The ArchipelagoLab is an experimental space between theory and practice focusing on 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 critique and aims to breach the gap between university and the society. In particular, the Lab inquires the humanities in their transformative social potential but also their implicit structures of power. A key aspect of the Lab’s activity resides in critically investigating these power structures through forms of “collective problematization.” Affect-based, diversity-aware, anti-racist, and 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.
Website: ARCHIPELAGO LAB
Contact: archipelagolab@leuphana.de
The Kunstraum of Leuphana University Lüneburg is a project space for exhibitions, lectures, workshops, conferences, film screenings and performances. It offers students the opportunity to work with artists and curators, developing exhibitions, encountering artistic perspectives and practices and dealing with current questions of contemporary art. Leuphana University is one of the few universities in the German-speaking world with an art space, where academic and artistic practices meet. The Kunstraum was founded in 1993 by Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig. Following the early years and the particular focus on institutional critique, for example with Andrea Fraser, Renee Green and Christian Boltanski, artists and curators such as Marion von Osten, Ruth Noack, Roger Buergel, Joshua Simon, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann have further sharpened the profile of the Kunstraum as an experimental teaching and exhibition space. Since 2022, Christopher Weickenmeier has been responsible for the curation of the Kunstraum. Over the next few years, the Kunstraum's program will be dedicated to reconfiguring institutional critique as a proliferating form of institutional practice. By working on and in this space, contemporary artists question both the material and ideational conditions of art institutions and artistic practice today - and thus of the Kunstraum itself.
Website: KUNSTRAUM
Contact: kunstraum@uni.leuphana.de
The Lüneburg Arbeitsgespräche für Kritische Theorie have been held in since 2014. The format ranges from evening lectures to conferences lasting several days and is committed to cultivating classical Critical Theory in Lüneburg. The Arbeitsgespräche thus continue a rich tradition of Critical Theory in Lüneburg dating back to the 1970s and seek to foster its development. Topics of previous talks were for example: Neapolitan Modernity; Schmerzverwandtschaften: The Animals in Critical Theory; In the Anteroom of Thought: Lifeworlds of Critical Theory; The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Music; The Intellectual and the Troublemaker; Teaching in Critical Theory; Krankheit als Kränkung. The results of the discussions are regularly published in the form of anthologies or thematic focuses in the Zeitschrift für Kritische Theorie.
Contact: christian.voller@leuphana.de
LAKT Conferences
- November 2022: Die Lehre in der Kritischen Theorie, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
- Mai 2019: Schmerzverwandtschaften. Die Tiere der Kritischen Theorie, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
- Juni 2017: Im Vorraum des Denkens. Praktiken und Lebenswelten kritischer Theorie, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
- März 2017: Neapolitanische Moderne. Lebensformen um 1900, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Neapel
The Provenance Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, is an interdisciplinary research hub for experimental knowledge production in the field of provenance studies. The Lab, which is part of the Institute of Philosophy and Art History, is founded and headed by Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother, who brings over a decade of experience in provenance research and museum practice to the project.
Here at the lab, we consider provenance information beyond individual object biographies and read them more broadly as empirical evidence of cultural and social phenomena across time and space. The Lab operates at the intersection of provenance research and data science, and works to explore new methodologies, refine existing data models, and develop key standards for the analysis of digital provenance information on a large scale. These undertakings are crucial steps towards realizing the still untapped scientific potential of provenance research, which is being undertaken daily by researchers around the globe.
The Provenance Lab is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) and Leuphana University.
To find out more about the Lab, the people involved, and current projects, please visit our Hypotheses blog.
Website: PROVENANCE LAB
Contact: Lynn Rother
The Gender and Queer Studies Reading Group has met three times a semester since 2016, engaging primarily with new critical literature and research in the field. The reading group is open to all members of the university and is coordinated by Ben Trott. Every meeting begins with a short informal input (approx. 10 minutes in length) and discussions generally take place in a mixture of English and German, depending on the needs and desires of the participants.
Zu den bisher besprochenen Texten gehören (in Auszügen):
José Esteban Muñoz The Sense of Brown; Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke Transgender Marxism; Jack Halberstam Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire; Christopher Chitty Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System; Saidiya Hartman Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals; Sophie Lewis Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family; Judith Butler Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind; Tommy Orange There There; Nancy Fraser The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born; Helen Hester Xenofeminism; Louise Toupin Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement; Asad Haider Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective; Combahee River Collective A Black Feminist Statement; Jack Halberstam Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Guide to Gender Variability; Gabriele Winker Care Revolution. Schritte in eine solidarische Gesellschaft; Negar Mottahedeh #iranelection: Hashtag Solidarity and the Transformation of Online Life; Sara Ahmed On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life; Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation; Judith Butler Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly; Silvia Federici Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle; Silvia Federici Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation; Laboria Cuboniks Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation; Didier Eribon Returning to Reims.
For a full overview of previous and future meetings of the Reading Group see: https://www.leuphana.de/en/institutions/office-for-equal-opportunities/gender-and-diversity-research-network/previous-events/gender-and-queer-studies-reading-group.html
Contact: ben.trott@leuphana.de