DDGC Research Cooperatives

The DDGC Research Cooperatives provide opportunities for people in the broad field of German Studies (and beyond!) to come together. They emerged out of a need for more robust infrastructure to help facilitate scholarship and practice in areas of studies and by people historically and structurally suppressed by the field as well as the academy broadly.

Cooperatives are both intentionally planned by the DDGC Steering Committee and grow out of the need as expressed by our membership. They can be long-term initiatives or short-term ones with refined aims. They can pertain to traditional fields (i.e., 19th-century literary studies), transnational ones (i.e., migration studies), areas of practice (i.e., community organizing), or any arena of shared interests to our members.

The purview of each cooperative will be defined by the group running it and can shift over time. For example some cooperatives will want  to run reading and discussion groups. Others will have specific political aims they seek to reach through panels and workshops. Yet others might like to organize entire symposia or conferences. What format each cooperative takes is left to the collective nurturing it! 

Proposing a DDGC Research Cooperative

We are eager to support scholar-practitioners at any stage of their career or of any employment status or relation to the academy to reach out with ideas to propose a cooperative. If you are interested in starting  a cooperative, here are some things for you to think about before drafting a proposal. 

  • Each cooperative will in some fashion relate to the DDGC Guiding Principles. How can the area of study, methodology, or relational practice you are interested in developing connect to our collective’s critical work aimed at transforming the discipline? 

  • What is your main interest? Why would this interest be best supported by bringing people together? And what type of gathering space(s) do you imagine for this cooperative (reading group, workshop, panel/panel series, symposium, conference, or any other format that works best for you)? How frequently do you envision meeting as a cooperative? 

  • Who will be part of your cooperative? All it takes to start this work is two people! From there, think about how to draw other scholar-practitioners to your work. If you are collaborating with someone on founding a cooperative, know that you will also have support from the DDGC Steering Committee in helping to think through some or all of these questions. There is also no rush in establishing these cooperatives, so taking time to think them through is possible. 

  • Accessibility is key. The cooperative gatherings should take place primarily online to maximize access. They should never come with a price for participants. If you are hosting in-person meetings for people who share a geographic area, the conveners will secure resources to support participation for people who need support. To this end, you might have access to institutional support structures (department funding, institutional grants, regional or national funding support). In this case, consider using these to fund your cooperative activities. If you do not have access to funding, your gathering can take place online. Sometimes accessibility requires extensive recruitment efforts. Consider how to make access to your cooperative visible by advertising widely, reaching out regularly to people who might be interested, and asking all participants to reach out to their networks as well.

  • Too white, too male, too straight, …. Reflect on the extant conditions for violence permeating the academy. It is important to do this work before you start building a collective. Think intersectionally and coalitionally with a critical bend toward inclusion and access. Intentionally thinking about these matters ahead of time will make it more likely for you to develop the critical space we require to transform the discipline and create better outlooks for us and our comrades. 

What does a proposal look like?

Once you are ready to formalize the cooperative, you can start putting together a proposal for it. The proposal will, in essence, organize some of the ideas you generated in thinking about the questions above. So be sure to include those thoughts. It should include: 

  • A name and a short summary (minimum 300 words, but can be as long as you like) providing background about the cooperative. This could include (where possible) information about its scope, possible membership, format of convening, frequency of convening, and any resources that you may have already secured for it or that you might require for it. We will do our best to help you find resources you need to run the cooperative but if you have access to resources already or plan to apply for funding, include that info in the proposal. The description here should double as a description we can use on the DDGC website, where each cooperative will have their designated page. 

  • Contact information for the main convenor(s) for the cooperative. 

  • Any additional information you think is pertinent for us to understand better the scope of your cooperative. 

Submit this proposal as a .doc, .docx, or rtf document to researchco-op[at]ddgccollective.org. From there, the DDGC Steering Committee will review the proposal and will offer suggestions. This will take between 1-2 months, depending on the timing of the proposal and steering committee meeting schedule. Please always feel free to reach out to us with follow-up questions, or with questions about the process in advance. This can include individual consultations with steering committee members. 

Once Your DDGC Research Cooperative is Approved

Your cooperative can, of course, meet well ahead of the formal approval as DDGC Research Cooperative. Once you are approved, you will receive more information about how to get the word out about your cooperative. 

We will provide you with your own cooperative page on the DDGC website. Here, you can include any and all information about your cooperative. From there, you can convene a cooperative meeting to talk about its aims, reformulate them as needed to account for the needs of the collective, and start developing your meeting schedule. This can include a meeting of the cooperative in the format of community get-togethers, reading groups, workshops, panels, conferences/symposia, etc. 

Once you have programs planned, be sure to submit the information about them to researchco-op[at]ddgccollective.org. We will create an official calendar item for the on the DDGC website and will amplify them through our existing communication channels (social media, listserv, etc). Each time you have new events thereafter, submit new communication requests for them. 

DDGC Research Cooperative convener(s) will submit a short progress update in a report emailed to researchco-op[at]ddgccollective.org by June 30. Where there is interest, we encourage the convener(s) to write an update about cooperative activities in article form to be published on the DDGC Blog.

DDGC Research Cooperatives Guidelines & Resources

The guidelines and resources below will help you with the nurturing of the cooperative. If you require any additional resources, be in touch with the DDGC Steering Committee. We will do our best to support you and brainstorm with you. 

General Information

  • All DDGC programming is grounded in the DDGC Guiding Principles. If you participate in any of our programs, we ask that you familiarize yourself with the principles, reflect upon them, and revisit them occasionally. 

  • Cooperative gatherings are occasions for community building. They should be first and foremost about developing good relations (meaning the process) and not exclusively about knowledge production (results). This means that you will have to be patient, nurture understanding and critical reflection about positionality, and do other community-building work in order to make your cooperative best serve the community for which it is intended. 

  • Patience and vulnerability will be your friends. It takes time to make collectives and spaces for vulnerability to help people negotiate differences and find ways to move forward together. To this end, don’t be concerned with the smallness of the cooperative or its audiences. All it takes for a collective is two people! 

  • Consider the cooperative semi-autonomous. This means that you don’t need to get DDGC Steering Committee permission to run programming. The collective you nurture knows best what work and what format for gathering its members require. 

  • Do you have access to institutional funding (grants, internal funding opportunities, fundraising campaigns)? Consider securing this funding for your cooperative. This funding can help you offset costs with invited speakers and the like. 

  • The DDGC Cooperatives conveners are happy to facilitate any dialogue around guidelines should there be any questions or concerns.  

Programming

  • All cooperative programming will be listed on the DDGC Events Calendar. Each calendar post requires the following information, which should be sent to researchco-op[at]ddgccollective.org. Send the information in the email body or as separate attachments.

  1. Event title, day/time (include time zone information), format (virtual, in person, etc.).

  2. Event description short form (2-3 sentences) and long form (as long as you’d like it to be). List information about how you would like people to attend the event. If you have a registration link for the event, include that information in the long description. 

  3. Image to accompany the post (we can also select one of our stock images for you). If you use images, these should be in public domain and cleared for reuse. 

  • The DDGC Research Cooperatives conveners are available for consultation when it comes to developing a communication infrastructure for you. 

Current Cooperatives

Conveners

Suzuko Knott (Connecticut College)

Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia)