Öffentliche Vorträge im Rahmen der Summer School "Globalization and Diversity"

During the Summer School "Globalization and Diversity", six public lectures will be offered. All events take place at Tagungszentrum an der Sternwarte. No registration is necessary.

2.8., 14:00 - 15:30: Astrid Biele Mefebue (Göttingen Diversity Research Institute): Rationales and Activities Aimed at Coping With Multiculturality – The Example of German Public Libraries

German public libraries are one of the most important cultural and educational institutions in Germany. As such they could play an important role in the promotion of social inclusion in an increasingly culturally diversified society. Taking the example of libraries and adopting a neoinstitutional point of view, the lecture discusses rationales and activities aimed at coping with multiculturality. A representative online survey on diversity management in German public libraries, conducted in 2013-2014, provides first insights into recent developments and problems. The current low level of implementation of diversity practices is interpreted as an expression of ongoing negotiation processes concerning ideas on integration, library work and public management.

3.8., 15:00 - 16:30: Shinji Kajitani (University of Tokyo): The Ethos and Nomos of Inclusion: A Philosophical Reflection on Why and How We Live with Diversity

Today we talk about diversity in many ways, in terms of gender, race, class, religion, language, age, education, occupation, etc., and in this way we criticize the related “exclusion” as forms of discrimination. We thereby call for equality, mutual understanding, and openness to difference. However, exclusion is in fact quite common, and can be found everywhere in society, not only in the explicit form of ideology, law, institutions, and so forth, but also in the implicit form of “things” like architecture, tools or products, and even in our use of time and space. It seems that practices of exclusion are almost a principle of the formation of daily life, and any kind of diversity is itself based on exclusion. Here, we consider “inclusion” as our key concept. In this lecture, I propose to discuss what living with diversity means, why it is important, how it becomes possible, which kinds of exclusion can be understood as problems, and how inclusion is possible for living in a diverse society. More specifically, I propose to explore these questions through a reading of two texts, from the viewpoint of urban life (Jacobs) and of product design (Coleman, al.).

7.8., 15:00 - 16:30: Laura Fantone (UC Berkeley): Undocuqueer: Belonging and betrayals among young queer immigrants in the US

In this talk we will address the concept of “coming out” as a central strategy to the LGBT activists since the 1970s and for the twenty-first century immigrant rights organizing in the United States. In discursive and social usage of “coming out” for undocumented (queer) migrants, we argue that normative forms of recognition are negotiated: acceptance, victimhood, vulnerability, and the human vs the citizen.
Through transnational feminist methodologies, we will also analyse an example of poster art and visual materials related to the undocumented queer “coming out”, showing how coming out has also been a strategy of resistance, bound to a rhetoric of “national coming out of the shadows day,” and “coming out as undocu-queer.” In the conclusion, we will examine the shift from the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, the Dream Act, and California state dream act/AB540 to the Trump administration's immigration executive order aimed at deporting more immigrants.

9.8., 15:00 - 16:30: Yvonne Franke (Göttingen Diversity Research Institute): Global Social Inequality and Diversity

Diversity emerged first as a political concept within the social rights movements in the so-called Global North. More recently, it has become popular as both a theoretical concept and a policy instrument applied to public and private institutions as well as business actors. As a legal concept, it is usually tied to a national framework. At the same time, political and theoretical perspectives focusing on global (social) inequalities have been somewhat reluctant to pick up diversity as a concept. The lecture sets out to assess the potentials of combining the current discussion of diversity with insights from debates on global social inequality. To this end, I will address central aspects of global social inequalities and elaborate their linkage to individual positioning, privileges and discrimination within the nation state.

13.8., 15:00 - 16:30: Kristin Aune (Coventry University): Religious Diversity in Higher Education in Europe and North America

The talk will introduce religion as a diversity issue in higher education that should be considered alongside gender, race, class and others. It will trace the history and contemporary contexts of religion in universities and argue that religious diversity should be seen as a resource, rather than as a threat or something that should be marginalised, in the contemporary university.

14.8., 15:00 - 16:30: Sabine Grenz (University of Vienna): Investigating Data Collection from an Intersectional Gender Perspective

In social science methodology textbooks the research situation is conceptualized as being as neutral and confidential as possible. Only rarely do we find hints on the difficulties to reach this neutrality and confidentiality. In this talk I will focus on the complexity of interviewing processes by drawing on my own research on gender and sexuality from a Foucaultian perspective as well as research of feminist researchers who reflected on issues of gender, sexuality, social class and race as factors that potentially influence interview outcomes, for instance, by creating particular silences. I argue that they need to be perceived as enriching and not disturbing aspects of research and included into our data reconstruction.