Cultural Production & Social Justice
Cultural Production and Social Justice was founded as a research group in 2019. It explores the roles of the arts and humanities in creating a sustainable, because ethical, societal future. It is an “umbrella” project that critically examines, via a series of specific individual and collaborative research projects, the relationship between artistic production such as film, novels, poetry, performance, and social, legal, and epistemic justice.
Opportunistic cultural production can shore up prejudice and further injustice. But artistic work can also open out new perspectives that destabilize prejudices and reveal new possibilities. What is the overlap of politics, ethics, and aesthetics?
Use the links to the left to find out more about researchers associated with the project, events, publications and resources.
We welcome contact from colleagues and graduate students, in and outside the Ƶ. To get in touch, email: cpsj@mmll.cam.ac.uk and follow us on X/Twitter and Bluesky @cpsjcam.bsky.social
Cultural Production and Social Justice was established with the support of the Ƶ Schröder Fund. Associated projects have been funded by the University of Bayreuth Humboldt Centre, by a LMU-Ƶ Strategic Partnership award, and by UKRI Innovate Horizon Europe Guarantee, for the Horizon Europe project Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe (CAPONEU).
Media
Language and Rhythm, a podcast by Charlotte Lee and Tim Chesters about the power of rhythm in language, from the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the Ƶ. Supported by the British Academy and the Schröder Fund, Ƶ: . Watch the accompanying film, "Language and Rhythm":
What’s novel about a novel? Storytelling and travelling knowledge, 26 March 2024: Shida Bazyar in conversation with Miriam Schwarz & Tara Talwar Windsor. To view the recording of this event, see
Being in connection: a conversation with Sharon Dodua Otoo: on Friday, 18 March 2022, Sharon Dodua Otoo also gave a public reading from her highly acclaimed novel Adas Raum (2021), in English translation (by Jon Cho-Polizzi), and in conversation with the literary expert Maryam Aras. The event can also be watched back here:
In Search of Resonance: On Black German Literature and Literary Criticism: Sharon Dodua Otoo delivered the annual Schröder Lecture on Monday, 14 March 2022, exploring themes of Black aesthetics and Black writing from the Weimar Republic to the present. The lecture can be watched back here:
Publications
- Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz, and Tara Talwar Windsor (ed.), Re-writing Identities in Contemporary Germany: Radical Diversity and Literary Intervention (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2024).
- Miriam Schwarz, ‘Relational Epistemologies: Friendship and Reading in Shida Bazyar's Drei Kameradinnen.’ Forum for Modern Language Studies, 60:2 (2024), 219–237
- Stephanie Galasso, Genre, Race, and the Production of Subjectivity in German Romanticism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024)
- Sarah Colvin and Tara Talwar Windsor (ed.), Special Issue: The Literary and Essayistic Writing of Sharon Dodua Otoo, German Life and Letters 77/1 (2024).
- Stephanie Galasso, ‘Vocabulary for an Unthinkable Grammar: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Synchronicity. German Life and Letters 77/1 (2024), 51-67. https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12401
- Alrik Daldrup, ‘Von der ‘Macht, Welt zu machen’: Radikale Demokratie in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum.’ German Life and Letters, 77/1 (2024), 125-145. https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12400
- Tara Talwar Windsor, ‘Visionen vom idealen Geschichte-Schreiben und Geschichte-Machenʼ: Epistemic (In)Justice and Insurrection in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Historical and Memory Activism.’ German Life and Letters 77/1 (2014), 10-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/glal.12398
- Sarah Colvin and Stephanie Galasso (ed.), Epistemic Justice and Creative Agency. Global Perspectives on Literature and Film, New York/London 2023.
- Sarah Colvin, ‘Doing Drag in Blackface: Hermeneutical Challenges and Infelicitous Subjectivity in Courasche, or: Is Grimmelshausen Still Worth Reading?’ Daphnis 50/4 (2022) , 666-692. https://doi.org/10.1163/18796583-12340045
- Sarah Colvin, ‘May Ayim and Subversive Laughter: The Aesthetics of Epistemic Change.’ German Studies Review 45/1 (2022), 81-103. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0005.
- Sarah Colvin, ‘Freedom Time: Temporal Insurrections in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas Raum.’ German Life and Letters 75/1 (2022), 129–165
- Melina Mandelbaum, ‘Administering Exclusion: Statelessness, Identity Papers and Narrative Strategy in B. Traven’s Das Totenschiff (1926).’ Forum for Modern Language Studies 57/2 (2021), 186–204, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqab015
- Sarah Colvin, ‘Talking Back: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin and the Epistemology of Resistance”’. German Life and Letters 73 (2020), 659-79
- Sveinung Sandberg and Sarah Colvin, ‘“ISIS is not Islam”: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance’. British Journal of Criminology, online 23 May 2020
- Sarah Colvin, “‘The credibility of elves’: narrative exclusion and prison writing’, in Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall (eds.), Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice. London: Routledge 2021, 21-37
- Stephanie Galasso Goethe Yearbook 24 (2017), 197-200.
- Sarah Colvin, ‘Unerhört? Prisoner Narratives as Unlistened-to Stories and Some Reflections on the Picaresque’. Modern Language Review 112 (2017), 442-60
- Sarah Colvin, ‘Why Should Criminology Care about Literary Fiction? Literature, Life Narratives and Telling Untellable Stories’. Punishment & Society 17/2 (2015), 211-29
The Cultural Production and Social Justice seminars will bring together colleagues and postgraduate students working on different themes, media, languages, time periods, and theoretical frameworks relating to questions of cultural production and social justice. Kindly supported by the Faculty Research Workshop scheme, the seminars aims to provide a space for intellectual exchange and for exploring potential collaborations for research, teaching, and funding applications.
Lead Convenor & Contact: Miriam Schwarz (ms2713@cam.ac.uk)
Co-convenors: Prof. Sarah Colvin, Dr Charlotte Woodford, Dr Melina Mandelbaum, Katie Unwin
Supported by the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
2025-2026
Michaelmas 2025
7 November 2025: 1pm (online)
Prof Bettina Bildhauer, St Andrews “Menstrual art, activism and academia: from 13th-century German literature to the 2021 Scottish Period Products Act”
21 November 2025: 1pm, Selwyn College, room tbc
Madison Bennett, Ƶ “Good Letterings: Calligraphy, Activism, and the Power of a Beautiful Envelope”
Previous years
Easter 2025
16 May, 1-2pm, Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
Natasha Kennedy (Brighton): Towards a Heterolingual Poetics – Representations and Recognitions of Linguistic Identities
28 May, 3-4pm, online, joint event with German Graduate Research Seminar
Shoshana Schwebel (University of British Columbia): A Gentle Approach to Studying Trauma in the Work of Emmy Hennings
Lent 2025
28 February, 1-2pm, Selwyn College
Jiayao Jiang (Ƶ, Italian): Rome as a Shared Legacy: The Monuments Men and the Transnational Efforts for Heritage Preservation
7 March, 1-2pm, Selwyn College
Dr Kirstin Gwyer (Oxford): Superposition and Strange Loops: Black Literature and Quantum Physics
Michaelmas 2024
6 December, 1-2pm, in Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
Ruth Murphy (Ƶ, Italian): Reflections on literature and politics in Hannah Arendt's thought
2 December – 4.30-6pm (followed by drinks) in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine's College
Joint event with German Section SRC: Radical Diversity and Cultural Production in Contemporary Germany
Book launch for:
- Jeannette Oholi, Afropäische Ästhetiken. Plurale Schwarze Identitätsentwürfe in literarischen Texten des 21. Jahrhunderts (transcript, August 2024)
- Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz & Tara Talwar Windsor (eds.) Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany: Radical Diversity and Literary Interventions (Camden House, October 2024)
- Joseph Twist (ed.), Cultural Responses to the Far Right in Contemporary Germany. Kunstszene gegen rechte Szene (Brill, June 2024)
- Maha El Hissy (ed.), »Die ganze Geschichte fasse ich an der Hand« Literatur und Kunst zur Einwanderung ins Nachkriegsdeutschland (Verbrecher Verlag, June 2025)
Easter 2024
Friday 3 May, 1-2pm, Seminar Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
Dr Anna Richards (Birkbeck): Tutelary phantoms in Marie Espérance von Schwartz’s Gemma, oder Tugend und Laster (1877) and the late nineteenth-century anti-vivisection debate
Lent 2024
Friday 9 February, 1-2pm, Seminar Room 3, Alison Richards Building
Prof. Mark Devenney (Brighton): ‘Fiktionsbescheinigung: Thinking the Violent Fictions of Citizenship with Erpenbeck and Shibli’
Thursday 22 February, 1-2pm, location TBC
Weibing Ni (Ƶ): ‘Reimagining Intimacies between Afro-/Creole and Sino-Caribbeans: Marronnage in Raphaël Confiant, Patricia Powell, and Victor Chang
2025
15-18 September 2025, online
Travelling Knowledge: Global Epistemologies and the Political Novel in Europe
The third CAPONEU consortium conference, 15-18 September 2025 (on zoom), explored perspectives on how cultural and geopolitical knowledge travels in the political novel. Our approaches take in but also go beyond Western European and North American epistemologies; intersectional approaches; and/or explorations of novels as political in the sense that they have an epistemologically transformative impetus. If knowledge can travel across class barriers, time, space, and communities, how might political fiction be its vehicle? In the European context, how can we better apprehend travelling knowledge, and the political impetus and potential it brings with it?
2024
2 December 2024, 4.30-6pm, Ramsden Room at St Catharine's College
Joint event with German Section SRC: Radical Diversity and Cultural Production in Contemporary Germany
Book launch for:
- Jeannette Oholi, Afropäische Ästhetiken. Plurale Schwarze Identitätsentwürfe in literarischen Texten des 21. Jahrhunderts (transcript, August 2024)
- Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz & Tara Talwar Windsor (eds.) Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany: Radical Diversity and Literary Interventions (Camden House, October 2024)
- Joseph Twist (ed.), Cultural Responses to the Far Right in Contemporary Germany. Kunstszene gegen rechte Szene (Brill, June 2024)
- Maha El Hissy (ed.), »Die ganze Geschichte fasse ich an der Hand« Literatur und Kunst zur Einwanderung ins Nachkriegsdeutschland (Verbrecher Verlag, June 2025)
26 March 2024, Public Event, 7.30pm, Frankopan Hall, Jesus College & Online
What’s novel about a novel? Storytelling and travelling knowledge – Shida Bazyar in conversation with Miriam Schwarz & Tara Talwar Windsor
Shida Bazyar’s novel Sisters in Arms (translated by Ruth Martin) has been called “an explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship”. It tells the story of three young women who are simultaneously at the forefront of the novel and on the margins of the society they live in. As women of Colour living in low-income families, they fully understand the demands of a white and consumer-oriented culture while standing with one foot in it – so to speak – and one foot out. Readers of the novel necessarily engage with their view of the world, even though mainstream society tends not to.
Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor are part of a project that is developing free materials for book groups. Together with Shida Bazyar and – hopefully – members of the audience, they will discuss how novels take their characters and their readers on journeys across cultural contexts, and how this can make both characters and readers re-assess the things they think they know. How sound are our belief systems, viewed from another perspective? How easy or difficult is it to let the new knowledge gained from reading novels travel into everyday life?
To view the recording of this event, see:
26 March 2024
The Political Novel in Reading Groups
This one-day workshop as part of the CAPONEU project (The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe) will discuss how our project team can produce online, open-access resources to support the work of community and prison reading groups, with particular focus on reading political novels. This is part of our project work package on travelling knowledge and global epistemologies, which starts with the assumption that political fiction may be an important vehicle for the circulation of knowledge across class barriers, across time, across space and across communities, and which aims to critique dominant Eurocentric perspectives and power structures that shape how knowledge is transmitted and apprehended.
21 March 2024
Book Launch: Brothers by Jackie Thomae, 7pm, Goethe-Institut London
Join critically acclaimed poet, writer, editor and sociocultural commentator Nii Ayikwei Parkes, in conversation with Jackie Thomae and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp as he casts a male gaze on this richly layered novel that follows the journey of two brothers as they navigate their adulthood, reluctant to centralise the colour of their skin as a way of defining how they see themselves and the decisions they make.
More information and tickets here:
11-12 January 2024
Literature and the Rule of Law / Literatur und Rechtsstaat — Aesthetic negotiations
This DAAD-funded workshop as part of the Ƶ-LMU Strategic Partnership investigates aesthetic negotiations of political freedom and justice and the role of the cultural imaginary in engaging with the relationship between the general and the particular.
2023
31 October 2023, 5pm, Frankopan Hall, Jesus College
The Schröder Lecture 2023
What is the Place of Prison in Democracies? A Conversation with Annelie Ramsbrock and Sarah Colvin
12 October 2023
Afropolitanism and Ada’s Realm: A conversation with Sharon Dodua Otoo
On 12 October, prizewinning author Sharon Dodua Otoo returned to Ƶ to speak with CPSJ/CAPONEU literary researcher Chalo’a Waya about the recently published English-language edition of her critically acclaimed novel Ada’s Realm. For a report on the event and to watch the event recording see:
12-14 July 2023
Knowledge and Narratives of East Germany before and after 1989
A three-day workshop funded by the Ƶ DAAD Research Hub and the Birmingham Institute for German and European Studies, which brought together researchers from across the humanities and social sciences to discuss new perspectives on East Germany. The event also included a public screening of the short film , an artistic documentary which explores questions of secrecy and power in relation to the East German Secret Police, and a Q&A session with filmmakers Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright. For more information, see:
27 June 2024, Goethe-Institut London
Ƶlands, Nightmares, Good Immigrants. Essays in Dialogue
Panel discussion with Fatma Aydemir, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Nikesh Shukla, Musa Okwonga and Chimene Suleyman, moderated by Leila Essa.
See:
18 May 2023
'Extreme polyphony': A reading and conversation with Mithu Sanyal
On 18 May the Ƶ DAAD Research Hub hosted author Mithu Sanyal, who read from her best-selling novel Identitti and its recent translation, and discussed her book in conversation with Kendal Karaduman, Syamala Roberts and Tara Talwar Windsor. Read more here:
15 May 2023
Poetry Reading & Conversation with Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç
On 15 May, the poet and political scientist Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç joined Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor to discuss and read from his poetry volume, which explores the intimate intertwining of memory, language and desire, of geography, body and belief. The event was held in German and attended by undergraduates, postgraduates and staff. It was followed by a drinks reception and was generously supported by the German Section/Schröder Fund, the DAAD and Gonville & Caius.
8 March 2023
International Womxn’s Day
Queer, Working-Class and Kurdish Experiences. Narrative Interventions in Contemporary German Literature
To mark International Womxn’s Day 2023, writers Fatma Aydemir and Karosh Taha joined Maha El Hissy, Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor to talk about representations of Queer, working-class and postmigrant, especially Kurdish, experiences in German literature. The event offered a space to think critically about the kind of marginalised voices and stories that can be told in the contemporary German literary scene. Read more here:
2022
14-18 March 2022
In March 2022, the CPSJ research group was thrilled to host a series of exciting events with the Bachmann-prizewinning author, Sharon Dodua Otoo, who will also be the inaugural Ƶ Schröder Writer in Residence.
Sharon Dodua Otoo delivered the annual Schröder Lecture on Monday, 14 March 2022, exploring themes of Black aesthetics and Black writing from the Weimar Republic to the present. The talk is entitled, “In Search of Resonance: On Black German Literature and Literary Criticism.” The lecture can be watched back here:
On Friday, 18 March 2022, Sharon Dodua Otoo also gave a public reading from her highly acclaimed novel Adas Raum (2021), in English translation (by Jon Cho-Polizzi), and in conversation with the literary expert Maryam Aras. The event can also be watched back here:
We also hosted a symposium on the ‘Literary and Essayistic Writing of Sharon Dodua Otoo’. Further information can be found at:
CPSJ is very grateful for the support of the Ƶ DAAD Hub, Jesus College, and the Schröder Fund.
18-19 July 2022
Literary Acts of Agency
- A two-day international conference held by the research group “Literature and the Rule of Law” (as part of the Ƶ-LMU Munich strategic partnership) at the Seidvilla in Munich. Read more here:
MORE EVENTS for 2022, 2021 and 2020 to follow!