Belonging in the City

​Join us on April 25, 2026, 4 PM at Donaustr. 84 for a conversation on how cities serve as sites of both belonging and difference. Across ethnography, writing, and multimodal work, the panelists examine how migration, memory, and affect shape the lived experience of difference and belonging in urban life. We invite you to engage these themes through your own experiences in Berlin.

​We’ll end the evening with a shared buffet.

​In conversation with:

​Tilmann Heil (KU Leuven; UFRJ) – works within and addresses hierarchies and ways of living with difference, with research across Senegal, Spain, and Brazil.

​Arshi Javaid (HU Berlin; Einstein Fellow) – explores memory and migration in Kashmir through everyday life, sensory experience, and urban relationships

​Omar Kasmani (FU Berlin) – Karachi-born writer and theorist tracing migrant life, queer love, and political heartbreak in the German capital. Asks how erotic desire maps on to social disturbance in Berlin; why urban matters are also matters of the heart.

​Ammara Maqsood (UCL) – examines how people live with and across difference in non-liberal contexts, reflecting on Hindu (be)longing and invisibility in Karachi through the collaborative multimodal digital project Absent Presence (www.absentpresence.org)

​Simone Toji (HU Berlin; Iphan, Brazil) – is a researcher and writer whose work combines ethnography and literary experimentation to explore migration and urban life in São Paulo, focusing on how migrants and cities transform one another.

​Moderated by Sadia Bajwa (HU Berlin)

​Hosted by _subkontinent, supported by the Einstein Foundation and organized by Sadia Bajwa and Arshi Javaid with Berlin South Asia Studies, Humboldt University.