Care, Equality and Diversity Board

Mission Statement

The Care, Equality, and Diversity Board (CEDB) of the DFG Research Training Group 2686 Contradiction Studies aims to support and promote the values generally shared in our RTG of Care, Equality and Diversity at all levels in the RTG. Universities, funding institutions and Research Training Groups work under specific historical conditions: They are intertwined with the history of colonial, enslaving, imperialist, patriarchal and heteronormative European policies and actions and their after-effects in the global present. In addition, also at universities unequal treatment and marginalization on the basis of power, gender, class, origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, educational level, age, ability and care work are perpetuated. The CEDB critically reflects these conditions of academic work.

The CED Board

  • ensures the concrete equal treatment of all members of the Research Training Group.
  • works on the basis of recognizing intersectional diversity.
  • supports care work including self-care of all people involved in the RTG.
  • on the basis of equal rights opposes discrimination of any kind and the abuse of power at universities.

Members: Eva Arnaszus & Fiona Makulik (Representative of the Fellows), Kerstin Knopf (Commissioner for Diversity & Care), Michi Knecht & Ingo H. Warnke (Commissioners for RTG Culture), Christian Bär (Scientific Coordinator, advisory member)

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
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
sustained engagement

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

Norman Sieroka
city

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

Julia Lossau
space

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

Julia Lossau