Events

What is “East Germany”? We want to talk about a region often perceived as gray, cold, and politically right-leaning. We aim to discuss how East German lifeworlds are constructed in media representations, political debates, and cultural and literary narratives, navigating between self-description and external attribution, between memory and the present.

In fall 2025, Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) will be 10 years old. An overview of the planned program is available on the WOC website.

Early Career Networking Workshop as part of the 10th anniversary of the WOC Contradictions Festival with members of the WOC Graduate Network (WOC GradNet), the DFG Research Training Group 2686 Contradiction Studies, the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), the Institute for Social Research (IfS) and the GRK 2638 Normativity, Critique, Change

Following Charis Thompson’s concept of ‘Ontological Choreography’ (2005) the workshop engages with the production of different subjectivities in the speaker‘s fields of study through shifting the foucauldian idea of the order of the discourse towards a focus on material-discursive practices. This means that not only discourse analytic insights are used to raise questions about political practices and agencies, but also the institutional, material, and social practices of human and non-human actors are understood as a framework to make the production of subjectivity intelligible. Understanding academia as a discipline that is driven by a desire to deconstruct, inform about, and engage with societal distortions and injustices, we want to open up a multidisciplinary dialogue where our methodological practices and analytic concepts are interrogated and also through asking how we open opportunities of engagement and involvement and deal with often contradictive subjectivities and desires.

The panel discussion will be held in German and English with simultaneous translation.
After the recent elections in Spain, a stalemate emerged in which neither the PP- nor PSOE-led coalition of choice could unite a majority behind them. The Catalan nationalists from the left and right suddenly emerged as the kingmakers in the talks to form a government, ultimately enabling the re-election of Pedro Sánchez as Prime Minister in return for a controversial amnesty for Catalan independence advocates.

Paraconsistency is the view that logical contradictions do not imply everything, and dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are actually true. Though both views are currently unorthodox, they have recently been at the centre of a number of debates in logic and metaphysics. In this talk Prof. Graham Priest will explain these views, their history, and some of the issues that surround them.

Professor Graham Priest will give a formal model of dialectical progression, as found in Hegel and Marx. The model is outlined in the first half of the paper, and deploys the tools of a formal paraconsistent logic. In the second half, He will discuss a number of examples of dialectical progressions to be found in Hegel and Marx, showing how they fit the model.

Religiosität ist in vielen Fällen von einer Erfahrung der Sprachlosigkeit und einer Begegnung mit dem Unsagbaren geprägt. Doch wie ist mit dem Widerspruch des Sprechens über das Unsagbare umzugehen und wie lassen sich Sprachlosigkeit und Unsagbarkeit forschungspraktisch untersuchen? In unserem primär religionslinguistisch jedoch interdisziplinär offenen Workshop möchten wir dieser Frage nachgehen und anhand verschiedener Methoden und Konzepte Zugänge zum Sprechen über das Unsagbare diskutieren.