ArchipelagoLab
The Lab is open to students who look to follow their interests beyond the academic daily life, want to explore other formats of exchange or are searching for a safer room within the university. The ArchipelagoLab is a room in building 5, but entails a network of students as well, who are supporting each other and sharing experiences and resources. Below this you will find a section on the concept of the Lab.
If you would like to use the ArchipelagoLab for a group, a presentation (...), contact us via archipelagolab@leuphana.de.
Please, in the subject line, indicate when your request should be answered the latest while keeping in mind that it will be coming from a student assistant with an finite number of working hours.
“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.
Groups
Here you can find current groups, who are meeting at the ArchipelagoLab currently, and who's meetings are open.
If you have a group yourselves with which you would like to use the Lab, please send us a message.
Events
Here you will find public events that are coming up, as well as the dates of our regular Labmeetings.
If you want to plan your own event, please send us a message.