Workshops
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Workshop #1 – Data as/in Contradictions: Research, Practices, Politics (Postdoc Intro)
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.
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Workshop #2 – Solidarity by Choice and Not by Co-optation: Getting to Know Each Other Using Different Data Stories
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Workshop #3 – Data as/in Contradictions: Research, Practices, Politics
Past Events
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Academic Freedom and Early Career Researchers. World Café
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Taking Stock of the Holocaust – Human Rights Nexus: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Junior Fellow Workshop of the Kolleg Forschungsgruppe Universalism and Particularism in European History
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Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons
Workshop based on Professor Gutiérrez Rodriguez latest publication Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons.
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Anti-Intellectualism, Attacks on Academic Freedom and Illiberal Neoliberalism
This interdisciplinary workshop will address the rise of neoliberal illiberal politics and their connection to anti-intellectualism and discourses around academic freedom. Based on the guest lecture, we will discuss a variety of cases, ranging from the US-American moral panic around ‘Critical Race Theory’, Bolsonaro’s intentional attacks on University funding, discourses around ‘islamo-leftism’ and ‘wokism’ in France to the ban of Gender Studies in Hungary. What do those cases and the growing hostility against researchers tell us about the global state of democracy? How and why are academics and their modes of knowledge production targeted not only by far-right actors but increasingly also by the state?
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Workshop Science-Slam
On January 8 and 9, a workshop on the topic of science slams will take place with the participation of the WoC GradNet, the GRK Contradiction Studies and MAPEX. Participants will learn how to present their own research topic on stage in an exciting talk and make it accessible to a lay audience in an understandable way. The workshop will be led by Dr. Julia Offe and Andreas Laurenz Meier from scienceslam.de.
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Workshop with John Holloway
The workshop is open to BA, MA, and PhD Candidates. We have currently reserved 5 places for members of the Training Group. Please, register with me in advance, if you are interested.
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Bänkelsang to a binaural beat – The issue, the method of delivery, agnotology and the contradiction of selling ‘rodenticide’
We (Laura Ziegler & Dean E. Stephanus) invite you to think with us as we invoke the legacy of the bench singers “Bänkelsang” that were active in the region that would become Germany from at least the 17th century until the practice was banned by the Nazi’s. Acting as proto journalists, researchers and performers, the bench singers gathered news stories and histories that alerted people to what was going on, information that would have been otherwise concealed, censored and often inaccessible by the subordinate masses (class, race, gender) due to illiteracy.
We use the motif of the bench singers to revisit an old question in the humanities and political organising, how to methodologically find ways to make accessible, communicate, and share information with the mass public(s). And importantly we wrestle with the contradiction of that aim. We refer to this as our rat poison, a reference to times when bench singers of old sold rodenticide to make money for their itinerant performances. We would like to engage the ways in which real-life maintenance of the body contradicts the aims set out to liberate the body.
The talk will include links to current questions we debate as cultural workers and humans. Through the use of zine making we tease out certain topics, one example of a zine that will be presented in the talk is through the medium of biography we discuss the life of Mabel Grammer, a black journalist who played an important and little-known role in the “Brown Baby Plan” of post-war Germany. This was a private adoption agency that arranged the adoption of over 500 Afro-German children to African-American couples, particularly in the 1950s. And then link it to a so-called ‘brown baby’ who lived a life in Germany deeply affected by race, Robert Pilatus. Pilatus was a member of the once popular Afro/Pop duo known as Milli Vanilli.
Our approach is usually dialogical. We speak in a down-to-earth manner and encourage all participants to feel free, to question or challenge us, to add or think with us throughout the talk.
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Widerspruchsresponsives Recht. Nachhaltige (Rechts-)Transformationen
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Agencies, Contradictions, and Subjectivities – Towards a Material-Discursive Framing of Engaged Practices
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.
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The Logical Structure of Dialectics
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.