Dr. Anna Mattfeldt

My name is Anna Mattfeldt. I took up my current position as Lecturer (focus area German Linguistics, with German as a Second Language as a supplementary area) at the University of Bremen in 2020. Linguistic forms and their functions in context are at the center of my research interests. My research is situated mainly within the field of linguistic discourse analysis – here I am especially interested in comparative linguistic studies – and internet linguistics.

Contradiction plays a particularly important role in my research on discourse linguistics. Turning to the paradigm of agonality, I am interested in how contradictions are constituted with linguistic means on textual and conversational surfaces, which actors manage to establish dominant positions in discourses, and how dissent and consensus are shaped linguistically. I also take into consideration multimodal means that contribute to the constitution of contradictions here. In the field of internet linguistics, these questions are also relevant, both with regard to controversial positioning and in relation to so-called filter bubbles and how they deal with contradictions. These questions require an interdisciplinary perspective; at the same time, my own discipline, with its diverse descriptions of the linguistic facets of contradiction, can contribute significantly to an exploration of contradictions.

In the Research Training Group, I am particularly looking forward to linguistic doctoral projects with an empirical focus that are grounded in the fields of discourse linguistics, socio- and variationist linguistics, multimodality research, and/or internet linguistics. I am equally interested in qualitative and quantitative approaches.

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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
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
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