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Workshop #1 – Data as/in Contradictions: Research, Practices, Politics (Postdoc Intro)

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Deborah Nyangulu, Nurhak Polat & Katrin Antweiler (RTG Contradiction Studies)

06/24/2025 4:30 pm –5:30 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030

Drawing on the research projects of the postdoctoral Fellows of the RTG 2686, this three-part workshop invites our doctoral researchers to collectively reflect on the intersections between data and contradictions. We will explore how data is both shaped by political, social, and epistemic contradictions and, in turn, actively shapes these contradictions. To what extent does data become a contradictory tool, a contested site of knowledge, or a catalyst for compromise, ambiguity, and inconsistency? In the first session, the Postdoctoral Fellows will outline their research focus, providing a starting point for critical engagement. Across the following sessions, we will critically engage with data and data politics as both a tool and an object of research within the framework of Contradiction Studies through interactive formats.

Back to overview
earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau
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
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
l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke
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