9 July 16:00–17:30 | Roundtable: Reading Matters – Literature as Social and Political Practice
Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.
Reading is one of the fundamental cultural techniques of modern societies: Once learned, it modulates our relationships to ourselves and the world; it creates connections across time and space, and constitutes a site of our collective self-understanding. The roundtable aims to foreground the practice of reading literature both as a form of social participation and as a means of reflection for individuals and communities. Against the backdrop of the current transformation of our reading culture, it seeks to explore the uses and functions of 'doing literature' in the present, while also envisioning possible futures.
With:
Laura Bieger (Ruhr University Bochum/EXC 2020)
Laura Bieger is Professor of American Studies at Ruhr University Bochum. In her work on reading publics, she considers literature's social responsibility from a praxeological point of view as a collective doing that involves a multiplicity of human and non-human actors and institutions. She examines literary works as nodal points in a complex and shifting web of relations that catalyse activities such as reading, writing, publishing, reviewing, citing, recommending and republishing. For Bieger, political engagement is not intrinsic to certain styles, forms or genres, but defines literary practice from within this web in accordance with historically specific ideas about justice and social responsibility. Picking up themes from her forthcoming book Reading for Democracy, her input will highlight the function of literature as a critical infrastructure of the democratic public sphere, with a special focus on reading as a technologically and affectively conditioned infrastructuring practice.
Hanan Natour (EXC 2020)
Hanan Natour is a postdoctoral researcher of Arabic and Comparative Literature at EXC 2020 and an associated fellow of the programme Europe in the Middle East — The Middle East in Europe (EUME). Her current research focuses on modern Arabic literature from the Maghreb and on literary networks between North Africa, the Levant and Europe. Her first monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming (2026). During her PhD, she served as research associate to the ERC-funded project PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present, where she collected and analysed data on the literary links between Palestine, Tunis, Paris and London, and developed visualisations for the project's open access data platform. In her input, Natour will draw on this work to investigate reading as a practice of survival, a way of preserving collective memory in a literary locale that is threatened to disappear and has been challenged with fragmentation, dispersal and exile for many decades.
Heike Geißler (writer/EXC 2020 Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence 2025)
Heike Geißler is an author, translator and co-editor of the series Lücken kann man lesen. In her writing, Geißler focuses on themes such as class, literature and/as work (Saisonarbeit, 2014; Arbeiten, 2025), anti-democratic developments, right-wing extremism and misanthropy (Die Woche, 2022), as well as the artistic search for ways to counter the feeling of powerlessness in the face of current social conditions (Liegen, 2022; Verzweiflungen, 2025). Her artistic work, for example with the intervention format Sabotique, reveals literature as an intermedial and performative phenomenon that is only effective as a collective aesthetic practice. During her residency, she explores the potential of reading (literature) in both intimate and public spaces.
Chair: Barbara Bausch (Research Area 4: Literary Currencies/Constellations)
Image Credit: S. Messner 2025 for EXC 2020 using a photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash.
