Introducing the DDGC Research Cooperatives: Infrastructures for Relational and Transformative German Studies

Suzuko Knott (Connecticut College) and Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia)

The DDGC collective strives to advance critical discourse in German Studies. This criticality is vital as a form of resistance to the ongoing harm our comrades sustain under various disciplinary regimes structuring our profession (see the DDGC Guiding Principles for more information). Criticality is also a site for inspiration, empowerment, and joy. Good work is as challenging as it is inevitable, as rewarding as it is generative. Thriving as a collective means drawing strength from the expansive archive of feelings attendant to resistance work. 

For years, we have sought out different forms for this criticality. Form, here, refers to a scheme facilitating the gathering of people in a way that permits their positionalities and experiences to shape discourse. At its best, this gesture is intended to empower those who have historically and structurally been excluded from conversations to be immediately involved in shaping them. In so doing, we hoped to give rise to ideas from and about the field long in the shadow of dominant epistemologies. Quickly, this became the main work for our collective. To create opportunities for our comrades to come together over their shared interest in critical topics is a foundational means by which we could put our principles into action. 

Although each of our gatherings helped us advance our own relationships, we soon realized that we needed more extensive and varied forms for engagement. If our conference takes place every two years, what do we do in between? If we have the capacity to organize one reading group on a pressing topic, what do we do with the fact that at any given moment there are dozens of struggles and areas of interest each deserving of attention? Add to this the analytic category “labor.” Viewed from this vantage point, the few of us organizing initiatives certainly had our limitations. But as did our comrades. When we invited the members of the collective to organize initiatives and share our labor, they appeared too stretched thin themselves to pursue the work. Some were beholden to existing structures even while they critiqued them. This made sense: their commitments to existing organizations was formal. These provided them with formats both recognized by their home institutions and optimized for scholarly exchange. “Give us something similar,” they said, “and we would be able to do some of the work at the DDGC.” 

After numerous conversations with our members, ongoing DDGC Steering Committee discussions, and years of planning, we recognized the need for a new infrastructure for scholarship and community in German Studies. The DDGC Research Cooperatives are designed to bring together scholar-practitioners in the broad field of German Studies. The Co-Ops are semi-autonomous in that they can benefit from some support from our collective while being able to make programming decisions about frequency, format, content, and membership on their own. 

In what follows, we delve deeper into the rationale for the Co-Ops. Our aim is to articulate some of the longstanding critiques of existing methods for scholarly community and exchange in academia broadly speaking, and German Studies more specifically. We conclude this contribution with our reflections about the capacities of the Co-Ops initiative and with an invitation to join our efforts.  

Why Cooperatives? Some Reflections

Research in the field of German Studies is a stunningly expensive enterprise. And accessing the traditional networks and associations through which we are expected to share our work has become increasingly cost-prohibitive. Membership fees on a sliding scale help, but with the current rates of inflation, that $40.00 membership fee may be better spent on groceries. Then there’s the $200.00 registration fee, the $350.00 roundtrip airfare, the $100.00 a night hotel costs and per diem food expenses for two days at an academic conference we feel compelled to attend in order to prove “an active research agenda.” And then it’s time to renew our not-so-affordable membership fees to another association so that we can submit for another round of expensive conference registration fees and travel. It’s a never-ending cycle of pay-to-play without adequate material resources in place and the gatekeeping begins with membership fees.

Many of us were initiated into the world of academic conferencing and publishing by a faculty mentor in graduate school. And so began the cycle of pay-to-play for another generation of Germanists in structures built for those with the privilege of institutional affiliation, funded research, and travel. As graduate students we were excited, maybe nervous, to experience what we imagined to be the generative spaces of academic dialogue and were primed to soak up as much from the experience as we could. In the sprawling halls of the conference hotel, we took our first steps into the world of “conferencing” and were schooled in the art of academic networking. For many of us, these experiences too often resulted in disappointment—everything from disappointment in the conformity and uniformity of conference panels and the sameness of theoretical approaches to the trauma of entering unwelcoming spaces meant for someone else. 

That is, of course, assuming that we can cross the threshold into these spaces in the first place. The gatekeeping inherent to peer review is demoralizing. Reject many, accept few, and the few have to be select people working on particular topics otherwise we get into trouble. Responding to how research, methods, and ideas “fit,” for example, on a traditional panel or in a publication is exhausting. This question of “fit” is a source of pain, as it forces a series of justifications based on the very same dominant structures much of our work seeks to disrupt.    

A lot of good work has been done to address the inherent inequities baked into the pay-to-play research and networking systems. The application of a sliding scale to conference and membership fees, for example, is a helpful step. But it’s not just the economics of the structures that often keep folks from engaging with other scholars and sharing their work. It’s also the pain, the anxiety, and the fears of the public and private tearing down of each other that sometimes stand in our way. But what if we could imagine alternative ways of sharing our work and coming together as scholars outside of this pay-to-play structure? What if we could build mutual support and open-access outlets in co-creative spaces that align with our DDGC guiding principles? What if we could research in community with one another in ways that are nurturing and attendant to the positionalities we embody and supportive of experimental and tentative relational formats? We propose, the DDGC Research Cooperatives do just that!  

There is something liberating in conceiving of scholarship as a sort of practice that can take many forms: reading groups or sharing a quote and reflecting on its meaning, having the freedom to develop theoretical frameworks on the basis of lived experience, celebrating different forms of scholarship regardless of “fit.” Accepting different forms is an invitation to others. In opening up formats for scholarly practice, we also open up formats for scholarly engagement. Thinking about inclusive form means by definition then to also consider scholarship as community. The DDGC Research Cooperatives are a much needed structure that we hope will help our comrades come together in meaningful and varied forms. 

Who is Involved?

Standard vetting procedures in the academy have a history of violence. Sometimes the most important people are kept from conversations as a result of “fit” or positionality in the profession. Vetting too often suppresses scholarship and people. As a result, we hope that the framework we conceptualized for the DDGC Research Cooperatives offers guidance and support at the same time as it is welcoming and capacious enough to hold all our members gently. Each Co-Op will develop its own infrastructure to nurture their research and we, as conveners, as well as the DDGC Steering Committee, view ourselves as facilitators for this work. 

Students, faculty, staff, those under or unemployed, those working in any context internationally with interest in a topic that in some fashion touches upon the domain of German Studies are welcome to propose a new Co-Op or join existing ones. If you have felt that your ideas are not finding a home or an audience but know they are important, we can help you find people who can be in community with you. 

As we enter this new year, we hope that you will join us in our inevitable and exciting work as part of the DDGC Research Cooperatives. If any of the above inspires you, we’d love to hear from you and help you start a co-op!