Anna Lauenstein & Leon Vatter
Transdisciplinary Classroom for Feminist & Decolonial Reflections
Analog block seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Saturday/Sunday, 4./5.12.2021 and 15./16.1.2022, 10-18 h, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 310

THERE IS STILL SPACE!
If you want to sign up for class, please send an email to anna.lauenstein_ @posteo.net and write just a few words about the work you want to share on the first seminar weekend. Then we will send you the password for the Moodle class.

The transdisciplinary classroom is a format in which students present and discuss each others current artistic, scientific, social or/and political practices. Over the course of the semester we will share insights into each others working processes, methods and self-reflections – once at the beginning and once at the end of the semester. This will give us an idea of how different, but also similar our practices develop over time, how different disciplines work in particular, it will allow collaborations to unfold, it is a chance to get a diverse feedback to one's own practice and finally it creates a space for a respectful exchange on how to work with critical feminist and decolonial perspectives within your own work.

Starting off with the teachers/facilitators sharing their current individual practices in the fields of scientific writing and artistic filmmaking, each student will give insights into his/her own current practice. For this we will focus on questions like: How does an ongoing critical self-reflection influence ones working processes? How can they both go hand-in-hand in a productive way? What are actual ways of staying with the trouble?

To start off with, we will discuss critical positions from feminist science studies and decolonial perspectives from theory as well as from artistic film practices and how they relate to our own individual approaches. Positions may include Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, Renzo Martens, Walter D. Mignolo, Banu Subramaniam or Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
On the one hand sharing ones work in class means to show tools, methods and references which are being used. On the other hand it means to speak about ones very own doubts and self-critique and to open up these questions for a joint discussion. This being said, it is particularly important to create a space for non-violent discussions and feedback within the seminar.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Regular and active participation as well as sharing ones artistic/scientific/social/political practice in each block.

Anna Lauenstein, who grew up in Chemnitz and Leipzig, lives and works as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts with a focus on New Media at the University of the Arts (Berlin) with Prof. Jimmy Robert, Prof. Ming Wong and as „Meisterschülerin“ with Prof. Hito Steyerl. In her exchange semester she was at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens. She also studied Cultural Anthropology at the Humboldt University (Berlin) and the University of Leipzig. In her artistic research she combines artistic as well as cultural anthropological methods and works within the tensions between knowledge, poetics and politics, whereby a decolonial perspective on Europe is central. Her works have been shown e. g. at Kunstquartier Bethanien, the Museum of Photography, Berlin and the BWA Gallery, Wrocław. She was nominated for the President's Fine Arts Award of UdK and she was awarded the NaFöG fellowship. Since August 2020 she is also working at Studium Generale as an artistic and scientific assistant.
Leon Vatter studied philosophy and political sciences at Freie Universität Berlin and Universitá di Urbino. Since October 2019, he has been working as a research assistant in the Studium Generale team at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he regularly teaches seminars in both cultural studies and interdisciplinary arts. His fields of work are in political philosophy, feminist philosophy of science and futures studies. He is also currently working on his PHD thesis at Prof. Karin Harrasser’s department at the Kunstuniversität Linz. In addition to teaching and researching, he is active in the DAAD-funded Integra project Beyond UdK, founded in 2020.