Prof. Dr. Julia Lossau

What is the relationship between society, power and space? It is the application of a seemingly simple question to concrete realities and life worlds at different geographical scales that stands at the heart of my research. As human geographer who is intrigued by epistemologies of difference, I am interested in all sorts of spatialities – in spaces and places, in scales, but also in different forms of materiality and substance as well as in (flat) ontologies of materiality and sociality. As my professorship focusses on urban geography, I see myself as counterpart in questions of urban theory and practise in a broad sense. The city is relevant in the context of our Research Training Group in that it is a laboratory not only of modernity, as often said, but also of contradiction. It is hence the urban context in particular that allows for strategies of working beyond identifying and homogenising categories, opening up ‘spaces of dissension’ as arenas to think in and beyond contradiction.

Being the geographer in our multidisciplinary team, I stand for a certain ‘worlding’, if not ‘earthing’, of contradiction, in both theoretical and practical respect. Theoretically, such a worlding implies ways of taking seriously materialities and empirical life worlds; practically, I am interested in bringing Contradiction Studies out of the ivory tower and into public spheres. At present, everyday life is characterised by a multiplication of diverging perspectives as well as by alarming social, ecological and (bio-)political crises. Against such a background, I hope for dissertation projects in the fields of critical urban studies, postcolonial memory studies and/or social transformation studies. Methodologically speaking, anything from textual analysis to ethnographical research is welcome as long as it has a creative, collaborative or contradicting edge to it.

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decolonial scholarship

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

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
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
coherence in thought

“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”

Yan Suarsana
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke