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)

diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
earthing

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

Julia Lossau
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

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