Welcome to the DFG Research Training Group Contradiction Studies

The international and interdisciplinary Research Training Group (RTG) “Contradiction Studies” at the University of Bremen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG),  has been exploring the formation, negotiation, and explanatory limitations of contradiction. We start from the assumption that the ordering figure of contradiction which includes the imperative of resolving contradiction often stands in a relationship of tension to experiences of the contradictory in everyday life. read more

News

Publications

Events

  • Reading the Present with History. Reading the Past with Anthropology

    Andrea Rueda Herrera (Universidad Pablo de Olavide | Doctoral Visitor at RTG 2686)
    11/26/2024 2:15 pm 3:45 pm
    U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

    This talk focuses on an afro-diasporic community located in an Andalusian town (Southern Spain). It concerns a series of families whose identity is linked to the early modern slave trade, while Spanish mainstream society tends… read more

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  • Academic Freedom and Early Career Researchers. World Café

    WoC (Worlds of Contradiction)
    12/02/2024 2:00 pm 4:00 pm
    U Bremen GRA 2 0030

    Moderation: Hagen Steinhauer, Jessica Nuske, Jendrik Nuske, Kevin Kuhlmann, Sarabjeet Kaur, Jonas Trochemowitz What is the role of academic freedom in doctoral studies and scientific qualification? Is academic freedom under threat, and if so, what… read more

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  • Contradictions in Narrow Definitions of Gender-Based Violence Against Men During Armed Conflict

    Philile Langa (University of KwaZulu-Natal)
    12/03/2024 2:15 pm 3:45 pm
    U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

    Philile Langa’s presentation will focus on gender-based violence against men during armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960-present). Her research is about challenging and shifting the understanding of what gender-based violence during… read more

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The members of the RTG

The Research Training Group is run by twelve faculty members of the University of Bremen and is a place of interdisciplinary exchange of empirical cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, German and interdisciplinary linguistics, literary studies (Romance literary and cultural studies, North American and postcolonial literary and cultural studies, Medieval and Early Modern German literary studies), law, human geography, political science, history of Eastern Europe, philosophy, and religious studies.

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power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
decolonial scholarship

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

Kerstin Knopf
paradox

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

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
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