Welcome to the DFG Research Training Group Contradiction Studies
The international and interdisciplinary Research Training Group (RTG) “Contradiction Studies” at the University of Bremen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), has been exploring the formation, negotiation, and explanatory limitations of contradiction. We start from the assumption that the ordering figure of contradiction which includes the imperative of resolving contradiction often stands in a relationship of tension to experiences of the contradictory in everyday life. read more
News
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Approval of the second funding phase of the Research Training Group »Contradiction Studies«
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has extended funding for the Research Training Group 2686 »Contradiction Studies« for a further four and a half years. We are delighted by this decision, which enables us to continue the successful work of the Research Training Group and to further […]
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Lecture by Franziska Moosmann at the Katholische Akademie des Bistums Hildesheim
Our RTG 2686 fellow Franziska Moosmann will present her research as part of her doctoral project on May 5, 2026, in the lecture series Katholische Akademie des Bistums Hildesheim. Her lecture is titled “Missionary Collections from Colonial Contexts: Historical and Decolonial Approaches.” Further information and […]
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Contradictions Festival – 10 years WOC
On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, the interdisciplinary collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) is organizing the WOC Contradictions Festival from November 10–14, 2025, in cooperation with the Bremen DFG Research Training Group 2686 Contradiction Studies, the Berlin DFG Research Training Group 2638 Normativity, Critique, Change, the Bremen International Graduate School of Social…
Publications
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In this paper, we analyze the term reconciliation as well as Versöhnung in political and religious communication. Against this background, we are interested in how far political as well as religious dimensions of the terms come together, which we describe as a process of conceptual […]
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When debating academic freedom in Germany, the term cancel culture, originating from North-American contexts, is commonly used to express concerns about a threat to academic freedom as posed by a narrowing of boundaries of discourse. In the semantic battels regarding Wissenschaftsfreiheit (academic freedom), this perspective […]
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Wissenschaftsfreiheit betrifft uns alle. Sowohl Personen außerhalb der Wissenschaft, insofern sie vom gesellschaftlichen Einfluss wissenschaftlichen Handelns betroffen sind, als auch diejenigen, die selbst wissenschaftlich tätig sind. Dieses Betroffen-Sein tritt im wissenschaftlichen Alltag häufig in den Hintergrund; Wissenschaftsfreiheit ist schließlich nicht das Ziel oder Ergebnis wissenschaftlicher […]
Events
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Thomas Itsuo Fujishima —Imaginaries of More-than-human Resistance: Life, Farming, and Posthuman Politics in Japan Yash Gupta — Of मिर्ची in Our Blood: Intergenerational Dis/abilities and Toxic Contra-dictions of Postcolonial Care in the Survivor Narratives of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy
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Ethnographic researchers can find themselves confronted with a deceptively simple question: What am I doing here? In the field, researchers regularly encounter moments of uncertainty, ethical tension, and contradiction, particularly when working from feminist and intersectional perspectives that foreground questions of power, positionality, and responsibility. […]
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The members of the RTG
The Research Training Group is run by thirteen faculty members of the University of Bremen and is a place of interdisciplinary exchange of empirical cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, German and interdisciplinary linguistics, literary studies (Romance literary and cultural studies, North American and postcolonial literary and cultural studies, Medieval and Early Modern German literary studies), law, human geography, political science, history of Eastern Europe, philosophy, and religious studies.
