Events & activities

After two successful years with the "Diversity Day", the event concept is opening up to a larger audience in favor of knowledge transfer and to strengthen its participatory character. The organizers Inga Stang and Anouk Almstedt invite you to become part of the "Diversity Days - Days of Diversity 2024" again this year and enrich the program with your contribution around the topic of diversity.

Between 28 May and 4 June, selected program items from various actors at TU Braunschweig and external partners will be made available to the general public in a joint program entitled "Diversity Days - Days of Diversity".

Further information and contact details can be found here.

As part of the Diversity Days (28.05.- 04.06.24), both networks of the Diversity Office, the BIPoC and the LGBTIAQ* network, will meet in the Bunte Bib in Grotrian to exchange.

The open network meeting of the student groups BIPoC@TU and LGBTIAQ*@TU is intended to give students the opportunity to get to know a contact point at the TU in order to exchange ideas with like-minded people and to connect with each other. The meeting should be informal and take place in a pleasant atmosphere so that both established members of the two networks and newly interested people can get to know each other.

Date: 29.05.24

Time: 16:45 - 18:45h

Location: Zimmerstraße 24C, Bunte Bib, Grotrian 1st floor (not barrier-free)

From 02.04.2024 to 30.04.2024, the exhibition "Afrotopia NDS"¹ can be seen in the University Library of the TU Braunschweig.

The exhibition portrays five well-known Black personalities from Lower Saxony - Djenabou Diallo-Hartmann, Yared Dibaba, Denise M'Baye, Emmanuel Whajah and Elli Mariyama Manneh - who present their individual success stories. Through their perspectives, visitors will see resistance, hurdles and inspiring moments of self-assertion against racism and intersectional discrimination.

We are delighted to be able to show the exhibition as part of our Focus 2024: Racism-critical university, a project of the Diversity Office: https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/en/organisation/designated-offices/equal-opportunity-office/diversity-office/translate-to-english-fokus-2024-rassismuskritische-universitaet

More Information about the exhibition: https://afrotopia-nds.de/wanderausstellung/

^{1 The exhibition is available in German only}

On April 16, 2024, Dr. Bontu Lucie Guschke will give the lecture "The Persistence of Sexism and Racism at Universities" as part of the CEWS Colloquium. The lecture will be held in English.

Lecture content & Speaker

#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and related social movements have over the last years continuously shown us that sexism and racism persist in our societies, our workplaces, and our universities and that we need to invest time, care, and resources into understanding how the sexism and racism that so many continuously experience is reproduced.

This presentation discusses how sexist and racist harassment and discrimination are reproduced in workplaces at universities. Building on empirical research that integrates discourse and affect analysis to focus on the interplay of individual- and structural-level factors, it details how harassment and discrimination are facilitated in a context of in/ formality which prevails at universities, leading to a continuous reproduction of inequality. Drawing on dis/organization theory as well as queer and Black feminist understandings of vulnerability, autonomy, and discrimination, it is further discussed how harassment and discrimination remain imperceptible and unspeakable.

On this basis, implications for organizational practice are discussed that recognize anti-harassment and anti-discrimination as ongoing, relational organizational practices and address the affective ambiguities of harassment and discrimination.

Dr Bontu Lucie Guschke is a researcher in the area of queer and anti-racist feminist theory. She earned her PhD degree at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. Her research interests include intersectional feminist organizational analyses, queer feminist and norm-critical theory, anti-/racism research, feminist epistemologies and the interplay of discourse and affect analysis. She wrote her PhD dissertation on ‘The persistence of sexism and racism at universities - Exploring the imperceptibility and unspeakability of workplace harassment and discrimination in academia.’

CEWS-Kolloquium with Dr. Bontu Lucie Guschke, 16. April 2024, 14-15h, online via Zoom

Registration for the colloquium at: https://www.gesis.org/cews/news-events/cews-kolloquium  

EMPOWERED! Disarm racism, unleash strength!

Empowerment workshop for students who have experienced racism

Racism is a pattern of discrimination and an expression of social power relations (see DIMR, 2023)1. It manifests itself in discriminatory practices, thought patterns, as well as structural, institutional and social inequalities. Racism negates the human dignity of certain social groups and is fundamentally opposed to the idea of human rights (cf. DIMR, 2023). Racialized and migrant social groups encounter restrictive racism in their everyday lives, which triggers feelings of incapacity to act, anger, sadness and despair for many of those affected. 

Racialized/migrant students also encounter racism and discrimination based on their actual or ascribed origin at university, for example in the form of racist remarks made by fellow students and lecturers in lectures, exercises, exams, etc. In order to be able to deal with discriminatory everyday situations, the empowerment workshop offers a safe space to develop strategies for action, empower each other and promote collective strength. The workshop aims to find resource-oriented solutions that enable students to develop individual options for action. The workshop deals with manners and develops skills that students are given as a tool to be prepared in critical situations and to strengthen their ability to act. Recognizing, naming and classifying racist situations will be taught.

The empowerment workshop is held in German and can also be offered in English-German if required with the support of the participants.

The maximum number of participants is limited to 15. We ask for the understanding of students who have not been allocated a place and will endeavor to continue offering similar events.

Target group:

The workshop is aimed at students who experience racism and is open to Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPoC), FLINTA*, people with migration history/s.

Date:
28.02.24, 17:00 - 19:30h, PK 4.2 (old building, barrier-free).

Leader:
Sabrina Rahimi - social worker, mediator, anti-racism trainer, empowerment trainer and lecturer with a focus on criticism of racism

Organizer:in:
Diversity Office of the Technical University of Braunschweig
With the support of ANTIFA/-RA-Referat of AStA

Registration:
Informal email to: diversity@tu-braunschweig.de

^{1 German Institute for Human Rights (DIMR) 2023. Racial discrimination. Available at: www.institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de/themen/rassistische-diskriminierung [27.11.23]}