Mediterranean Liminalities is an interdisciplinary research lab based at the University of Cologne that brings together departments and individual researchers from the social sciences, humanities, as well as natural and engineering sciences who work on and in the Mediterranean region at the University of Cologne. The lab also seeks to establish its role as a future research hub for connecting and promoting international innovative research projects in the Mediterranean.

The lab currently coordinates the EUniWell initiative (2024–2027) Crisis and Conviviality in the Mediterranean, developed within EUniWell Arena 4: Culture, Multilingualism and Well-Being. 

To capture the interdisciplinary nature of the Lab as well as the multi-layered entanglements of the Mediterranean region, we propose to work with the perspective of a ‘nested Mediterranean’, in which overlapping zones of different scale form and dissolve at an uneven pace, and lend themselves to different forms of belonging in an increasingly capricious environment. To critically rethink borders, connections and disconnections, and the histories of global entanglements, we pay close attention to what has been called the dynamics of involution in the region. A ‘nested Mediterranean’ accounts for situated complexities, as documented not only in the ethnographic archive but also in, and for, Mediterranean scholarship, that include contradictory discourses and dynamics, and are recalibrated in situ; it collapses binary distinctions and the clear-cut distribution of social, political, and discursive power.

If you would like to learn more about the Lab’s work and its perspective of a “nested Mediterranean,” see the Special Issue “Rethinking the Mediterranean” of Zeitschrift für Ethnologie / Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, published in two parts as issues 145.2 and 146.1–2