Prof. Dr. Michi Knecht

Prof. Dr. Michi Knecht

As part of the team of spokespersons of the new Research Training Group, I would like to welcome you together with Ingo H. Warnke to our new homepage (still under development). I am Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology here at U Bremen, co-editor of the blog “DCNtR – Decolonizing Collections – Networking towards Relationality” (boasblogs.org/) and co-founder of the “Bremen NatureCultures Labs (BNCL)”: naturenkulturen.de). Together with Ingo H. Warnke I am also spokesperson of the interdisciplinary research platform “Worlds of Contradiction” (www.woc.uni-bremen.de/).

Methodologically and theoretically, my work is situated in the context of practice theories and of STS (Social Studies of Sciences and Technologies). I am a passionate ethnographer. The RTF could be a special place for joint research: a kind of incubator that constantly generates new ideas and formats (even contradictory ones!). A kind of bridge between the humanities, social sciences, and law, as well as into different public spheres. And an instance of critical translation and questioning of ways of thinking and concepts. In order to adequately reflect the possibilities, limits and futures of very different people and societies in an increasingly interconnected world, the knowledge histories of our disciplines need to be re-examined and further developed. For me, Contradiction Studies therefore form a starting point for the cosmopolitization and decolonization of the humanities, the social sciences and law.

My own research aims at the connections between knowledge practices and social and political forms. I have investigated such connections in the field of reproductive technologies and new kinship, in religious-political movements, in the context of poverty, and in relation to the transformation of regimes of anonymity. Currently, I am concerned with unrequited reciprocity and object-extractivism in the confrontation of Pacific gift societies with German colonialism.  I am looking forward to project proposals that ethnographically explore diverse constellations of contradiction, non-contradiction, and worlds full of contradictions in any of the problem zones of the contemporary. These can be, but do not have to be, projects in the fields of an anthropology of sciences and knowledge, projects on (postcolonial) naturecultres, on current museum debates, or projects that propose new methodologidal ways – ethnographically, collaboratively and experimentally.

Back to overview
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
problem to be solved

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

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
decolonial scholarship

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

Kerstin Knopf
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