Between 18 October and 2 November, the Mercator Salon will explore the concept of "Heimat” in four discussion events. Heimat orguxiang are both words meaning homeland that have sentimental connotations, a concept not easily directly translated into English. The series of salons will particularly focus on differences and common ground in the understanding of the concept ofheimat in Europe and China. Four aspects will play a major role in the discussion.

On 18 October, the first salon titled “What does Heimat mean? Do people need Heimat?” will raise the fundamental question of what heimatmeans to people in different cultural contexts.

The salon “How to construct Heimat? The role of architecture and city planning” on 19 October will revolve around the role of architecture and urban planning when it comes to the way people identify with the place of their origin and with the place of their daily life.

The question of migration movements and the associated cultural and social integration processes and conflicts will be the central focus on 1 November in the salon “Moving away from Heimat, finding a new Heimat: integration and marginalization.”

The final salon of the autumn season on 2 November, “What does Heimatlook like? Images of Heimat in artistic and literary imagination,” will analyze the topic of heimat in artistic and literary production.

Leyla Neyzi

Professor at Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University.

Anthropologist and oral historian, Leyla Neyzi teaches at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University in Istanbul. Her research areas/interests include Turkey/Middle East/Europe, memory studies, oral history, transnational youth cultures, nationalism and minorities. Most recently, she completed an oral history project on Kurdish and Turkish youth in Turkey and Germany. Her publications and projects can be viewed on her website: http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/neyzi/

Dr. Lan Yuyun

Professor, Doctoral Supervisor and Dean at the Institute of Politics and Administration of South China Normal University.

Dr. Lan Yuyun focuses primarily on sociology and social work in her professional teaching and research work. In recent years, her main research field has been urbanization and urban and rural community governance, devoting special attention to urban villages and publishing more than 80 academic papers in the journals Chinese Social Science, Social Science Front, China's Rural Economy, Academic Research,Ideological Front and Society.

Her monograph Urban Village: a Field Study of "the New Village Community", published by SDX Joint publishing company, is a field research project focusing on an urban village in Guangzhou. The book describes and presents a panoramic view of the formation and development of a village within a South Chinese megacity. In the context of China’s rapid urbanization, villages in the urban area, as "centers of the floating population", are subject to and reflect the vicissitudes of the rural migrant population. Her book examines and interprets this huge migration movement of rural people to urban areas and offers fascinating examples of the ways they seek to integrate and the exclusions they experience in the process.

Michael Kahn-Ackermann（Stiftung Mercator China Special Representative）

About the Stiftung Mercator

Stiftung Mercator is one of the largest private foundations in Germany. It pursues clearly defined objectives in its thematic clusters of integration, climate change and arts education and achieves these objectives with a combination of socio-political advocacy and practical work. Stiftung Mercator implements its own projects and supports external projects in its centers for science and humanities, education and international affairs.

Currently, Stiftung Mercator is funding several projects in China: school and youth exchanges, multiplier encounters and fellowship programs for young managers in the areas of civil society, politics, academia and business. We are working to create a better and more nuanced understanding of Chinese and European reality in the respective other region through long-term partnership and cooperation.

Please see www.stiftung-mercator.de/en for more information.

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