Juliane’s previous blog post on the perils of academic conferences provided a glimpse into some of the activities faculty members engage in outside of the classroom. We want to continue with this topic and share other initiatives that we are involved with beyond the College. With this “Off Campus” blog series, we hope to paint a more robust picture of the field of German Studies as we know it. As teacher-scholars, our work is never done in isolation. What we do outside of the classroom (research, service, activism, etc.) informs our work in the classroom, and the same is true in the other direction; equitable ways of relating to each other in the classroom provide valuable insights for thinking about our roles in professional organizations (building clear support structures, offering various modes of engagement, etc.).
In this post, I focus on two organizations I have been involved with over the last several years. The first is a Mutual Aid group connected to the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC) initiative and the second is the Climate Emergency and Technology (CLEAT) committee of the German Studies Association (GSA). Both groups bring together scholar-activists in German Studies to advocate for changes in our profession, with the first providing grassroots support to people in our field who may be in underfunded or unsupportive positions and the second focusing on making our main professional organization more accessible and sustainable.
The Mutual Aid group is part of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum (DDGC) initiative, a collective of scholar-teacher-activists within German Studies who aim to make German Studies more diverse and equitable. The Mutual Aid action group formed in response to a town hall meeting on labor justice that DDGC organized in late 2020 and began its work by discussing the specific needs of our field, the politics of mutual aid, and how we can best establish our group to support our peers. Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) and examples of location-based mutual aid groups served as critical tools and models for our group. We have since organized a mutual aid infrastructure for our German Studies community with a group of over 50 scholars, including all three members of Carleton’s German program, who have offered to provide support in teaching (guest lectures, syllabus design, observations), research (editing, proofreading, support), professional development (mentoring, networking), organization (advocacy), and basic needs (financial, shelter, care work). In terms of our impact within German Studies, I wrote a blog post for the DDGC detailing the first year of our group’s work. Our efforts and fundraising meant that we were able to provide direct support in various forms to people in need within our field.
Beyond providing direct, no-strings attached aid to anyone in our field who needs it, being part of the mutual aid group has been a way for me to experience radically new organizational structures. Contrary to the structure of many typical committees or organizations, our group has a non-hierarchical, flat structure. Instead of a chairperson or leader, we take turns organizing and running meetings, and we take on different tasks and duties as the need arises (you can read more about the group’s organizational structure in a blog post I wrote for DDGC here). Through our organizational structure, we put into action ideas of solidarity that mutual aid groups are meant to foster. We prioritize the needs of the group, starting each meeting with a check-in to see if there are any group members who might benefit from the mutual aid process. I’ve never been part of a group that is so inspirational, understanding, and productive.
The positive experiences that I’ve had in the mutual aid group also inform my work at Carleton. While the connections between a mutual aid organization and teaching German may not be obviously apparent, I’ve found myself often reflecting on several parallels between the group and the classroom:
- both settings require a clearly defined group in order to function (the classroom is clearly defined by the students and faculty in a course together and the mutual aid group is for scholars in and around German Studies)
- both seek to eliminate barriers that prevent people from asking for help that they need
- both grow strong and flourish through regular interaction and through prioritizing the well-being of its members
- both encourage collaboration with greater goals in mind
- both create opportunities to form connections and new relationships with people within the community.
The second group I’m highlighting here is the Climate Emergency and Technology (CLEAT) committee of the German Studies Association (GSA). The committee was also established in 2020, in part as a response to an open letter signed by nearly 200 GSA members demanding decarbonization efforts from the organization. The committee was also created to explore ways that the organization can use technology for more virtual engagement—a necessity at the height of the pandemic. Working together as a small group, the CLEAT committee encourages GSA members and leadership to truly think about the future of the organization and the future of the planet: How do members imagine the German Studies Association and its annual conference in 2050? Who do we want our organization to serve in 25 years? What can we do now to ensure that our organization will be beneficial for its members and the environment?
Based on my research in the environmental humanities, I was appointed to the committee as an initial member by the president of the GSA in fall 2020. We worked for months on a collaborative report filled with suggestions and examples for decreasing our organization’s carbon footprint and making it more equitable in the process. As we write in our report, “With the help of technology and innovative new forms of communication, interaction, and mentorship, we must ‘future-proof’ the organization and combine climate protection and resilience with a more accessible, welcoming culture for a diverse membership…” (CLEAT Recommendations 2). Consequently, the report features, in part, nine basic principles, information on divesting the GSA’s funds, new structures for increasing technology, an overview of how virtual offerings bolster accessibility and inclusion, a list of interim actions that can be implemented immediately, suggestions for similar decarbonization-focused actions beyond the conference, and a condensed summary of twelve clear recommendations.
The report was filled with numerous ideas for “future-proofing” the organization, yet the initial response showed that many—but not all—in the GSA’s leadership and membership focused mainly on one element of the report: putting an end to the annual in-person GSA conference (to some, this felt like we were “killing” the organization)! To me, resistance to exploring virtual models for conferencing and mentoring indicates that some members struggle to imagine new ways of interacting with colleagues. A professional organization that depends solely on an annual in-person conference, however, is severely under-serving its current and future members who face barriers traveling to in-person conferences. Our CLEAT group envisioned creative ways to engage members with an organizational model focused on dispersing the important activities that take place at a conference throughout the year. Instead of concentrating networking at the in-person conference, for example, we suggest establishing an ongoing robust mentoring structure for graduate students and early-career scholars to connect with other members. We also advocated for a conference model that rotates between regional, in-person conferences and virtual full-scale conferences to account for environmental, personal, geographic, and institutional challenges (conference locations often favor larger cities and institutions over smaller ones), which would balance positive and negative aspects of the in-person conference that Juliane described in her previous post.
I found the reaction to the CLEAT report to be eerily similar to narratives in fictional works about climate change and related environmental crises that I study. The most prominent parallel was the problem of convincing a large group of people that there is indeed an emergency situation. In fact, one of the first actions we took as a group was to change our name from “Carbon Footprint and Technology Committee” to the “Climate Emergency and Technology Committee” in order to underscore the urgency of the situation. We were still met with pushback that dismissed climate change as a serious concern. Another parallel theme emerged around questions about how the future of the climate has already been shaped (or “hollowed out,” to use the words of Timothy Morton) by our past and current actions. The GSA board already plans in-person conferences years in advance and therefore already makes decisions about the future. The CLEAT committee hopes that they will start to make different decisions about the future and depart from enforcing an unsustainable status quo.
We are still pushing for more sustainable models for conferencing and professional development. The CLEAT committee, with members that now includes Seth Peabody, continues to advocate for change within the organization. We hope that the GSA will take action toward a sustainable and accessible organization and conference.
As a part of the CLEAT committee and DDGC mutual aid network, I have been able to build strong community and solidarity with colleagues at various institutions throughout North America. In both groups, the entirety of our collaboration has been done virtually, proving that regular virtual meetings with supportive and open collaborators is not just a possibility, but a necessity for building and maintaining collectives that flourish. Focusing on the well-being of the community and its environment is essential for a group to thrive. Through my work with the CLEAT committee, I hope that the above principles of mutual aid might guide the GSA to become a more sustainable and accessible scholarly organization.
Works Cited
CLEAT, “GSA Climate Emergency and Technology Committee (CLEAT) Recommendations” German Studies Association. 20 October 2021. https://www.thegsa.org/resources/climate-emergency-report. Accessed 7 December 2022.
Frazier-Rath, Emily, and Maggie Rosenau. “Mutual Aid in our German Studies Communities: Why and How to Do Collective Organizing and Care Work in Academia.” DDGC Blog. May 25, 2021. https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog/mutual-aid-in-our-german-studies-communities-why-and-how-to-do-collective-organizing-and-care-work-in-academia. Accessed 7 December 2022.
Kost, Kiley. “DDGC Mutual Aid Organizing Principles.” DDGC Blog. 16 May 2022. https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog/ddgc-mutual-aid-organizing-principles Accessed 7 December 2022.
Kost, Kiley. “Mutual Aid Log Report.” DDGC Blog. 6 October 2022. https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog/mutual-aid-log-report-july-2021-july-2022 Accessed 7 December 2022.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Schicker, Juliane. “The Complexities of Conferencing.” Critical German Studies. 1 November 2022. https://www.carleton.edu/german/critical-german-studies/news/the-complexities-of-conferencing/ Accessed 7 December 2022.
Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next). New York: Verso, 2020.