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Agencies, Contradictions, and Subjectivities – Towards a Material-Discursive Framing of Engaged Practices

Brent Abrahams, Dean Stephanus & Vuyisanani Am (University of Western Cape) & Helen Stephan (GRK Contradiction Studies)

12/07/2023 4:00 pm –6:30 pm

GRA 2 0030 & online

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.

Brent Abrahams, Dean Stephanus, Vuyisanani Am from the University of Western Cape and Helen Stephan from University of Bremen will especially give insights in their current research projects while engaging with the problematizations above.

The workshop will be held in english and in a hybrid format so you can also join online. If there questions please contact Helen Stephan.

Back to overview
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
decolonial scholarship

“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”

Kerstin Knopf
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
driver

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

Norman Sieroka
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