Book Series

#4
Biting Back. Food, Diaspora, Resistance

Have you eaten yet? - Have you eaten anything yet? The topic of food occupies us every day, and so it is no wonder that the number of cookbooks and guidebooks on healthy food, on diets, on sustainable nutrition is hard to keep track of. Looking at the topic of food from a critical and diasporic perspective makes questions of belonging, discrimination, and identity close and tangible, which are otherwise usually negotiated on a more intellectual level.

For example, what desires and wishes do we express through what we (don't) eat? What (anti-)colonial traces can be traced in different drinks, dishes, foods, in eating and drinking habits? How are class and food related to each other? Can food, can cooking be resistant or political? Poems, short prose, essays, autobiographical reflections, scientific analyses, scenic texts - as diverse as the questions are the approaches the authors* choose to question supposed unambiguities, to renegotiate national and cultural attributions, to draw connections between the (post)colonial past and the present, between the personal and the political.

ISBN 978-3-89771-373-4
Publication date October 2023 
Pages ca. 88, pocket size
Cover design Tasnim Baghdadi

#3
Friendship. Triad of a political practice

Justice is the goal, but with whom is it to be achieved? This is by no means a marginal question asked alongside the supposedly central political discussions, but an explicitly political issue at the heart of any social movement.

It is worth thinking here about another concept of political practice: friendship, usually relegated to the private sphere and condemned from the political terrain. Yet friendships are genuinely political relationships whose fundamental characteristics transform our view of the world.

In times of multiple crises and growing global inequalities, this essay traces existing theories of friendship in order to make them productive for a concept of friendship as political practice.

ISBN 978-3-89771-207-2
Publication date March 2023
Pages 88, pocket size
Cover design Tasnim Baghdadi

#2

Decolonial Interventions

The "knowledge of the world" in Western Europe is not innocent, objective or decontextualized, but emerged in historically grown relations of power and domination. Only in the continuity of colonial, academic practices have subjects been produced and (re)produced as deficient >others< (othering). But who determines what is or may be considered >knowledge< and/or >education<?

The authors* set out in search of decolonial knowledge productions and move the perspectives of marginalized subjects from the margins to the center. Reflective, (self)critical, unruly, ironic, indignant, their texts want to reveal the violence of knowledge (epistemic violence) and western-eurocentric representational power to a certain extent and thus deconstruct it. In doing so, the authors* also consider places and structures of power and domination against the background of their own positionality and entanglement. Their preoccupation with the (re)production of hegemonic notions and ideas leads them in the end to the question of an ethics that relates to this.

ISBN 978-3-89771-181-5
Publication date October 2022
Pages 100, pocket size
Cover design Tasnim Baghdadi

#1

Education. A postcolonial manifesto

What is education? Most publications that claim to be able to answer this question usually cite a number of white European men who have taught at universities or still do so. The bildungsLab* intervenes in this taken-for-grantedness and presents - as a prelude to a multi-part series under the title resistance & desire - a manifesto that wants to encourage linking education and experience.

The bildungsLab* reflects on education from a wide variety of perspectives: sometimes personal, sometimes theoretical, sometimes poetic, sometimes funny, sometimes serious - but always precise and clever. They call for a rethinking of Eurocentric-humanistic notions of education and a reflection on a postcolonial education in a plural society.

ISBN 978-3-89771-091-7
Publication date October 2021
Pages 108, pocket size
Cover design Tasnim Baghdadi

Review by an.schläge (in German)