Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic problems in the global health system. It revealed that the global health system perpetuates global health inequalities rather than effectively reducing them: The international community, particularly the countries of the Global North, failed to make COVID-19 vaccines widely available to the populations of the world’s poorest countries. This blog debate takes stock of the reform debate about a just and decolonizing transformation of the health system. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, the contributions of this debate ask what a fair global health system could look like and what role the law plays in it.

In recent decades, the history of social movements has been characterized by discursive struggles for the attention to (intentionally) overlooked social positions of subjects and their actual or imagined membership in groups marginalized by and in mainstream discourses. Warnke, Ingo H., Bonacchi, Silvia & Seiler […]

In this article, the proposal is made to analyse practices of contradiction with regard to their aesthetic potential. On the one hand, this is intended to demonstrate the diverse possibilities of contradiction studies and, on the other, to emphasise the role of aesthetic texts in protest discourses. Texts from the feminist abortion discourse will be used as examples.

In Austermann, Nele, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Heike Kleffner, Kati Lang, Maximilian Pichl, Ronen Steinke & Tore Vetter (eds.). 2024. Recht gegen rechts: Report 2024. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. printISBN: 978-3-10-397556-7 ebookISBN: 978-3-10-491854-9

Contribution to the Journal Femina Politica – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft In this article, I address the precarious relationship between democracy and care and develop a radical democratic understanding of care – Radical Democratic Care. I proceed in four steps: First, I introduce the concept […]

This contribution deals with the contradictions of nature and agricultural economy in the contemporary moment of crisis in the Anthropocene. It is based on an analysis of the fantastic French film La nuée (The Swarm) by Just Philippot who reflects by this film also on the turning points from the preception of reality to obsession and from the uninjured body to the damaged body, or even from live to death resepctiveley from live instinct to death drive.

This article aims to critically examine anti-genderist representations of queer Christian church services by analyzing social media data and discourse ethnographic field research. In this regard, the concept of ‘anti-genderism’ is first discussed with reference to current research literature and related to church policy contexts.

European demand for raw materials is growing as part of the energy transition. Many of the raw materials required for the energy transition are located on the territories of indigenous peoples, which often leads to conflicts. Against this backdrop, it is surprising that the planned agreement between the EU and the Mercosur states does not contain any provisions regarding the participation and protection of indigenous peoples. A reference to such provisions, in particular from ILO Convention 169, would be required under international law and would help to make the conflicts and contradictions of the concept of sustainability negotiable.

In Hanna Acke, Silvia Bonacchi, Carsten Junker, Charlotta Seiler Brylla & Ingo H. Warnke (eds.), Religious and national discourses. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Volume 33 in the Series Diskursmuster/ Discourse Patterns eBook ISBN: 9783111039633 PrintISBN: 9783111027739

The living body and the capitalist thinking of the modern economy seem to be irreconcilable objects. Nevertheless, their history and perception have been inextricably linked, at least since the times of industrialization and capitalization in the 19th century. Our volume follows this entangled history and the various contradictions it develops.
Since Pierre Bourdieu, we known that the body forms an incorporated cultural and social capital. It is a commodity and means of production, a sign of belonging to a social class, a place where sex, gender and power relations are negotiated or a pretext for social exclusions and racism. The body is the object of punishments, sanctions and social control, a support for affects, obsessions and illnesses as well as a site of rebellion and resistance. The 19th century novels analyzed in the contributions to this volume tell all this. From the perspective of current body studies, we propose a new reading of the great stories from Balzac to Zola, via Mirbeau, Maupassant, Louise Michel, Georges Sand, Rachilde, Eugène Sue and Huysmans to demonstrate, through their texts, how the images of the body and the policies of capital are entangled and, thus, form a central part of the imagination and the memory of 19th century French (and Northern/Western) society.
Contributions in French and German.

Arbeit und Wirtschaft in Bremen (43).

In Chojnicka, Joanna & Hornidge, Anna-Katharina & Knopf, Kerstin & Chatterjee, Sukla (eds.) Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, 219-236. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: 10.17885/heiup.1046.c17310

In Nele Austermann, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Heike Kleffner, Kati Lang, Maximilian Pichl, Ronen Steinke, & Tore Vetter (Hrsg.), Recht gegen rechts, 307–314. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.

In Chojnicka, Joanna & Hornidge, Anna-Katharina & Knopf, Kerstin & Chatterjee, Sukla (eds.) Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, 1-19. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: 10.17885/heiup.1046.c17297

In Auteri, Laura, Natascia Barrale, Arianna di Bella & Sabine Hoffmann (eds.) Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik. Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive. Akten des XIV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) 6: 511-515. Bern:  Peter Lang Verlag.

This book contributes to the study of oceans, seas, coastal waters, and rivers within blue humanities by broadening, circulating, and interweaving knowledge about such waters, ocean epistemologies, and sea narratives from pluriversal epistemological, geographical, cultural, and disciplinary perspectives. The contributors from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, North America and the Pacific explore the interconnections between oceans, coastal areas, rivers, humans, animals, plants, organisms, and landscapes in the fields of cultural history and cultural studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, marine and environmental studies, linguistics, literature, film and media studies.

In Meier, Christel, Carolin Führer, Marco Magirius & Silke Kubik (eds.) Evaluative ästhetische Rezeption als Grundlage literarischen Verstehens und Lernens: Theorie und Empirie (KREAplus Band 28) 243–256. Muenchen: kopaed. ISBN: 978-3-96848-095-4

This paper is about poetry as a vehicle for imparting knowledge in natural philosophy. It discusses the epistemological and cultural background against which early Greek thinkers such as Parmenides and Empedocles composed in verse, and it explores the rationale why poetry was thought to be a preferred means for transmitting important and often non-discursive knowledge about nature—in other words, how poetry was meant to make “a philosophical theme audible,” to prompt an insight that organizes a large field of experience. Much later, related assumptions find a (last) heyday in Goethe’s attempt to write a Naturgedicht in the vein of Lucretius. Even though new insights especially from classical German philosophy influenced Goethe, his reasons for writing nature poetry show striking continuities with those of his ancient peers. The paper ends with a brief look at later attempts to “make philosophical themes audible” in the context of an ever-increasing fragmentation of knowledge.

Bringing together memory studies with the emerging field of contradiction studies, in this article, I suggest the need for an alternative way of thinking about collective memory by juxtaposing the ideal of wholeness that necessarily underlies any group’s identity with that of the inevitable contradiction of the plurivers. I discuss the power of the Western narrative order in regard to the Haitian Revolution and examples of mnemonic disharmony in contemporary Germany and seek to illuminate the epistemic violence constitutive of this narrative order. The article therefore interrogates memory study’s epistemological foundation and the practices in which these underpinnings result. The aim is to highlight the potential of contradiction in an attempt to pluriversify responses to the past as well as future visions for the worlds we live in. Special attention is paid to the question of what it is we hope for when attempting to (scholarly) contribute to making collective memory more inclusive, and where the limitations of this might lie. The purpose of my contribution, then, is to explore the tacit imperative of harmony that often remains unchallenged in memory studies, and to propose a shift in focus, from the ways in which memory might help us understand (e.g., current clashes of identities), toward a research agenda that is considerate of its own entanglements with power, yet, at the same time, lives up to its potential to contribute to transformation.

This book provides an analysis of the forms and functions of Holocaust memorialisation in human rights museums by asking about the impact of global memory politics on how we imagine the present and the future. It compares three human rights museums and their respective emplotment of the Holocaust and seeks to illuminate how, in this specific setting, memory politics simultaneously function as future politics because they delineate a normative ideal of the citizen-subject, its set of values and aspirations for the future: that of the historically aware human rights advocate.