We are Crossmopollinate. Our name is a portamento of the words cosmopolitan and cross-pollinate.
We are a collective initiated in the Transcultural Studies department of Heidelberg University. Although we come from multiple backgrounds, such as anthropology, architecture, art history, cartography, geography, literature studies, urban planning, and so on, one thing that brought us together was our approach to transculturality. We firmly believe that the transcultural lens could be implemented to create a collaborative platform between students, researchers, artists, and cultural practitioners. We strive to bridge the gap between transcultural theory and practice, employing a two-pronged approach in order to achieve this goal.
Through Interval, the collective’s magazine, we aim to integrate the transcultural model into discussions about art, politics, economy, and society beyond the confines of academia. Interval seeks to demystify the theoretical aspects of Transcultural Studies by creating multimedia content, including calls for papers, podcasts, video essays and more. We hold the belief in the capacity of such diverse narrative practices to promote the horizontalization of the often hierarchical domain of knowledge production.
Through Crossmopollinate, the collective’s research lab, we aim to bring together expertise from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, mathematics, art, and natural sciences. We wish to realise the conjunction between separated realities through new modes of critical thinking and problem-solving. Additionally, we aim to facilitate community-based workshops, research, and public art projects related to urban inhabitation, and citizenship. Our approach rests upon a mode of collaborative knowledge production.
Team
Inah Kim
CO-FOUNDER
Inah Kim is a graduate student pursuing an MA in European Art History and Transcultural Studies in Heidelberg. She is interested in visual representations of urban spaces. She has recently completed her thesis titled “Access to Land: Challenging Notions of Value through Public Art in Mumbai in 2011 and 2012,” which aimed to investigate the interplay between colonial legacies, capitalist and governmental ventures, and their reverberations in the contemporary conceptualizations of Mumbai regarding land, property, and water through the artistic interventions that took place in 2011 and 2012. Interdisciplinary research lies at the core of her interests, where art history speaks about architecture and cities not only as built spaces but also as lived ones.
Julia Edelman
Editor-in-Chief,
Interval Magazine
Julia Edelmann is currently completing her thesis, which examines the intersections of queerness and death, loss, and grief in Mannheim, her new home. Her research focuses on queer funeral rituals, bodily autonomy in death, funeral homes as hybridised agents of church, state, and market, and the concept of “afterlives” through memorials, gravesites, and communal support networks such as grief groups.
Throughout her academic and professional work, she he is deeply interested in science communication, aiming to bridge complex research topics with wider audiences and ensure access for everyone.
kattyayani J
co-founder
Kattyayani Joag is a graduate of Sociology and Transcultural Studies. Her research interests are informal urban economies in India. Her work focuses on waste-related labour and waste flows, investigating how these are shaped by urban transformations and the ambivalence of sustainability narratives with regard to informal labour. Through her research, Kattyayani examines the socio-economic and bureaucratic dynamics of informal work, investigating precarities within changing urban infrastructures.
Tara Brahme
Member
Tara is a third semester M.A. student at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Her research interests currently lie at the intersection of culture, politics and the arts and how these three come together in shaping progressive, anti establishment movements.
MIHIR DESAI
Member
Mihir Desai is a healthcare architect, cartographer and marine biologist based in Mumbai and Vienna. His professional work focuses on master-planning for medicine teaching institutions and emergency pandemic hospitals. He is also a co-author of publications which map prejudice in urban planning for the legal advocacy of coastal or forest communities in India and Paraguay. His recent academic work historicizes maps through a trend of epistemic conflicts and epistemic fallacies in the theory of cartography. He is a graduate from the TU Munich School of Engineering and Design, Vienna University of Technology, Technical University of Dresden and the ITC University of Twente.
paromita roy
Member
Paromita Roy is pursuing her masters in Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University. She is currently working on her thesis that aims to shed light on the backdoor negotiations and compromises that women make to have fun within a city. Interested in urban geography and mobility studies from a feminist lens, her work is situated around the politics of leisure and fun and how it manifests in the public sphere for women.
Shivam Kaushik
member
I am a researcher and a moving image artist. I finished my MA in Environment and Development from Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. My interests lies within the ambiguities of nature-society relations that shape our quotidian life. My master’s thesis delved into the novel space and place-making within Adivasi communities on the face of flooding disaster due to dam-induced submergence. Prior to my master’s I worked as a community media personnel at Samaj Pragati Sahayog a grassroots organization that works in the semi-arid Central Indian landscape dedicated towards the livelihood of the marginalized tribal communities within the region.
sakura
member
M.A. student of Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University, focusing on cultural anthropology. Currently working on my Master’s thesis.
My research interests lie in the spatial aspects of identity politics in ‘multicultural’ communities, especially focusing on the Japanese community in Germany. This topic sparks my curiosity, as it allows me to explore the agency of individuals not necessarily in positions of power in traditional social studies.
Diksha Jain
Member
I’m Diksha Jain, an architect and urban designer, passionate about improving cities. My experiences in various Indian cities have deepened my understanding of how urban environments profoundly impact our lives. During my undergraduate studies in Architecture, I explored cities through research, realizing their enduring influence. While working at Designers Forum, I identified a knowledge gap in addressing urban challenges effectively, motivating me to pursue a master’s degree in Urban Design at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. Here, I found my passion for research, documentation, and design, which I believe is underrepresented in urban design. I thrive in diverse, multidisciplinary environments, striving to expand my knowledge and create inclusive cities that leave no one behind.
Ira Borgstedt
Member
I am a Master student of Geography at the University of Heidelberg. My focus lies on political and urban Geography. I am interested in how planning and the built environment influence social and political processes and vice-versa. Aside from social inequalities in urban contexts, I am interested in placemaking strategies around the world. How can we use the information we have on urban inequalities to make our cities more livable? How do placemaking strategies create an environment worth living in? Interdisciplinarity and friends around the globe help widen my horizon and pursue my research interests.
Anita Markmiller
member
I am a researcher and a moving image artist. I finished my MA in Environment and Development from Ambedkar University, Delhi, India. My interests lies within the ambiguities of nature-society relations that shape our quotidian life. My master’s thesis delved into the novel space and place-making within Adivasi communities on the face of flooding disaster due to dam-induced submergence. Prior to my master’s I worked as a community media personnel at Samaj Pragati Sahayog a grassroots organization that works in the semi-arid Central Indian landscape dedicated towards the livelihood of the marginalized tribal communities within the region.
Amogh Dutt
member
Amogh Dutt is a copy-editor and publishing professional. He is a graduate in psychology and has spent the last 8 years helping researchers and academicians refine their writing and communicate their knowledge effectively. A lifelong reader, his interests span history, art, literature, ethology, architecture, and sociology, among others. Were he an urban studies researcher, one would likely find him involved in a project examining the links between urban spaces, sleep, and leisure.
Rishika Rai
Member
Rishika is a Doctoral Scholar in the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies) at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Rishika’s research focuses on the rise of Alt-Right in India and the effect that digital visual culture has in accelerating the reproduction of cultural and social capital of the Hindu Right or Hindutva in India. She is interested in examining how global Far-right formations shape both the visual language and ideological substance disseminated by the Hindu right in digital spaces.
Prior to joining HCTS, Rishika completed her master’s in development studies from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati and her bachelor’s in political science from University of Delhi.
Cem Çataklı
Member
Cem Çataklı was born in 2000 in Heidelberg as the son of Turkish parents and grandchild of guest workers. He works with film, text, poetry, photography, and music to explore questions of identity, memory, and belonging. After discovering poetry and music in his school years, he began writing in English while living in London. He now studies Philosophy and English in Heidelberg, focusing on phenomenology, migration ethics, and the emotional textures of experience. For him, creative and philosophical work are ways of making sense of the world — and of staying in touch with what moves us.
Muhammed Aras
Member
Muhammed Aras holds a master’s degree in Transcultural Studies and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology. His research explores the social and cultural politics of visual media, with a focus on photography, memory, and communication. He is particularly interested in how visual narratives shape collective and alternative memories. His master’s thesis examined the moral and political implications of photographic practices during the 2015–2016 conflicts in Turkey, exploring the role of non-hegemonic imagery in the formation of socio-cultural memory.