African, non-aligned, anti-imperial struggle for liberation. PASUA’s resistance above all that of its most vocal president Unokanma Okonjo turned the local and international spotlight on the issue of anti-Black racism in Austria, confronting the Second Republic of Austria with an anti-colonial counternarrative that unsettled dominant structures of silence and amnesia. Yet despite of the intensive media publicity in major Austrian newspapers, and international press reports during the early 60 s, the resistance of PASUA seems conspicuously forgotten today. Disrupting what Fatima El-Tayeb refers to as the “active process of forgetting” the lecture moves the critique of of Unokanma Okonjo and PASUA into the center, examining the meaning of its critical remembrance for present futures.

Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur was co-founder of PAMOJA. Movement of the Young African Diaspora in Austria and the Research Group on Black Austrian history. Her multifaceted work lays a transdisciplinary focus on decolonial worldmaking including architectures and ecologies of critical remembrance. Centering on unearthing the presence of histories and poetics of social movements in the African Diaspora in Austria, she completed her doctoral thesis on the pan-African, non-aligned resistance of Unokanma Okonjo and the Pan-African Students Union of Austria in post-Nazi Austria in the early 60s at Howard University. She is part of the directors' collective of MUSMIG (museum for migration), a museum, still struggling to exist in Vienna, while at the same time addressing the fundamental violence that usually underlies museums in Europe.

Mirjam Karoly for Romano Centro: Human Rights and Gender: The Case of Roma Women in Europe (20.01.2026)