DDGC Guiding Principles

What We’re Committed To

Members of the DDGC collective take up a commitment to actively combat oppressions, every day, in our daily work as teachers and researchers of German Studies (in its broadest sense). We maintain this commitment in solidarity with those we hope to teach, and with colleagues in other disciplines and places around the world. We take inspiration from Black radical thinkers and their antiracist practices to encourage and inspire change within and beyond our communities. We fight:

  • for a liberated curriculum, as the only legitimate and effective response to institutional oppression and white supremacy;

  • for the well-being of our fellow teachers, researchers, and learners, as they seek to dismantle the oppressions enumerated above;

  • for clear policies that ensure equitable and fair labor practices, policies that will eradicate academic precarity as we know it, rather than mitigate such precarity for a temporary few;

  • for just, accountable, free, and vigorous public pre-K-16 education in our time.

What We Recognize to be True

Members of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC) collective recognize that oppression has permeated European colonial modernity since the 15th century, and that it persists today around the world. Routinely, this oppression expresses itself as intersectional violence against people, based upon: 

  • Racialization: through racism, anti-Blackness, colorism, ethnicization, settler practices, Indigenous erasure, and white supremacy;

  • Regimes of embodiment: through normative sex, gender, sexuality, ableism;  

  • Elite social distinctions: through class, caste, educational credentialing, deskilling, neoliberal competition, and extreme meritocracy; 

  • Regimes of expression: through language, accent, native-speakerism, delanguaging, intellectual pedigree;

  • Regimes of civic order: through citizenship, nationalism, status vulnerability, ascriptions of permanence and impermanence; anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish fear-mongering;

  • Regimes of deprivation: through wealth, debt, impoverishment, structural precarity, involuntary volunteerism, and coercive entrepreneurial individualism.​

We recognize that these structural oppressions continue to inform curricula, communities, and daily life in and beyond academia, and that they do constant damage to our students, colleagues, schools, and friends. These aren’t violences that happen somewhere else or in another time, but in our very midst. Accordingly, we see them as intensely endurant conditions to be opposed and dismantled, and not merely as research topics to be explored occasionally and debated virtuously. Keeping it simple, we say: tear them down. 

We recognize that even the most meaningful ideals of Diversity and the most potent practices of Decolonization have yielded conflicting purposes, strategies, actions, and outcomes. We retain both of these guiding principles in the title of our Collective, because we believe these two complex traditions contribute important components to our overall work combating oppression in our time. 

What We’re Not Committed To

DDGC is not an end in its own right. The efforts we make collectively are in service of the purposes described above, and not toward the permanence or status of the organization itself. We do not advocate for a field, or for a discipline, or for a language, but for people and their livelihoods. When universities, for instance, undermine marginalized people’s well-being, we cast our lot unequivocally with the people, not the universities. When research or literature distorts marginalized people’s lives, we cast our lot with the people. When funders or partner organizations want to work with us, we will scrutinize their funding sources and their organizational habits, rather than quietly compromising on our guiding commitments to get along. We expect to be held to account for all the details of what we do and don’t do—if not today, then by the people whose ancestors we will have been.

As such, there is no higher institutional structure to DDGC than its members, their comrades-in-purpose, and our collective, imperfect efforts together. We do not feel obliged to do in one year what we may have done in the previous year, nor do we seek a conventional organizational structure in perpetuity. We are not tireless, nor heroic, nor are we necessarily all seasoned activists. Within the collective, we are all positioned differently vis-a-vis compensation for service as well as employment and educational privilege; these different positionalities reflect the structures of violence we hope to dismantle.

Who We Are

Anyone who finds their own experience and commitments fit somehow within the principles sketched out above is welcome to join the collective. Sit where you fit! Please join us in this joyous, inevitable, and ongoing work! What else is the 21st century going to be for?