Transregional studies respond to increasing interdependence and specialization, pursue an open approach in the internationalization of the humanities and social sciences, they confront and connect disciplinary and regional perspectives on shared questions. What is the role and value of the Humanities and Social Sciences in times of crises? How do wars and other un/natural disasters affect scholars, their work and society? What are the ethics of research in times of upheaval, in contexts of authoritarian transgression or temptation? What are de/pressing matters, for whom and why? What are politics of knowledge and meaning in polarised societies and fragmented publics? Will the effects of crises and different assessments of urgency lead to more parochialism? Are we back to provincialism? Or is there nothing new about crises, and Europe – after an exceptional run in the second halves of the 19th and 20th centuries – only becomes what it used to see in its others? What then may Decoloniality mean? Or Restitution and Emancipation? What does North, West, South, or East stand for in the 21st century? And who speaks for and in which direction?

Seven short interventions of Fellows of the Forum’s programs _Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe, Prisma Ukraïna: War Migration, Memory, and re:constitution: Exchange and Analysis on Democracy and the Rule of Law in Europe will not answer all these questions but look forward through the themes and questions they have, in five minutes each.

A panel conversation will take up some of the issues introduced in the questions and in the fellow interventions and discuss what sustainable internationality could mean in light of the current crisis debates, degressive funding, irritable publics and shrinking spaces of civil and academic freedoms in many countries.