Working Paper “Einrichtungsantrag Contradiction Studies – Konstellationen, Heuristiken und Konzepte des Widersprüchlichen, Lesefassung”

Monograph

Michi Knecht, Ingo H. Warnke, Gisela Febel, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Kerstin Knopf, Elisabeth Lienert, Julia Lossau, Anna Mattfeldt, Martin Nonhoff, Susanne Schattenberg, Norman Sieroka, Yan Suarsana

2023

The Research Training Group 2686 Contradiction Studies researches the formation, negotiation and explanatory limits of contradiction.
The point of departure is the assumption that the ordering figure of contradiction with the imperative to resolve contradictions is often in tension with everyday experiences of contradictions in living together. Constellations of contradiction, contradiction avoidance, contradictions and practices of contradiction are therefore systematically researched and established as objects of investigation in the humanities, social sciences and law. The research group combines discourse-, narrative- and text-centred approaches with ethnographic and other qualitative-empirical methods. On the basis of case studies and genealogically or analytically orientated projects, the Centre carries out conceptual and theoretical work. This aims to re-evaluate contradiction, contradictions and contestation in their empirical constellations, heuristic functions and ontological dimensions – also in response to post- and decolonial discussions on the cosmopolitanisation of knowledge production.

The online publication can be found here: https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/handle/elib/8014

DFG-GRK 2686. 2023. Einrichtungsantrag
Contradiction Studies – Konstellationen,
Heuristiken und Konzepte des Wider-
sprüchlichen, Lesefassung. Graduierten-
kolleg Contradiction Studies (GRK2686)
Working Paper Series #1_de. Bremen: U
Bremen

print
ISBN: 2942-7762

ebook
ISBN: 2942-7770

Back to overview
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
paradox

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

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
space

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

Julia Lossau
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