Online encounter: University of Siegen meets UNAM

The kick-off of our COIL on Wednesday, 29.04.2026 is based on the preliminary work with the students in Mexico. As anthropologists and future mediators of Mexico's cultural heritage, we initially have different questions and goals than our future teachers and experts in the fields of literature, culture and media. The aim of the COIL is to bring both interests and subject areas together in a profitable way using a current example (the World Cup).

The common goal will be to reclaim the World Cup as an intercultural space and to remove it from the media sovereignty of interpretation of the institutionalized actors (FIFA/press).

The students from Mexico will have the opportunity to think more extensively about the concept of cultural heritage - outside the classic spaces of museums, pyramids and excavation sites - and to align it with a specific international target group. The specially created World Cup songs serve as the basis for this, which are to be tested as mediating formats in exchange with the German students.

The students from Siegen, on the other hand, will have the opportunity to build directly on the "cultural memories" of the Mexican students in order to develop possible "authentic" and updated formats for cultural mediation in international co-production. The exchange with the Mexican students is intended to fill the media void created by reporting and media representations of Mexico. This gap is to be filled productively by presenting the representations of Mexico and discussing them with the students from UNAM.