Endangered Constellations. Uncertain Orders and Precarious Life › view all

From March 22nd to 24th 2016, the DNGPS executive board and the DNGPS working group 'Political Theory' organized the 6th DNGPS conference on "Endangered Constellations. Uncertain Orders and Precarious Life" at Humboldt-University Berlin. The DNGPS is the German Association for Political and Social Science Students and was founded 2011 in Osnabrück. The aim of the conference was not only to shed light on various aspects of precariousness, insecurity and uncertainty, but to provide a platform for young scholars to present their research to an academic audience.

Together with Clelia Minnetian (TU Berlin), Daniel Staemmler (HU Berlin) and Janosik Herder (University of Osnabrück), BIGSSS PhD fellow Stefan Wallaschek was one of the main organizers of the conference. After an open call for papers and rigorous peer review of the submitted abstracts, the organizers set up the program with seven panels including 25 presentations by students and early PhD fellows. With over 70 registrations for the conference, it was the biggest DNGPS conference so far. Moreover, three additional events complemented the conference. Prof. Dr. Oliver Marchart (University of Vienna) held the keynote speech on “Precarization and Democracy”. Publisher Barbara Budrich gave a workshop on academic publishing and publication strategies. A podium on “Precarious work of/at the University” brought together experiences by researchers and trade unionists.

Besides functioning as one of the main organizers, Stefan Wallschek chaired two panels. In the first panel on 'The economies of the precarious', presentations dealt with the combination of  precariousness research and social class analysis as well as discursives changes in family and social policies in Germany. The five presentations of the second panel on 'vulnerable mobility and migration' were related to discourses on migration and migrants in home and host countries, bureaucracies dealing with refugees as well as ethnographies on refugees dealing with asylum applications, complex legal regulations, racism and social exclusion.

The good presentations and the lively discussion in each panel demonstrated that academic research does not necessarily depend on your academic status. The DNGPS conference brought together young scholars from many different universities and social science programs and enabled the academic exchange of students among themselves. Moreover and based on their presentations, the students have the chance to get their work published either on the DNGPS website as blog posts or as research article (after peer review) in the DNGPS Working Paper Series.