Events

What is “East Germany”? We want to talk about a region often perceived as gray, cold, and politically right-leaning. We aim to discuss how East German lifeworlds are constructed in media representations, political debates, and cultural and literary narratives, navigating between self-description and external attribution, between memory and the present.

In fall 2025, Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) will be 10 years old. An overview of the planned program is available on the WOC website.

Early Career Networking Workshop as part of the 10th anniversary of the WOC Contradictions Festival with members of the WOC Graduate Network (WOC GradNet), the DFG Research Training Group 2686 Contradiction Studies, the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), the Institute for Social Research (IfS) and the GRK 2638 Normativity, Critique, Change

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.

Prof. John Holloway is known for his influential writings on the renewal of Marxist theory, the relationship between the state and capitalism and forms of anti-capitalist struggle. These include the books Changing the World Without Taking Power (2002), which was well received internationally and has since been translated into eleven languages, and Breaking Capitalism (2010). Together with his latest book Hope in Hopeless Times (2022), these have now become a trilogy. With his latest book, John Holloway dedicates himself to formulating an understanding of hope against the seemingly unstoppable destruction of our world that we are hurtling towards. He sees this hope as rooted in our “wealth”; a wealth that cannot be reduced to money and profit, but should be understood as an “overflowing” creativity that can enable radical social change and is therefore a source of hope. “Wealth versus money: this battle will decide the future of humanity”. The lecture is jointly organized by the Institute of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Worlds of Contradiction (WoC), the DFG Research Training Group ContradictionStudies and the Department 09 and takes place as part of the lecture series “Challenge Climate Change – Cultural Studies Perspectives on Life in a Threatened World” and as part of the colloquium for political theory “Wilde Theorie”. The lecture will be held in German, with Q&A in German and English.

Guest lecture as part of the seminar “Sprache, Wissen, Macht in biomedizinischen Diskursen” (Prof. Dr. Constanze Spieß and Lesley-Ann Kern)

As part of the Transformationswerkstatt Nachhaltigkeit 2024 at the University of Kassel.

Debates about a democratic-socialist planned economy are currently being are being intensified again. The main focus is on the question of how social production should actually be organized after capitalism capitalism: What can a utopia outside of markets, wage labour and markets, wage labor and exploitative relationships? Many of the concepts discussed today refer to the debates that took place back in the 1920s debates on the future vision of a post-capitalist society. post-capitalist society. For January 11, we have invited Samia Mohammed, who in her lecture will explore the question of the extent to which to what extent previous ideas of democratic-socialist planning are fruitful for a progressive overcoming of capitalism and market-based exchange. can be. She traces which models exist for the organization of a organization of a socialist economy exist and what gaps they have. Particularly with regard to natural and gender relations in particular, it quickly becomes apparent that previous approaches to organizing often fail to include these in a sensible include them in a reasonable way. How can these gaps be filled?