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

  • Reconciliation in the Liminal Space between the Secular and the Divine

    Article / Paper

    Bär, Christian, Lara Herford & Jonas Trochemowitz

    2026

    In this paper, we analyze the term reconciliation as well as Versöhnung in political and religious communication. Against this background, we are interested in how far political as well as religious dimensions of the terms come together, which we describe as a process of conceptual […]

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  • Cancel Culture als Positionierungsvehikel im semantischen Kampf um Wissenschaftsfreiheit

    Article / Paper, Book Series »Contradiction Studies«

    Lara Herford

    2026

    When debating academic freedom in Germany, the term cancel culture, originating from North-American contexts, is commonly used to express concerns about a threat to academic freedom as posed by a narrowing of boundaries of discourse. In the semantic battels regarding Wissenschaftsfreiheit (academic freedom), this perspective […]

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  • Einleitung

    Article / Paper, Book Series »Contradiction Studies«

    WOC GradNet

    2026

    Wissenschaftsfreiheit betrifft uns alle. Sowohl Personen außerhalb der Wissenschaft, insofern sie vom gesellschaftlichen Einfluss wissenschaftlichen Handelns betroffen sind, als auch diejenigen, die selbst wissenschaftlich tätig sind. Dieses Betroffen-Sein tritt im wissenschaftlichen Alltag häufig in den Hintergrund; Wissenschaftsfreiheit ist schließlich nicht das Ziel oder Ergebnis wissenschaftlicher […]

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Events

  • Workshop on Jacques Derrida by RTG 2686 Mercator Fellow

    Internal

    Prof. Dr. Rozena Maart (U of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban/ZAF)

    6/25/2026
    2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

    U Bremen GRA 2

    Workshop on Jacques Derrida This workshop offers an overall account of the work of Algerian born Jacques Derrida, educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, between 1949 and 1956. His work has been read within a broad range of […]

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  • Workspace #12 — Project Presentations

    Internal

    Jean Marie Bakaïwé Ngabra & Miguel Ángel Prieto-Castellanos (GRK 2686 – Contradiction Studies)

    7/2/2026
    2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

    U Bremen GRA 2 – 0030 & online

    Jean Marie Bakaïwé Ngabra — Der Einsatz von KI-Tools zur Förderung der Schreib- und Sprechkompe-tenz im DaF-unterricht: eine Untersuchung der Motivation von DaF-Lernenden am Beispiel Kamerun Miguel Ángel Prieto-Castellanos — Becoming Aware of Ignorance and Contradiction

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  • The Environmental Impact of Literature

    Talk

    Prof. Dr. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Rice University/USA)

    7/8/2026
    4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

    U Bremen GRA 2 – 0030

    Is contemporary literature—and storytelling in general—helping to address the accelerating climate and nature crisis, or adding fuel to the fire? Tens of thousands of articles in literary and cultural criticism have approached this question primarily through close readings of environmentally focused novels and films, but […]

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The members of the RTG

The Research Training Group is run by thirteen 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.