Call for Contributions
to the Online lecture series “Cities at War”

A Teaching and Writing Stipend for the Winter Term 2025-26

Off University is inviting proposals for a contribution of 90-minutes to its online lecture series “Cities at War”. This series is jointly organized by scholars from war-torn cities focusing on how military conflicts and their aftermath have produced and re-produced their cities. Scholars who are working in the broad field of urban studies and who are directly affected by war, displaced and/or on the move can apply for a stipend of 1200 GBP.

Contribution to the online lecture series “Cities at War” should adhere to a shared conceptual framework: Much of urban research on cities at war discusses the effects of armed conflict on urban space and the militarization of urban space in the same breath. While we acknowledge that similar urban forms may emerge and are interconnected (e.g., via technology), we do not think that the militarization of urban space that often is a result of the “war on terrorism” or some iteration of it is directly comparable to the experience of cities where inhabitants are experiencing/ have recently experienced war or armed conflict.

Focusing on actual physical destruction and ruination (Navaro 2009), we’ll first take account of the everyday life in a city at war (Fawaz et al. 2012, Harb 2017) and the practices and strategies of inhabitants to cope with the present and protect war-related memories. 

Second, recognizing the emerging continuum between war and peace in many war/conflict cities perceivable as a “practice of continuously planning for war in times of peace” (Bou Akar 2018), we want to contribute to a better understanding of the practices of planning a city at war and their interplay with processes of reconstruction (Sharp 2023), displacement, commodification and musealization (Genç 2021). The increasingly blurred “division between war and peace” (Sharp/Kelegama 2025) is our focus when we examine specific cities at war.

A third cross-cutting theme is the erasure of knowledge, heritage sites and memory that accompanies war both through physical destruction and the loss of archives and records, and through theviolent nation building often entailed in post-conflict rebuilding in the form of re-engineering cities and their histories.

The online lecture series will be held on the Off University online learning platform during the 2025-26 winter term (14 weeks, October 2025 – February 2026). Selected lecturers will receive a total of 1200 GBP as an honorarium for their lecture and a short article on the lecture’s topic. The results of the lecture series will be compiled, discussed during a round table of all participating scholars in Mid-February, and published online.

Besides the delivery of the lecture and the article, we offer a day-long training on teaching in a digitally secure and inclusive way in September and request all scholars to participate in the roundtable discussion of their articles in Mid-February.

Off University’s online-learning platform Moodle offers a virtual classroom including chat options, video live streaming, virtual blackboard, file sharing and a whole range of collaborative learning activities. Over the last seven years, we have organized 80 interactive online courses certified by universities with recognized ECTS credits.

The Online Lecture Series “Cities at War” is accredited by the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt-University. All regular and successful participants will receive a 3 ECTS point certificate. Off University is open for everybody to join, not only participants enrolled at a university. 

The Online Lecture Series got awarded with the Seminar Series Award by the Urban Studies Foundation. Proposals will be selected by the representatives of organizations that received the Seminar Series Award: Off University, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Beirut Urban Lab.