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Forum Beruf is a panel discussion during which three of our alumni report on their experiences after graduating, hosted in cooperation with the University's Alumni-Netzwerk.

‘The Mamdani Moment’ points to a shift in U.S. politics: a new generation of leaders is emerging and redefining political priorities, communication styles, and representation in an extremely polarized landscape. As the U.S. grapples with mistrust towards democratic institutions and deep dissatisfaction with politics in general, questions about the future of public leadership are becoming more pressing. Who are the rising stars within both the Democratic and Republican parties? Which issues do they focus on and which strategies do they employ? And how are candidate selection, factional competition, and political communication evolving? Taking the book Zohran Mamdani – Our Time is Now, authored by Luzia Geier, as a point of departure, this discussion brings together two complementary perspectives: Geier’s work tracing the rise of a new political figure, and Dr. Mike Cowburn’s research as a political scientist on intra-party factions, partisan polarization, and political communication.

Honoring Juneteenth through the powerful voices of Black poets amd composers, celebrating a legacy of liberation that continues to sing today.

On January 20, 2026, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, called for “a new form of European consciousness” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, highlighting energy, defense, and access to raw materials as areas of particular concern. While the goal of more European self-reliance and autonomy sounds desirable in theory, several fundamental questions arise about how it can be put into practice: How independent can Europe truly be in an era of unprecedented global integration? What does “European independence” mean in the context of the intensifying U.S.–China rivalry that is (re)shaping world politics in the 21st century? What political, economic, financial, and social costs might a more independent Europe entail? To explore these and other pressing questions and think about the role Europe should play in the emerging new world order, distinguished experts on Europe’s relations with both the United States and China will join us for a panel discussion.

How can we read and interpret diverse Indigenous literatures in ways that better reflect the global reality of Indigenous life? This talk offers one possible answer by presenting a framework for reading relationally across Indigenous novels and short stories from North America, Oceania, and South Asia. The literary constellations that structure these readings offer stories of resurgence that connect seemingly disparate Indigenous nations so we might imagine our worlds otherwise. Specific to this talk is a constellation focused on how queer and Two Spirit Indigenous kinships hold multiple relations at once, reminding readers of our varied and overlapping responsibilities to one another as members of a shared planet.

This talk examines how contemporary cultural studies is shaped by institutional and political pressures while confronting demands for engaged public pedagogies. Focusing on the racialisation of settler colonial Asian identities and insights from critical whiteness theory, Dr. Teo explores how universities produce and regulate knowledge about race. Further, by considering how Asian racialisation has been alternately hypervisible and marginalised within Western academic discourse, the talk interrogates how institutional norms reproduce racial hierarchies prejudicial to this racialised group through curriculum design, hiring and promotion practices, and standards of “neutral” scholarship. He also considers tensions between academic insularity and public scholarship, asking whether cultural studies can contribute meaningfully to debates on race despite institutional constraints.

The political value system underpinning the American Declaration of Independence anchors in a dialectical tension of emancipation and oppression. While the egalitarian radicalism of the American Revolution that declared all men to be born free and equal did unleash emancipatory energies, the  founding credo of the United States also created new forms of discrimination that were justified by the values of the American Revolution. Central to this tension between emancipation and oppression was the question of who qualified as a human being and how humanity was defined. Professor Depkat's talk will explicate the dialectics emerging from the value system of the American Revolution by looking into the history of Black people and women in the United States.