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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earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
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
hierarchy of norms

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

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel