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glossary

Glossary

Here you find terms that are important for our projects, offers and research:

Biography
I have a biography that is filled with memories and embedded in a culture. How do I feel about it? What have I experienced? I communicate. I share my experiences, desires, wishes, hopes and attitudes with others. From this, storytelling can emerge - a narrative.

Discourse
What can be said?
What should be said!
What must not be said?
Who is allowed to say it? Discourse is the field in which power relations are negotiated and language spaces are opened or closed.

Diversity
I am multifaceted, I do not allow myself to be categorised, I raise awareness to discrimination in the areas of gender, desire, body, disability, skin color and social situation, I think outside of prevailing norms, I realize utopias of the everyday. I live diverse versions of myself.

Participation
I take part, I am a participant in life, in conversation, in politics, in art, in society. I help shape, I have room to shape, do I have room to shape? I am a part of it.

Performance
I present, I perform. I show myself, I am part of the performance. I represent, I create a cultural self-image and I question it. I walk, I move, I correspond and I do not correspond.

Space
I am the space, we are the space. We are in the space, I am in the space. We create spaces, there is space between the spaces. There is space between us. There is unused space between us. There are unused spaces within me. These spaces can contain space for encounters and for development.

Utopia
Doing something for the future by discovering a past that has not yet been uncovered and doing it in the present. A way of recycling and rethinking meaning.

applied
I turn to life. I use life to playfully recognize potential for action, which I can in turn apply in life.

decolonial
We are those who cannot believe that our imperial behavior has appropriated and exploited people and territories while romantically clinging to it. Yet, we are increasingly uncovering how this is ingrained in our thinking, speaking, and acting, and how we must become aware of it. Decolonial means an active engagement with one’s own history and power structures.

critical of patriarchy
Hegemony is powerful. Before power comes domination. He! Go! Patriarchy describes a social system that ascribes a privileged position of power and authority to masculinity and manhood.  And who is critical and what is criticism anyway? One characteristic of criticism can be to work out the system of evaluations. Occupy patriarchy!

immersive
We immerse ourselves. We no longer separate ourselves into spectators and actors. We interact and place the entire stage in public space.

minoritarian
Who or what is dominant? The white man who is heterosexual and monolingual and sensible, who is rich and lives in the city. What is minoritarian? Whatever the numerical ratio may be, minoritarian means inferior, i.e. less in value, not in number. So something is devalued, I am devalued because I don't conform to the norm. 

posthuman feminist
What we understand as culture and nature is socially defined. We live in the age of the Anthropocene, where humans place themselves at the center as the crown of creation and subjugate animals, plants and ecosystems. The bill is now coming, but we still close our eyes and continue to live capitalistically. Posthuman Feminism sets new accents against capitalist exploitation.

post-migrant
We are post-migrant, we are here and yet we all came here at some point. Who now tells whom when they can stay or have to leave because they are here now or wanted to be here before and have always been here? What does belonging mean? We are all migrants. Migration is not just a movement in space, but also a movement in thought and feeling.

queer
queer is often used as a collective term for LGBTIA (lesbian, gay, bi-, trans-, inter-, asexual). However, queer is more than that. queer refers to desire and gender, but also stands for a critique of domination. queer resists categories and binary concepts such as man/woman, homosexual/heterosexual, right/wrong and standardizations that define what is considered ‘normal’. queer theory and queer activism are directed against all kinds of oppression and use strategies of subversion and ambiguity.

queer-feminist
Is there a connection between heterosexuality and the devaluation of women or of characteristics defined as feminine? Queer feminism draws attention to these constitutive relationships.