Workshops

Junior Fellow Workshop des KFG.

Workshop basierend auf Prof. Gutiérrez Rodriguez jüngster Veröffentlichung Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons.

Dieser interdisziplinäre Workshop befasst sich mit dem Aufstieg neoliberaler, illiberaler Politiken und deren Verbindung zu Anti-Intellektualismus und Diskursen über akademische Freiheit. Auf der Grundlage des Gastvortrags werden wir eine Reihe von Fällen diskutieren, die von der US-amerikanischen moralischen Panik um die „Kritische Rassentheorie“ über Bolsonaros vorsätzliche Angriffe auf die Universitätsfinanzierung, Diskurse um „Islamo-Links“ und „Wokismus“ in Frankreich bis hin zum Verbot der Gender Studies in Ungarn reichen. Was sagen uns diese Fälle und die zunehmende Feindseligkeit gegenüber Forschern über den globalen Zustand der Demokratie? Wie und warum werden Akademiker und ihre Art der Wissensproduktion nicht nur von rechtsextremen Akteuren, sondern zunehmend auch vom Staat angegriffen?

Souleymane Bachir Diagne im Gespräch mit Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen im Rahmen des Kolloquiums des Graduiertenkollegs 2686 Contradiction Studies.

The workshop is open to BA, MA, and PhD Candidates. We have currently reserved 5 places for members of the Training Group. Please, register with me in advance, if you are interested.

We (Laura Ziegler & Dean E. Stephanus) invite you to think with us as we invoke the legacy of the bench singers “Bänkelsang”  that were active in the region that would become Germany from at least the 17th century until the practice was banned by the Nazi’s. Acting as proto journalists, researchers and performers, the bench singers gathered news stories and histories that alerted people to what was going on, information that would have been otherwise concealed, censored and often inaccessible by the subordinate masses (class, race, gender) due to illiteracy.

We use the motif of the bench singers to revisit an old question in the humanities and political organising, how to methodologically find ways to make accessible, communicate, and share information with the mass public(s). And importantly we wrestle with the contradiction of that aim. We refer to this as our rat poison, a reference to times when bench singers of old sold rodenticide to make money for their itinerant performances. We would like to engage the ways in which real-life maintenance of the body contradicts the aims set out to liberate the body.

The talk will include links to current questions we debate as cultural workers and humans. Through the use of zine making we tease out certain topics, one example of a zine that will be presented in the talk is through the medium of biography we discuss the life of Mabel Grammer, a black journalist who played an important and little-known role in the „Brown Baby Plan“ of post-war Germany. This was a private adoption agency that arranged the adoption of over 500 Afro-German children to African-American couples, particularly in the 1950s. And then link it to a so-called ‘brown baby’ who lived a life in Germany deeply affected by race, Robert Pilatus. Pilatus was a member of the once popular Afro/Pop duo known as Milli Vanilli.

Our approach is usually dialogical. We speak in a down-to-earth manner and encourage all participants to feel free, to question or challenge us, to add or think with us throughout the talk.

Following Charis Thompson’s concept of ‘Ontological Choreography’ (2005) the workshop engages with the production of different subjectivities in the speaker‘s fields of study through shifting the foucauldian idea of the order of the discourse towards a focus on material-discursive practices. This means that not only discourse analytic insights are used to raise questions about political practices and agencies, but also the institutional, material, and social practices of human and non-human actors are understood as a framework to make the production of subjectivity intelligible. Understanding academia as a discipline that is driven by a desire to deconstruct, inform about, and engage with societal distortions and injustices, we want to open up a multidisciplinary dialogue where our methodological practices and analytic concepts are interrogated and also through asking how we open opportunities of engagement and involvement and deal with often contradictive subjectivities and desires.