HGGS - Us and Them

Conversation with Vanessa Márquez Vargas, Debby Avendaño Sánchez, and Adrián Navia Segovia (University of Los Andes, Venezuela)

Language of the Episode: Spanish

In this episode, Vanessa Márquez Vargas, Debby Avendaño Sánchez, and Adrián Navia Segovia, all from the University of Los Andes, Venezuela, present a hybrid theme combining text and image, with the goal of showing, from their perspective and experiences, how objects, walls, ...

Marco Del Din in conversation with Laura Herges

Diamonds Are Forever is not only the title of a James Bond film, but also the name of a drag show in Kyoto. In today's episode, Marco Del Din, PhD candidate at Heidelberg University and Ca' Foscari University in Venice talks to us about drag queens that transform into monsters, aliens, animals, and freaks. How do the performers of the oldest and longest-running drag show in Jap...

Florence Wieder-Kinne in conversation with Laura Herges

In child protection, "Us and Them“ manifests itself in different ways: Social workers and families often encounter each other with different expectations, shaped by institutional structures, biographical experiences, societal narratives and cultural influences. One of the greatest challenges in this context is the encounter with the cultural other. Social workers often int...

Alberto Carballo Soca in conversation with Sinan Barış Yaşar 

Group Cohesion, Digital Education, and AI Literacy: three distinct topics that come together in this episode through the lens of the „Us and Them“ dichotomy. Having dedicated his academic life to these fields, Alberto Carballo Soca from the Faculty of Psychology, University of Havana shares insights from his research and personal experiences, both within the Cuban context...

Isabella Gomez O’Keefe in conversation with Laura Herges

Polarization in the United States did not start when Donald Trump was elected President for the second time in 2024 – but it might be more visible now than ever, largely due to social media: the ‘enemy within,’ the un-American enemy image, has become a common denominator for right-wing politicians and alt-right influencers on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. In this interv...

Tetyana Kasima in conversation with Sinan Barış Yaşar

As human beings, we are all embedded in time and space—but how does the space we inhabit shape our perspectives and experiences? Drawing on her research into Clarice Lispector’s The Besieged City and Virginia Woolf’s Solid Objects, Tetyana Kasima (University of Tartu) joins Sinan from HGGS to explore how literature reflects and reimagines urban life. The conversation touches on ...

Dr. Tatiana Tereshchenko and Dr. Pavel Brunssen in conversation with Jiacheng Mo

What do ancient and medieval visual arts have in common with modern Antigypsyism in German pop culture? At first glance, these topics seem entirely unrelated — one rooted in the distant past, and the other in urgent contemporary concerns. Yet, in our 4th podcast episode, Dr. Tatiana Tereshchenko (Moscow) and Dr. Pavel Brunssen (Heidelberg), in conversat...

Dr. Liudmyla Pidkuimukha in conversation with Laura Herges 

When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, the world was left in shock. In times of war, the dichotomy between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ becomes clearer than ever; and one specific medium in which this is illustrated are war posters. Dr. Liudmyla Pidkuimukha has analyzed more than 2,000 Ukrainian war posters with a special focus on the interplay of visual and verbal elements. In this epis...

Professor Richard Caplan in conversation with Sinan Barış Yaşar 

In the second episode, we welcome Prof. Dr. Richard Caplan, Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Sinan Barış Yaşar (Law) from the HGGS interviews Professor Caplan, who reflects on the question: Has the Responsibility to Protect, particularly in the context of United Nations peacekeeping operations, amounted to a ‘false promise’? The convers...

Laura Herges in conversation with Sinan Barış Yaşar 

Our first episode introduces our theme “Us and Them” and opens the series with an interview between Sinan Barış Yaşar and Laura Herges (Heidelberg University): The traumatized war hero has become a well-known film trope. But how does the image of the suffering veteran influence our opinions on wars that happened in real life? Laura, who writes her thesis in American studies, discu...