Who are we?
The working group AG KGGU is an academic group of people with diverse positioning who are united by the enthusiasm to pursue geographical and critical questions.
Our group has emerged over the last twenty years because people in Tübingen, Innsbruck and Hamburg found each other with common ideas about science. Today we are mostly located in Hamburg. Though we live and work not only in the Hanseatic city, but are regionally and internationally anchored and networked. This includes living and research centers in many different countries around the world. A few of us have also left the university, but remain part of our working group.
We like to drink coffee or tea, eat chocolate and cake, and also try to integrate fun and joy into our scientific activities and collaboration. Nevertheless, as professors, postdocs, doctoral students, student assistants, master's and bachelor's students, we are squeezed into the hierarchies of the academic system in an intersectionally operating matrix of power relations. Through our way of working, we try to question these structures again and again and, in the best case, to break them up in a sustainable way.
How do we work?
Our practices - the whole academic potpourri of researching and discussing, teaching and learning, administering and managing - are based on collectivity, cooperation and consensus.
We learn from each other and with each other. Trust, empathy and time form the basis for our joint work inside and outside the university. We emphasize doing as much as possible together, collaboratively, and collectively in reading, writing, teaching, learning, researching, and publishing. That is why we committed ourselves to the ideas of slow science and continuous reflexivity.
Our research, which we often conduct in collaboration with people who experience processes of marginalization and oppression in hegemonic and powerful spaces, is also subject to our claim to practice forms of research that name, scientifically analyze, and make public unequal power relations.
As a group, we come together again and again to recharge our batteries, to discuss and plan, or to take a break from academic work. Weekly meetings, harvest cards, team weekends, writing weeks, field trips, and New Year's dinners are an essential part of what we do.
What is important to us?
We want to look critically at society and still think transformation. In what we do, it is important for us not to let ourselves be driven solely by the hectic pace of everyday academic life, but also to open up space for reflection, learning and care work.
Openness and trust are the foundations of our working group. We put our heads together and pass the balls to each other to engage in constructive debates, endure productive controversies, and set reflective processes in motion. We avoid competition both internally and externally, even if this is not always successful in the academic structures and rules in which we are integrated. We welcome all who are eager to share and commit to the idea of collaborative and intersectional knowledge production that is sensitive to discrimination and critical of racism.
To name our own privileges again and again, to unlearn them or - if that is at all possible - to share them, is important to us, because only in this way do we remain open to criticism and new perspectives that irritate us and that force us to leave our comfort zones.
