studiolab.

EXPLORATIVE & MANIFOLD

studiolab. Arbeit an Arbeit has existed since 2021. We work together as a collaborative, exploratory group made up of scientists from different disciplines and think about the way of our work.

studiolab has written 17 theses on how we (want to) work – our manifold. It's published open access in the Zeitschrift für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft 01/2023 and critically commented on by colleagues from the scientific community.

As scientific working group, studiolab is a structured association and thrives on the activities and contributions of everyone involved. There can be one, two, many studio labs. Organize with us and work differently.

Interested? We meet every six weeks in digital space. Feel free to come over! Contact us at arbeitanarbeit[at]dgekw.de.

17 theses

Our house has agency. It leads us to (self-)sabotage and protects us from being completely taken over by exploitation logics. The house gives us space for our own, shared, experimental logics, semantics, modes and tempos.

We work as colleagues who come together along their networks. Our connections are valued. They can stay, detach, change and expand.

We actively shape our work environment. We help shape the (r)evolution of knowledge creation.

We work in a violence-sensitive manner. We are aware of the potential to hurt, be unfair and exclude. That's why we strive to address these potentials and negotiate them together.

We take responsibility. We create a space in which we design the time and conditions to talk about our own strengths and (leadership) roles. We make ourselves vulnerable, negotiate, consult with each other and question how we can explore positions. We learn to share. This promotes our professionalism.

We maintain transparency in the rules we work with. Collaboratively designed rules foster a sense of identification and commitment. Solidarity gives us sovereignty.

We ask every question that is important to us. We take time and space to listen to our answers, discuss them or even leave the question open.

We work strategically, but not opportune. Despite all the rhetoric and self-economization that lies behind forms of work socialization such as coaching or leadership training, there are good reasons to work on values, evaluation and value of leadership. Leadership does not come intuitive.

We work for the relations we research. We want to create knowledge through teamwork and collegiality, which we have learned to value. We would like to live these modes in the spaces of our everyday disciplinary work - and beyond.

We know we are part of the structures. We help build them, build on them, dismantle them and rebuild them.

In our cooperation we find spaces, strategies and ways not to reproduce capitalistic logics of utilisation. We don't want to produce things solely for the sake of their utility.

We are brave. We grab hold of happiness and shake it until it takes hold of everyone. We don't want to have to be lucky in order to be happy in what we do.

We stand in solidarity. We care for ourselves and others. We are approachable, affectionate and warm-hearted in our dealings with one another. We ask for help and accept it.

We want to do good teaching, good research, good networking, good third-party funding and good science policy. But it's silly to have to combine everything in one person.

We pause and reflect. We need alternative variations for our work culture in order to counteract hegemonic structures and contexts. This is particularly true in smaller disciplines where there is a lot of social proximity.

We know that we don't know everything. We also know that shared knowledge becomes more, and shared ignorance becomes less. As a result, we work together. We decide where, when and how we want to get involved.

We work multimodally. We are building new spaces of knowledge and knowledge production online and offline. We experiment with different media, forms of representation, formats, visual elements and materials.

We as studiolab. Arbeit an Arbeit are already working on living this utopia.