As part of the multidisciplinary workshop funding by the MWP, Dima co-organized with fellows Natasja Rupesinghe and Miranda Loli a workshop titled ‘Fieldwork in Conflict Zones. Space, Time, and Emotion in War and Post-War Research, which took place on the 18th and 19th of May.

This one-day workshop brought together Max Weber Programme Fellows and external scholars to examine how space, time, and emotion shape knowledge production in conflict-affected settings. Researchers in war and post-war contexts encounter violence, trauma, and structural injustice as immediate lived realities that influence every facet of knowledge production. At the same time, spatial and logistical constraints challenge conventional immersive fieldwork: ‘red zones’ remain inaccessible, interviews are often conducted with displaced populations in capitals, and digital technologies are becoming indispensable substitutes for physical presence. The workshop addressed three interconnected themes. First, the methodological and theoretical implications of multi-sited research, including the rise of digital ethnography in conflict studies. Second, the emotional and relational dimensions of fieldwork, including fatigue, fear, and suspicion, and what these reveal about social dynamics in war. Finally, the temporal challenges of conducting research amid ongoing violence, including ethical decision-making, political timing, and real-time documentation and safeguarding.

Ayako was part of the organising committee of the MWP 20th Anniversary Conference ‘The Past, Present, and Future of the Max Weber Programme’ together with fellows Llorenç Soler Buades (SPS), Ana Mafalda Lopes (HEC), Rajkumar Sahoo (STG), Diya Sarkar Ghosh (LAW), Khushi Singh Rathore (HEC/RSC).

Ayako also organised the MWP funded multidisciplinary workshop Challenging Inequality: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Struggles over Gender and Sexuality   on 28 April 2026, together with fellows Carolina Biliotti (ECO), Elisa Heinrich (HEC), Ana Mafalda Lopes (HEC).

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild advanced his research agenda on the challenges of international institutions at the EUI. For his ESR project “LIDO – Loyalties in a Divided Order: Europe’s responses to the US withdrawal from multilateral institutions”, he conducted interviews with officials of international organisations, member states, and the EU at Brussels, Rome, and New York. These conversations revealed how European foreign and security policy copes with the dilemma between the need for multilateral cooperation and dependence on the US.

Participants in the Multidisciplinary Research Workshop ‘Revisiting the Rules-based Order’s Crisis: Contemporary Challenges, Historical Precedent, and Lessons for the EU’s Future’, Florence, June 2026.

Tim also co-organised multiple events on the contestation of multilateral cooperation, including the “Scapegoating International Organizations: Blame Games and the Erosion of the Liberal International Order” (Tutzing, April 2026), funded by a workshop grant of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and, together with Elettra Bargellini and Flavia Canestrini, the Multidisciplinary Research Workshop “Revisiting the Rules-based Order’s Crisis: Contemporary Challenges, Historical Precedent, and Lessons for the EU’s Future” (Florence, June 2026).

Elisa was interviewed for The elephant in the room | Equity, diversity and inclusion podcast at the EUI. In this episode, she explores how ideas of ‘normality’ are shaped through history, language, and power. Drawing on queer history, disability activism, and her own research, she reflects on labels, resistance, and the role of activism in challenging exclusion and producing new knowledge.

Elisa is also co-convenor of the newly established Disability History Working Group at the EUI, conceived as a welcoming and collaborative forum for exploring key texts and emerging ideas in disability history and disability studies. With monthly reading groups, book talks, and other events, the working group represents an important step towards connecting scholars interested in broader questions of the body, social norms, health, and inequality across academic levels and disciplines at the EUI.

Shaping Slovenia’s Gender Equality Legislation
Biljana Kotevska contributed as a legal expert to the drafting of the legal opinion issued by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) on Slovenia's Act on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men. The request, made by the Vice-President of the Slovenian National Assembly, asked ODIHR to assess the Act, originally adopted in 2002, against international and OSCE human dimension commitments on gender equality. Having previously co-authored ODIHR’s Comparative Note on Gender Equality Laws across the 57 OSCE participating states, Biljana was invited to provide an independent opinion which was incorporated into the consolidated opinion, published on 14 May 2026. The exercise gave her an opportunity to contribute directly to shaping the future of gender equality law in Slovenia, one of the countries she studied for her PhD.

Briefing the Croatian Parliament
In May 2026, Biljana Kotevska was received by members of the Croatian Parliament's Committee on Gender Equality, including its President, Marija Lugarić. Drawing on her work as an ODIHR expert on gender equality legislation, Biljana briefed the Committee, and the members of the working group drafting Croatia's new Gender Equality Act, on international standards for gender and intersectional equality. For Biljana, whose PhD research had Croatia as one of the countries in focus, the meeting closed a personal and professional circle, bringing her research directly into the legislative process she once studied from the outside. The meeting was facilitated by the project ‘Norms, Institutions, and National and International Frameworks for the Protection of Women's Rights,’ led by Prof. Antonija Petričušić at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Law, a former Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI.

Participants at the ‘Gaps in the Syrian Nationality Law: Achieving Gender Equality’ conference in Damascus University

Conference Gaps in the Syrian Nationality Law: Achieving Gender Equality
As part of his ESR project on ‘Re-centering affected families within research advocacy on reforming Syria’s gender discriminatory nationality law post-Assad’, in March 2026, Thomas McGee was involved in co-organising a conference entitled ‘Gaps in the Syrian Nationality Law: Achieving Gender Equality’ in Damascus University with the National Commission for Transitional Justice, UN Women and the MENA Statelessness Network (Hawiati). This picture was taken during the conference.

Ádám Mézes co-taught the seminar ‘History of Science, Medicine and Technology’with Professor Lauren Kassell in Fall 2025. He also gave a talk titled ‘“They Will All Go to Hell Anyway” - Killing the Dead in Early Modern Rumelia’ at the History of Death and Disease in the Islamicate World Working Group of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. In the Spring Term, Ádám gave a talk titled ‘The Costs of Killing the Dead’ at the workshop, History of Knowledge, a Seminar and Masterclass with Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) organized by the History of Science and Medicine Working Group at the EUI. He also organized a workshop ‘Sciences and Cults of the Mind: Hypnosis, Culture, and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century’, led by Assistant Professor Emese Lafferton from Central European University (CEU Vienna). This year Ádám was also active in the field of public history, he gave an interview for the Japanese cultural magazine Worksight, titled ‘The past never dies; it is resurrected. Vampires: A Historian Explains Why Vampires “Actually Existed" in the 18th Century’, and did a podcast for the The Review of Democracy titled ‘Did Fear of Vampires Inspire Early Scientific Inquiry?’

PI of a new CLUSTER
Noemi Quagliati has recently been appointed Principal Investigator of the cluster ‘Ecologies of Making: Material Culture Beyond the Human’ at the NICHE Centre for Environmental Humanities (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).

Cluster description
Traditional narratives of material culture often portray matter as a passive substrate awaiting human form. Challenging this view, Ecologies of Making investigates the more-than-human agencies that co-produce material worlds. Interweaving design and architecture history, the history of science and technology, and the environmental humanities—including plant and animal studies—this interdisciplinary cluster examines how matters, organisms, and environments actively shape processes of creation, production, circulation, and conservation. The research analyses artisanal epistemologies of the past alongside contemporary industrial methods, engaging both tangible artefacts and seemingly immaterial domains, for example by foregrounding the physical infrastructures and energy demands underpinning digital technologies. It also critically assesses the sustainability of cultural economies shaped by extraction, labour, and the commodification of living beings. By reconceptualising making as an interspecies and ecological practice rather than an exclusively human endeavour, Ecologies of Making opens new perspectives on design, architecture, and aesthetics. It reframes creativity as a property constituted by ecological relations, offering alternative approaches to material culture in an era of environmental precarity.

Saverio Salvioni, Ravaccione marble quarry, Carrara, 1810–1813 (Source: Archivio di Stato Massa e Pontremoli)

WORKSHOP SERIES
During the upcoming winter semester, Noemi Quagliati will serve as the curator of the online workshop series ‘Making the View from Nowhere: Aesthetics, Infrastructures, and Ecologies of the Aerial and Spaceborne Image’, organized in partnership with the international Network Topographic Visual Media.

Series Description
This workshop series focuses on the material elements, infrastructures, labour, and environmental impacts involved in producing the view from above. It brings to light the multi-layered processes of production, processing, dissemination, and archiving of aerial and satellite imagery across various contexts, geographies, and timeframes, spanning from the early history of aerial photography to contemporary remote sensing. Drawing on infrastructure studies and a visual history attentive to extractivism and ecology, this series examines how aerial and spaceborne vision is constructed and, crucially, how it remains grounded to the Earth.

Clean room technician working on Landsat 4’s Thematic Mapper instrument, 1978–1981 (Source: NASA).

Participants in the workshop Decolonial, Postcolonial and Feminist Theories in IR

Khushi and EUI PhD researcher Mart van der Wal organised a two-day workshop on Decolonial, Postcolonial and Feminist Theories in IR for doctoral researchers from across EUI departments, and Khushi had the privilege of teaching it. The workshop was designed not just to introduce these theoretical traditions to the researchers but to sit with the tensions between them. Together, they asked how these theories can actually transform the way we design research, choose methods, and write. The highlight was the guest lecture and extended dialogue session with  Prof Vineet Thakur from Leiden University, who took the participants through a genealogy of postcolonial thought with characteristic clarity, depth and generosity.

Khushi also delivered an online lecture to the Certificate Course on Diplomacy at Magadha University, India, on 'Women as Agents of Diplomacy in Multilateral Forums' .

Khushi was invited to deliver a guest lecture to the MA International Relations students at South Asian University, New Delhi, for their course 'Exploring South Asia Through the Archives'. The session focused on her work on Feminist Decolonial Historiography, rethinking how we read, interpret and inhabit the archive, and she also shared early framings of her ongoing research on the Idea of Asia.

Khushi presented parts of her ongoing research at the PISAR 2nd Annual Seminar on Politics in the Indian Knowledge System: Alternative Traditions and Perspectives, in Jaipur, on the panel Decolonization, Non-Western IR, Gender and Caste.

Khushi completed the programming for the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section for the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association 2026, where she served as Section Programme Co-Chair.