Atelier: Undoing Identities. Narratives of the self (2017)

The focus of the atelier was on biographical stories. The stories brought in by (most of) the participants told of a personal moments in which exclusion, marginalization and/or discrimination were experienced (or witnessed) and focused on the involvement of the storyteller as a perpetrator and/or victim, as a bystander and/or caregiver. After mutual introduction, these stories were read out one after the other in small groups, considered and discussed together. In a second step, the small groups used the materials provided and various tools to change the stories, i.e. to “queer” them and set them in motion.

In our context, critical diversity literacy means developing a “reading ability” that makes more or something different visible in the story than appears to be the case at first glance. It is therefore about looking at it from different angles, discovering structures, deciphering representations of experiences and making them narratable. And because stories are never complete, we looked for spaces in between to make it possible to read about that which remains hidden and that which might need to be told differently. weg

The following tools were tried out and (further) developed in the small groups:

• Queering: i.e. changing perspectives, starting with listening carefully and precisely naming one’s own positioning in history (i.e. moving away from othering towards queerness), subverting common patterns of interpretation and developing unorthodox readings.
• Making prehistories visible, i.e. imagining what happened so that this history could become real or deciphering the history behind the history.
• Determine contexts, i.e. ask what happened historically, socially, culturally, societally before this story could become real?
• Exploring the invisible, i.e. asking which “stories” in history are not told, perhaps cannot be told at all.
• Imagining the aftermath of the story or spinning on what unpredictable turns the story could take.
• Moving stories by relating different stories to each other.

In the final sequence, the experiences in this “laboratory situation” were reflected on with a view to the further education arrangement for university lecturers.

Central findings:

• Emotions are political – affects are not provoked here for the sake of emotions, but to set grievances in motion. It is about consciously dealing with feelings without being sentimental, sometimes as a basis for survival (A. Lorde): What I had to split off from myself in order not to let certain things get to me.
• It was striking that racialization/origin were central categories in many of the stories.
• Difficulties in dealing with stories: Urge to harmonize, victimization, singularization, problematization, exoticization, fetishization. It is precisely these common practices of dealing with difference and representation regimes (cf. Hall 1996) that Critical Diversity Literacy aims to thwart by evoking counter-intuitive ways of looking at things.
• In our continuing education arrangement, these moments should come into focus of a reflection: to recognize the need to observe our normed ways of performing as teachers and to realize what it means to abstain from specific practices in order to enable diversity to be lived in university teaching (cf. Hall: neither the incorporation of negative stereotypes, nor the attempt to reverse them to positive images in the same logic/“reverse stereotypes”).
• In the context of our learning movement on diversity, the field of tension between (our own) feelings of “injustice” (emotions that have their justification) and the larger structures and asymmetries into which we are born should be made visible. The question of what responsibility we have and how we can perceive this and turn it around politically instead of remaining stuck in feelings of shame and guilt should be brought up and offered as matters for negotiation.
• Initial ideas for translation into the university context: which stories are included here, which are not, because they are not told? Could they still be possible, would they perhaps already exist in other university contexts?
• Continuing education is not a university didactic (individual) measure for training and teaching intercultural skills, but a collective self-“research” or research-based self-understanding (with methodological instruments). It contains the potential as search movement aiming to develop and improve teaching and study conditions at the university.
  Learning to read ultimately should mean “researching and investigating” institutional and structural mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. This could be best undertaken in so-called ateliers – a safe space in which the distribution and safeguarding of privileges, discrimination and marginalization processes can be critically analyzed and renegotiated.