About the RTG

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.

How do people live with and against it? In which social fields and with which effects are bound to the imperative of their resolution? To what extent is it important to develop ways of describing the negotiation of diversity and incompatibilities that do justice to the  in scenarios of living together? How can contradiction be critically questioned and decentered as part of the foundations of Western/Northern knowledge production?

These are some of the questions that concern the 22 fellows and 12 participating scholars from various humanities, social sciences, and law.

The position of our RTG and its fellows is contradictory as well. European universities are themselves a privileged part of the established orders of Western-Northern modernity. The RTG is situated at the intersection of multiple overlapping societal contradictions and conflicts. These range from contradictions of capitalism and political contradictions to the co-existence of anti-discriminatory diversity programs and simultaneously continuing mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination along “race,” class, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of difference and their intersectional effects. The RTG »Contradiction Studies« encourages its fellows and faculty to reflect on such contradictions together and to take them as a starting point for developing other forms of un-learning and learning, of collaboration and recognition of diversity. “Doing Difference in Good Faith Together” (Helen Verran) may serve as an orientation.

Constellations of contradiction, the avoidance of contradiction, and practices of contradicting are systematically studied and established as objects of research in the humanities, social sciences, and law.

The RTG carries out conceptual and theoretical work on the basis of case studies and projects that are genealogically or analytically oriented. This aims at re-evaluating contradiction, contradictions, and the contradictory in empirical constellations, heuristic functions, and ontological dimensions—not least in response to demands for a cosmopolitanization and pluralization of knowledge production informed by struggles against the dominance of Western/Northern epistemologies.

On this page you will find information about our fellows, the scientists involved, our research program as well as about our publications, events and other news.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Contact
hierarchy of norms

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

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel
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
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka