This weekly digest is a collection of news, upcoming events and other opportunities from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University and the wider area, compiled by Graduate School students.
- Sustainability Week 2025
- UPF Career Talk. International Human Right Careers: Gender Equality, Development & Local Impact
- SASNET Book Talk with Rhys Machold: “Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel”
- Defending Livelihoods in the Speculative City: The Politics of Class and Solidarity for Tenant Shopkeepers in Urban Korea
- Girls Sc(AI)ence 2: Pushing boundaries of research design: Future Making through (re)mixing creative methods
- A New Look at an Old War: Examining Burma’s Long Running Civil Wars
- Transformation Food System: Rights, Land, and Justice
Sustainability Week 2025
This year’s programme consists of over 80 events – open to all and free of charge!
5-10 of May the Sustainability Week will be back!
Sustainability Week is an annual event where Lund University and Lund Municipality organise a week full with activities focusing on sustainability. During the week, both current societal challenges and hopeful visions of the future are explored in the form of lectures, workshops, debates, exhibitions and guided tours.
All events are organised by staff at LU and Lund Municipality, and student organisations at LU. Most events take place around Lund and the surrounding area, and this year events will also be organised at Campus Helsingborg and at the Malmö Academy of Music.
You find the programme at hallbarhetsveckan.event.lu.se
You find all the English speaking events here | hallbarhetsveckan.event.lu.se/calendar
Date and time: 5 May 2025 08:00 to 10 May 2025 17:00
Location: Lund
For more information, visit this page
International Human Right Careers: Gender Equality, Development & Local Impact
UPF Career Talk
Interested in human rights, gender equality, anti-corruption, and international development? Join us for an engaging Career Talk as Isis Sartori Reis shares her journey from Lund to global institutions like the UNDP and the European Commission, offering insights on navigating a career in human rights and development!
Our guest speaker:
Isis Sartori Reis is a human rights professional specialising in gender mainstreaming, anti-corruption, and local-level capacity development. She holds a Master’s in Asian Studies from Lund University and has worked with the UNDP, the European Commission, and currently serves as Programme Officer at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Lund.
CAREER TALKS is a series of events by UPF Lund’s Career Committee, offering students insights into career paths, experiences, and networking opportunities in fields related to international relations. Come learn from inspiring professionals and explore your future!
☕ Free fika and entrance for members
40 SEK for non-members
Date and time: 6 May 17:15 to 18:30
Location: Eden ED 222A,, Lund
For more information, visit this page
SASNET Book Talk with Rhys Machold: “Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel”
Seminar
Welcome to a book talk with Dr. Rhys Machold (University of Glasgow) on homeland security and efforts to reproduce it as new state form of policing around the world.
When we hear ‘homeland security,’ we often think about the aftermath of September 11th and the dramatic consolidation of domestic mass surveillance in the United States. Less well-known are the term’s origins and the subsequent efforts to reproduce it as new state form and “model” of policing around the world. Tracing homeland security’s origins in the colonization of Palestine and subsequent efforts by Israel’s homeland security industry to ‘penetrate’ India in the course of the ‘war on terror’, Fabricating Homeland Security locates homeland security as a universalizing transnational project of contemporary capitalism and empire, staged through ongoing practices and encounters across time and space.
This book tells this story by weaving together fragments gathered through more than a decade of ethnographic research across Palestine/Israel, India and the UK. It traces the political fallout of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, often known as “India’s 9/11” or simply “26/11”, concentrating on the efforts of Israel’s homeland security to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. By charting homeland security’s less known histories and geographies, the book raises urgent political questions about the actually existing extent of security’s self-implied universality and inevitability, even in places and societies deeply imbricated in empire and capitalist social relations.
Date and time: 5 May 2025 13:15
Location: CMES Seminar Room (Finngatan 16), Lund
For more information, visit this page
Defending Livelihoods in the Speculative City: The Politics of Class and Solidarity for Tenant Shopkeepers in Urban Korea
Open lecture with Yewon Lee, Department of Korean Studies at University of Tübingen
Tenant shopkeepers are micro-entrepreneurs or petit bourgeoisie that are often dismissively labeled as unrevolutionary, reactionary, and individualistic. Scholarly literature contributes to this invisibility. However, tenant shopkeepers in urban Korea are collectively organizing against the trend where urban spaces they depend on to eke out a living being captured as an investment commodity and resulting in their rent hikes and evictions. My in-depth ethnographic research in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul analyzes how once fragmented tenant shopkeepers come to embrace class politics to align their interest with various precariats of the city while demanding recognition of the value created through their “work.” As speculation on urban real estates are intensifying all around the increasingly urbanizing world, there is much to be gained from exploring and evaluating this South Korea’s case of building what scholars have coined as “cities for people, not for profit.” More broadly, through the case of tenant shopkeepers organizing, I investigate the path to generate new class politics for the previously fragmented.
Yewon Lee (She/Her) is a Junior Professor at the Department of Korean Studies at University of Tübingen. She is a political and labor sociologist and urban ethnographer whose work has been centered on unraveling how speculative real estate interests increasingly dictate the shape and character of urban landscapes and urban (work) lives.
Date and time: 7 May 2025 15:15 to 17:00
Location: Asia Library, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Sölvegatan 18 B, Lund
For more information, visit this page
Girls Sc(AI)ence 2: Pushing boundaries of research design: Future Making through (re)mixing creative methods
Workshop
An online lecture and on-site seminar in the serie Girls Just Want To Have Sc(AI)ence. Topic: Pushing boundaries of research design: Future Making through (re)mixing creative methods.
Invited speaker: Annette Markham, Chair Professor of Media Literacy and Public Engagement in the department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, Netherland
Read more about the workshop series “Girls just want to have Sc(AI)ence” at ai.lu.se
Programme:
10.00 – 10.45: Keynote by Annette Markham Pushing boundaries of research design: Future Making through (re)mixing creative methods
Abstract: How can we create methodological mindsets and sensibilities that give rise to alternate futures? How can critical perspectives, reflexivity, creativity, and data science co-mingle? In this talk and workshop, Professor Markham focuses on how to dismantle and then reconfigure disciplinary traditions for research design. The mindset of remix is one way to consider how methods are not just tools, but make worlds. This talk encourages researchers to reflect on how all scientific practices embody fundamentally playful, inventive, and generative forms of interrogation and embracing less restrictive frameworks for engagement and analysis can form novel pathways through wicked polycrisis. To build the case for pushing boundaries, Markham draws on her work conducting algorithmic literacy through arts-based community engagement as well as her work conducting close level sociological analysis of human-AI interactions.
Date and time: 8 May 2025 10:00 to12:30
Location: Hybrid, Zoom & Lund
For more information, visit this page
A New Look at an Old War: Examining Burma’s Long Running Civil Wars
Seminar
Burma’s conflict holds the distinction of being among the world’s longest civil wars – dating back to 1948. This multimedia public roundtable considers new perspectives for understanding the longevity of Myanmar’s civil wars by looking at the roles of militias, drugs, and human rights abuses against civilians through historical, feminist and cinematographic perspectives.
The seminar features footage from Adrian Cowell’s The Warlords – a documentary film shot in Shan State in the early 1970s to highlight the continuity of the roles played by militias and drugs across over fifty years of armed conflict from an on the ground perspective. The panelists will examine the Burmese military’s use of its militia system as part of larger strategy for managing conflict and discuss shortcomings of scholarly and practical interventions which focus too narrowly on armed actors and governance solutions, ignoring local contexts and longstanding grievances and potentially replicating harms.
Panelists include scholars and practitioners:
- Dr John Buchanan is a Researcher at Tallinn University and focuses on politics in Southeast Asia
- Melissa Booth, independent researcher on security and justice reform and gender and conflict
- Dr Jenny Hedström, associate professor of war studies at the Swedish Defence University
- Dr Patrick Meehan, Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies, Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HRCI), University of Manchester;
Moderator: Dr Elizabeth Rhoads, Human Rights Profile Area member and researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University
Date and time: 12 May 2025 17:15 to 19:00
Location: Asia Library, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Sölvegatan 18 B
For more information, visit this page
Transformation Food System: Rights, Land, and Justice
Lecture
📖 This lecture explores food and land as fundamental human rights, challenging their treatment as commodities. We examine how corporate control, land grabs, and toxic trade practices threaten food sovereignty, biodiversity, and local farming communities—especially in the Global South—and discuss pathways toward just, sustainable food systems rooted in human dignity and ecological care 🌱🌍
Gloria Jimwaga is a Policy Advisor on Food and Land Rights at AfrikaGrupperna, with over 11 years of experience in land tenure, food rights, and climate justice. She holds degrees from SLU and the University of Dar es Salaam and is passionate about women’s land rights and sustainable development systems.
☕ Free fika
70 SEK for non-members
Date and time: 12 May 2025, 17:30 – 18:30
Location: Gamla Köket 128, Allhelgona kyrkogata 8, Lund, Sweden
For more information, visit this page
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