 DIRECTOR’S CORNER
Dear FRIAS Community,
This is a kind of ristretto version of the December issue of the FRIAS Express, a full version of which was supposed to accompany our Season’s Greetings. So many things would have been worth reporting on – recent and upcoming events, the very successful start of our current research focus, or awards given to FRIAS members and members of FRIAS boards, etc. Alas, this was not to happen for reasons of illness in the Express team just in the critical period of the publication preparations. In a way this is typical of what has marred the work of the FRIAS team through most of 2018: many changes in the admin team (not least, the loss of our Managing Director Carsten Dose to the state ministry) and many absences due to health reasons, all this in light of the normal (high) workload PLUS the challenge of launching MIASA in Ghana and supporting the (still very small) team there from afar. It is with utmost respect that everything this team under extreme pressure has mastered and achieved in 2018 needs to be acknowledged (with organizing the 10 year anniversary event in June only as a sideshow, by comparison). On behalf of my fellow directors Annegret Wilde and Günther Schulze, I would thus like to use this occasion to thank all members of the FRIAS team, with Britta Küst as the front woman in charge, most deeply!
To give you a brief taste of what life at FRIAS was like just in the last three (!) weeks: FRIAS hosted the First Minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, giving a public talk (to some 800 people) on “Which science does society need?” in our Freiburger Horizonte outreach series, journalist Josef Joffe, editor of the major liberal German weekly “Die Zeit”, with a Freiburger Horizonte talk attended by some 600 people, and Nobel Laureate Thomas Südhof (Stanford), who gave a Staudinger Lecture plus Master Class. Moreover, Silja Vöneky, Senior Fellow and member of our research focus “Responsible Artificial Intelligence”, gave a brilliant talk on “Autonomous weapons and international law” in our HUMSS Colloquium, and Junior Fellow Philipp Harms co-organized an extremely interesting afternoon workshop on benefits and risks of purely DNA-based face reconstruction (as a spin-off of one of our current joint Penn State – U Freiburg project groups). Not to mention the successful start of our Lunch lecture series “Shifting perspectives: when the margins become the center”, the MIASA workshop on “Restitution and repatriation of looted and illegally acquired African objects in European museums” at the University of Ghana with a livestream keynote by historian Andreas Eckert on "Decolonizing the Museum? African Objects and the Politics of Restitution", and many more activities at FRIAS. It’s been a real finale furioso at FRIAS, after a year that, at least judging against the 5 years of my directorship, clearly qualifies as a top candidate for the title “annus horribilis”. That this has gone largely unnoticed outside of the FRIAS team speaks for the unique team spirit and its never tiring high motivation.
But this, I trust, is (almost) all behind us, and there are many good reasons to believe that the sun will be shining much more brightly on FRIAS in the new year we are rapidly approaching. In conclusion, let me therefore assure all readers of these lines that they can expect extremely interesting issues of the FRIAS Express in 2019. So many good news to report, so many interesting fellows and guest researchers to join us, so many fascinating events and activities at FRIAS and MIASA lined up! In the meantime, I would like to wish all of you only the very best – as is spelt out in a little more detail in the Season’s Greetings you find below! Frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes Jahr!
|
