Contested Pluralities. Conflictive Practices, Politics and Spaces of De/Pluralization
8th International Conference
15 & 16 OCTOBER 2026
ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany
Plurality is increasingly contested. Growing social and cultural heterogeneity has sparked debates about the acceptance of difference. Increasing global mobility – of people, goods, capital, and ideas – has intensified transnational pluralization. However, rising reactionary and nationalist movements and fortifying border regimes attempt to roll back and spatially contain these developments. These tensions reveal pluralization as a dynamic arena in which spatial orders are challenged, renegotiated, and refigured.
This international conference addresses the limits of pluralization as a central field of conflict. Hosted by the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces”, it unpacks pluralization not only as social diversification, but as a refiguration of spaces and spatial knowledge. Pluralization, in this sense, entails the coexistence of multiple spatial logics. It examines emerging configurations of coexistence and circulation, while simultaneously provoking defensive reactions.
By bringing together theoretical and empirical analyses, the conference deepens our understanding of pluralization as a contradictory process that enables connection while also producing exclusion. It addresses pluralization’s relations to spatial (re)organisation and asks what tendencies to limit pluralization mean for society and democracy, inviting perspectives from culture and civil society.
Program
15 OCTOBER 2026
11:30 – 12:00 Registration
12:00 – 12:30
Refiguring Space in Times of De-/Pluralization
Martina Löw & Johanna Hoerning
12:30 – 14:00 Keynote
Conceptualizing De/Pluralization
Susanne Wessendorf (Coventry): Place, Boundary-Making and Pluralization
Chairs: Joanna K. Kiefer & Janus Lafontaine Carboni
14:00 – 14:30 Coffee Break
14:30 – 16:30 Panel 1
De/Pluralizing Public Urban Spaces
Chair: Jochen Kibel
• Sangwon Chae (Berlin, CRC): Unwanted bodies, ordinary enclaves, and the emergence of sanitised urban publics: critical reflections from child-free spaces in Seoul, South Korea
• Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, Philip Baumbach, Daniel Groenefeld, Nicolas Zehner (Berlin, CRC): Plurality of public spaces through the lens of polycontexturality. How the safety and the malleability of public spaces affect playing Pokémon GO
• Taibat Lawanson (Liverpool): Climate Resilient or Greenwashing? Contested Imaginaries and the production of Urban Housing in Lagos, Nigeria
• Dominik Bartmanski (Berlin) & Diane E. Davis (Harvard): The Spatial Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Francesco Chiodelli (Turin): The legal geography of pluralistic public spaces
16:30 – 17:00 Coffee Break
17:00 – 18:00 Debate
Is Pluralism Spatially Fragile?
Chair: Christian Haid
18:00 – 20:00 Reception
16 OCTOBER 2026
09:00 – 10:30 Keynote
Politics of De/Pluralization
Janjira Sombatpoonsiri (Hamburg/Bangkok) Depleted, drained, demobilized: Digital Repression and Depluralisation of Civic Space
Chair: Daniela Stoltenberg
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 – 13:00 Panel 2
Territories Under Pressure: Deportation as De-Pluralization
Chair: Philipp Misselwitz
• Johanna Hoerning & Björn Scheffler (Berlin, CRC): Re-Figuration of Local Border Regimes: Conflicts over Deportation in Germany and Australia
• Aino Korvensyrjä (Bristol): Beyond the ‘Borders of Berlin’: West African Resistance to Deportation in Germany
• Florian Wagner (Erfurt): Democratizing the Deportation Regime? West Germany between Post-Nazism and Post-Colonialism (1950s–1990s)
• Matthew Gibney (Oxford): Denationalisation and the Evasion of Deportation
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch Break
14:00 – 15:00 Book launch
“Spatialities of Displacement in Times of Climate Change”, edited by Francesca Ceola, Qusay Amer, Juliana Canedo, & Philipp Misselwitz. JOVIS
15:00 – 17:00 Panel 3
Everyday Politics of Religious De/Pluralization
Chair: Silke Steets
• Joanna K. Kiefer (Erlangen-Nürnberg/CRC): Sedimented Plurality: Religion in Everyday Havana
• Schirin Amir-Moazami (Berlin): The Political Theology of Germany's ‘Staatsräson’. Exception, Enmity and Politics of De/pluralization in the Public Sphere
• Bernd Schnettler (Bayreuth): Violence, Religion, and Death Cult in Magdalena Medio, Colombia
17:00 – 17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – 18:30 Final Roundtable
Pluralism vs. Populism: What Is at Stake in Current Processes of Refiguration?
Chair: Johanna Hoerning
The conference will be held in English. It is organized by Johanna Hoerning, Martina Löw & Christian Haid.
This event is hosted by Collaborative Research Center 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces”.