Tag: positionality

Doodh Cha in Hamburg and Other Paradoxes

by Manish Dutta

Something has been bothering me, but before I come to the bother itself, I want to begin with something I noticed while working in a supermarket in Hamburg.

During Christmas in Germany, many sweet things appear more visibly on the shelves. Some of them are there year-round, but around Christmas, they seem to sell more, disappear faster, and become more prominent as traditional foods. One of these things is Kemm’sche Kuchen, a sweet biscuit (or cookie?) associated with Hamburg. I had seen it in the supermarket before, but during Christmas I began to notice it more carefully. Last night, while reading about it, I found that its recipe goes back to 1782 and that it is still presented as a traditional local product.

What interested me was not only its history, but its ingredients. Kemm’sche Kuchen has, among other things, cloves and cinnamon. I mention this because cloves and cinnamon are also common in Bengali doodh cha, or milk tea. For milk tea, the milk is not added at the end; the milk and a bit of water are boiled together with ginger, cardamom, cloves and sugar. It then slowly turns into a dark, thick sugary concoction. Over time, we started eating Kemm’sche Kuchen by dipping it into milk tea. In that sense, it reminded me of a Bengali habit: dipping Parle-G biscuits into tea. Dipping a biscuit into tea makes it softer and infused with the flavour of the tea. And the softened Kemm’sche Kuchen tasted good, which made sense because the flavours were not completely foreign to me. The cinnamon and cloves created a small bridge between a Hamburg biscuit and a Bengali cup of milk tea, which also contained cloves and cardamom, and it stimulated just the right places in my brain.

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Gender Studies Under Threat: Why It Matters to Everyone

by Rabbia Aslam and Shaqiaz Khan

In this blog, we are discussing how scholars and students within the field of gender studies are targeted, discredited and treated as if they are not part of objective knowledge production processes within academia. The objection is that Women and Gender Studies (WGS) is not a ‘real’ discipline because it allegedly lacks objectivity and facts. In this blog, our focus is on two recent examples within one of the provinces of  Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtoon Khawa (KPK), where efforts have been made to scrutinize or halt degree programs in Gender Studies and silence researchers, lecturers and activists.

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Is an appreciative appropriation of culture possible?

by Bruni Sonne

(This post is also available to read in German and French)

I am white[1], German, female and by and large quite privileged[2], in Germany – and even more so globally. I wore dreadlocks for six years, and very often clothes made from African fabrics. Now you can basically stop reading and immediately label me racist. My sin: Cultural Appropriation[3].

Or you can read on and get to know me as a person first.

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On Epistemic Violence and Personal Growth

by Rossella Marino

This is a reflection stemming from a particular emotional state, that, considering emotions integral to political inquiry, I did not want or intend to polish in any way.

It is about a game. A game of uttering and reacting. The game of who calls what how. A game of power, realisation, resistance.

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To crash or not to crash the canon? Seeking to address coloniality in a one-year social science programme in Norway

by Maren Seehawer

The decolonising academia movement came to Norway not in form of student protests, but as a – pretty heated – feuilleton debate between academics. During summer 2018, there was strong disagreement between those for whom the inclusion of multiple voices violates the principle of professionalism and is contrary to the whole idea of ​​academia and those who argue that decolonisation, will bring about more complex and nuanced perspectives about the world and thereby, in fact, lead to more robust knowledge generation. Last year, I was asked by a colleague to teach two classes on this debate in one of my institution’s social science bachelor programmes. As part of my classes, the students discussed whether and, if so, how, coloniality found expression in the courses they attended. From this exercise, it was a short way to reflecting on, and introducing some first tentative changes to, the courses which I am responsible for myself.

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Spaces of Confused In-Betweenness: The Paradoxes of Life and Decoloniality

by Aftab Nasir

Any traditional wisdom, be it Vedic, Aztec, Buddhist, Sufi, etc., while withstanding their key differences, seem to converge in a message, i.e., all of us are different from each other and from mother nature; yet one with each other and with her in the same instance. By definition, a paradox is a a statement or proposition which, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems logically unacceptable or self-contradictory. The paradox is at full play around us. In our own little worlds, we want to support climate change while enjoying the “luxuries” of a comfortable life that comes at the expense of injustice done to the environment. We detest war but trade with those waging them even when we know that territorial claims of the past century produced nothing but unprecedented scale of violence, and we witness yet another unfolding of war on the horizons. Though the current injustice received justified media coverage, we see many such wars happening in many parts of the world that go unnoticed as they don’t produce the click bits of a scale of the current crisis happening in Ukraine.

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Decolonisation on a T-shirt : On cooptation and academic careers

by Julia Schöneberg

Before I share some observations on how I feel ‘decolonising’ is coopted in academia, I want to start by situating the position from which I am arguing. I am a white, well-educated, middle-class, able-bodied woman living in Germany and working in a Western university. Inevitably, my approach to decolonisation is shaped by this positionality. Also, when I talk of ‘we’, I think of people holding similar privileges like myself, living and working in similar spaces, especially in institutions of Higher Education (HE) in the global North.

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On feminist entanglements and white politics of knowledge

by Lisa-Marlen Gronemeier

This contribution is situated within the beginning of my un-learning the single feminist story and its underlying violence, which constitute whiteness in German universities’ gender studies departments. I argue that the dominant knowledge politics enforces and normalizes white feminists’ epistemic privilege as well as practices that are “considered ‘unmarked’ – yet unmarked only if viewed from the perspective of normative whiteness”. As white feminists, ‘our’ epistemic privilege is reproduced through specific knowledge politics that has as a referent white, middle-class, cis-female herstory and experience. Insisting on ‘gender’ as isolated meta-category, this politics upholds patriarchy as a universal and transhistorical phenomenon, whilst trivializing the enmeshment of power relations resulting from (neo)colonialism and racial capitalism. Disconnected from ‘other’ (her)stories of struggle, ‘our’ story is not only produced as normative; white feminists are also authorized as ‘natural’ inhabitant of gender studies departments, with the prerogative of speaking for, on behalf, and instead of ‘others’. Thereby, knowledge politics re-produces violence against knowledge holders and knowledges beyond white feminisms’ genealogy. As Audre Lorde diagnosed long ago, white feminists’ self-centeredness and ignorance signify that “only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable”.

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Why Positionalities Matter and What They Have to do with Knowledge Production

by Julia Schöneberg, Arda Bilgen and Aftab Nasir

Coming from three different educational, geographical, and class backgrounds, the three of us met for the first time in a research institute in Germany. Together with a group of international colleagues, we were eager to be trained in Development Studies and pursue a PhD degree. In reminiscing about this journey many years later, we shared the struggles and challenges we experienced during our so-called ‘fieldwork’ stays in very different geographies and realised that there was a blatant gap not only in the way we approached our research, but also in the way we were trained: a lack of confrontation with the centrality of power and positionality in ‘development’ research (or any kind of research for that matter) – and a disregard of the colonial legacy in the way knowledge is created and considered legitimate.

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