ArchipelagoLab

Led by Prof. Christoph Brunner for a long time, the Archipelago Lab was a student-run space (C5.225) from 2023 to 2025, connected to the Office of the Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Cultural Studies.
The lab was available to students who wanted to pursue their interests beyond everyday academic life, explore different forms of exchange, or were looking for a safer space within the university. The Archipelago Lab existed as a physical space in building 5, but as a network of other students who supported each other and shared experiences and resources as well. Here, students could explore their own scientific interests in a variety of formats or bring their extracurricular activities into everyday life at Leuphana.

Starting in the winter term 2025/26, the Archipelago Lab has lost its space.

“We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. 
It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering [...].” - Fred Moten

Originally founded and cared for by Christoph Brunner, the ArchipelagoLab was transferred into student hands in summer 2023. This structural change was also accompanied by a warm invitation to the students of the faculties of Education, Culture and Society, Sustainability and Public Affairs to participate in and shape the Lab.

The ArchipelagoLab is a room operated by students, and it is open to students and PhD candidates for participation of many kinds. It offers the infrastructure for planning and implementing events and formats taking different shapes, and aims to be a safe space for this. The Lab is the node of a network that supports and advises each other, and at the same time a physical space in building 5 for meetings of student-organized groups and events.

The ArchipelagoLab focusses on study as a social practice. Similar to an archipelago, study emerges from the in-between. Water and islands – of which the institution is only one – come together in a field of relations and movements. How can we imagine a space and time in which study unfolds through the process of being-together, from the desire to make space for such a sociality?

By walking around mentally (or actually), new formations open up – beyond the critical, conventions of academic conduct or enlightened rationality. What transpires in this being-together is just as important as the modes in which communality takes shape and what the issues being addressed are. The Lab is an invitation to explore how study could become. It is a space where felt experience and the vernacular forms of knowledge are valued and exceed their supposed boundaries.

In its practice the lab is interested in the transformative potential of artistic, cultural, and socio-political processes. It is a place for projects and initiatives that interlace approaches in Cultural Studies with practices of engaged critical inquiry aiming to breach the gap between university and its socio-cultural surrounding. In particular, the Lab departs from the humanities in their transformative social potential but also their implicit structures of power. A key aspect of the Lab’s activity resides in questioning these power structures through forms of “collective problematization.” Affect-based, diversity-aware, anti-racist, and anti-/decolonial as well as care-oriented approaches often shape such practices of problematization. Through lectures, artists in residence, workshops and in cooperation with local and translocal partners the lab develops new forms of collective (un-)learning and knowledge production beyond disciplinary boundaries.