Juniorprofessur für die Geschichte Nordamerikas in seinen transkulturellen Bezügen

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Research Networks

• The African Atlantic Research Group
  
  

  The African Atlantic Research Group (AARG) formed during two research workshops in Berlin (June 2017) and NYC (April 2018). AARG aspires to facilitate multi-year collaborative research examining the social and cultural lives of post-World War II African immigrants to the United States and in the sphere we call “The New Black Atlantic.” On this website, you will find updates on the projects and events as related to this research focus.

  
  
• DFG-Network: "The Failure of Knowledge - Knowledges of Failure"
  
  

  In the research network “The Failure of Knowledge – Knowledges of Failure,” fifteen scholars of American Studies and related disciplines are investigating the nexus of failure and knowledge, addressing such timely concerns as ‘the post-factual,’ climate-science denial, or the digital divide as well as historical questions such as the suppression of Indigenous knowledge systems. Failure and questions of knowledge are inextricably linked. The assumption that knowledge is socially constructed and that its circulation (or lack thereof) is inflected by power relations, gives rise to the question how and why we know that someone or something has failed. The concept of failure (and the self-identification as a ‘failed individual’) presupposes specific epistemologies that, in turn, were produced by social, cultural, political, and economic processes.

  Thus, this network hypothesizes that knowledge has agency in the formation of ‘failed individuals’ and of the rhetoric that underlies the success/failure binary. Knowledge can both prevent and facilitate failure – restricted access to knowledge can impact someone’s chances to participate socially and economically, while the very structures and systems of knowledge are instrumental in producing normative assumptions and hierarchies that disqualify certain subject positions as ‘failed’ (for example, heteronormativity). At the same time, the subversive knowledges of those considered / self-identifying as failed individuals afford particularly astute insights into a given hegemonic order, and also constitute potent repositories from which efforts to articulate alternative futures may draw.

  This website provides further information.