Standard Time: The ways we love

While some local variations of Valentine’s Day celebrations persist, globalized cultural exports have impacted most of how it is viewed nowadays. There’s no doubt that consumer capitalism is at the forefront of this, but with digitalization, dating has begun to take a different shape, and young people are opening up to ideas of fluidity, non-restrictive commitments, and open communication. Guests: Faris Cuchi Gezahegn is an intersectional LGBTQIA* activist, performance artist, and Ethiopian Queer knowledge and culture producer. They are the co-founder of House of Guramayle and the vice-chair of Afro Rainbow Austria; the first organisation established by and for African LGBTQI+ communities in Austria. Carin Franzen has been a professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University since 2020. In her research, she investigates the history of subjectivity in premodern as well as modern and contemporary European literature and deals with formations of subjectivity. She has published on mediaeval and early modern female writers’ appropriations of subject positions in the tradition of courtly love. Leah Jule Ritterfeld is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Vienna, doing her research on “Love-less Lives, Isolated Minds: The Epistemic Fallout of Incels.” She works on radicalization, resentment and love from an epistemic perspective.