The workshop “Canon-Critical Literature Collection Media Studies. Critical methods of canonicity” is intended as a conceptual and theoretical examination of the project “Canon-Critical Literature Media Studies” (KLM: Kanonkritische Literatursammlung Medienwissenschaft), which was developed in the context of the Forum Antiracism Media Studies and its Working Group Canon Criticism.

The KLM is a public and participatory web library in the literature management programme Zotero (Open Source) with the aim of making students, teachers and researchers aware of texts, topics and authors that are still marginalised in the field of media studies. The literature database follows an intersectional understanding of anti-racist and decolonial research at the intersections with gender and/or queer studies, classism and ableism studies as well as political (economic) theory and feminist theory. The aim is not so much to create an alternative or counter-hegemonic canon. Rather, the KLM is meant to invite critical reflection, processing and deconstruction of the discursive power apparatus “canon” via the Zotero functions of tagging, relating, forking and commenting. Instead of merely adding Black, Indigenous and Of-Color perspectives to the existing predominantly white and male canon, power-critical relations and contextualisations of texts canonical in German-language media studies will be made possible.

The workshop will take place at ZeM on 28 April from 2-6pm and on 29 April from 10am-5pm. It is open to colleagues and students primarily from media studies, including all ZeM members. Please register in advance at .

Dulguun Shirchinbal: Student Infinitives and Perspectives on the Canon

Criticism of universities as white institutions with Eurocentric contents often comes from students. The first section will therefore focus on student-organised events such as reading circles and tutorials as well as their founders, in order to report on their tools of critique and empowerment, their experience at universities, and in their own seminars. In the course of the workshop, this will be combined with work on the KLM and the reading of a selected text.

Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner: Decolonise Pedagogy

The aim of this workshop is, on the one hand, to shed light on systemic inequality in university contexts and to ask how this is reproduced in seminar designs – i.e. also, but not only, in text selection and the (lack of) self-evidence of topics and authors. Furthermore, implicit presuppositions of teachers as well as hierarchies will be elaborated. Furthermore, the aim is to rethink pedagogical approaches and to work out strategies for action on the basis of concrete examples – both in the unequal system in which actors currently move and with a view to rethinking the current system.

Sharing and speculating

We invite you to share and discuss experiences and utopias for the creation of power-critical teaching and learning spaces at universities, ideas for fictitious or actual seminar plans and topics as well as didactic considerations and suggestions for corresponding media studies readings. The KLM serves as a point of reference, which in turn is also to be questioned and certainly changed in these accesses.

Organisers: Noam Gramlich, Sarah Horn, Sophie Holzberger, Elisa Linseisen, Mary Shnayien, Leonie Zilch.

A joint event of the ZeM, the Working Group Canon Criticism of the Forum Antiracism Media Studies in cooperation with the AG Gender/Queer Studies and Media Studies of the GfM.