Contradiction Studies

Spaces Old and New

Prof. Dr. Julia Lossau (RTG Contradiction Studies)

11/15/2022 2:30 pm 4:00 pm

U Bremen GRA2 0030

Readings

Lossau, Julia. 2020. Anthropogeography. In Kobayashi, Audrey (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography 1, 147-154. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Massey, Doreen. 1999. Spaces of Politics. In Massey, Doreen, John Allen & Philip Sarre (eds.): 

Human Geography Today, 279-294.Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press.

Back to overview
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
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
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