Mobilizing Contradiction: Methods as Tools. For Example: Ethnography/ Praxeography/ Walking

Michi Knecht (RTG Contradiction Studies) & Ingo H. Warnke (RTG Contradiction Studies)

07/07/2022 4:15 pm 5:30 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030

Readings:

Verran, Helen. 2021. Writing an Ethnographic Story in Working towards Responsibly Unearthing Ontological Trouble. In Ballestro, Andrea & Brit Ross Wirthereik (eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography. A Companion To Analysis, 235–245. Durkham: Duke University Press. https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/110829/9781478091691_Ballestero_Experimenting_with_Ethnography.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (17.05.2022).

Vogel, Else. 2021. Juxtaposition. Differences that Matter. In Ballestro, Andrea & Brit Ross Wirthereik(eds.), Experimenting with Ethnography. A Companion To Analysis, 54–65. Durkham: Duke University Press. https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/110829/9781478091691_Ballestero_Experimenting_with_Ethnography.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (17.05.2022).

Supplementary Readings:

Knecht, Michi. 2013. Nach Writing-Culture, mit Actor-Network: Ethnografie und Praxeografie in der Wissenschafts-, Medizin-und Technikanthropologie. In Sabine Hess, Maria Schwertl&Johannes Moser (eds.). Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte, 79–106. Berlin: Reimer.

Warnke, Ingo H. 2016. Tahrir is not a square. Wie meta- urbane Protestkommunikate städtische Territorien des Widerspruchs strukturieren. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 38(1–2), 65–86.

Back to overview
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel