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- Convenor:
-
Mirco Göpfert
(Goethe University Frankfurt)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Cassis Kilian
(Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Open for transfers
- Location:
- Seminargebäude S16
- Sessions:
- Thursday 2 October, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract
Humour has become a key (and perhaps common) practice of engaging with the political present. Does humour “common” critique and imagination? How do humourists address dissonances, reveal absurdities, and anticipate tipping points? We invite papers and creative experiments on these questions.
Long Abstract
Political satire, comedic journalism and (meta)political memes are gaining more and more traction; the slippages between parody and sincerity, play and earnestness, real and fake, ridicule and seriousness have proliferated at a dizzying rate. In the face of global crises and contested political spaces, humour emerges as a key practice for engaging with and making sense of the political present. In weird ways, humour appears to “common” political critique and imagination, offering ways to address and process uncomfortable knowledge that challenges dominant narratives and reveals the ambivalences, dissonances and absurdities of our time.
Aligning with the conference’s focus on commoning and uncommoning, we welcome explorations of how humour contributes to the creation of political and social un/commons, offering spaces for solidarity but also exclusion. After all, humour can resist the co-option of political spaces by hegemonic forces, enabling new forms of collaboration and collective knowledge; but it can do that also on the extreme right.
This workshop invites contributions that explore humour as an epistemic tool for grasping, critiquing and imagining the political present. We are particularly interested in papers that investigate how satire, political humour, comedic journalism, stand-up and other comedic practices serve to address, disrupt or spawn political imagination, question normative frameworks, and create alternative forms of knowledge. We invite papers and creative experiments that address how humour sharpens political dissonances, reveals absurdities, and anticipates political tipping points. Contributions from diverse global contexts and disciplines are welcome.
Accepted contributions
Session 1 Thursday 2 October, 2025, -Contribution short abstract
This paper argues that humour plays an important role in the work of Malawian civil servants and state-citizen interactions during times of disaster: enabling a commoning of state critique, humour helped reaffirm state-citizen relationships, despite the state’s material and moral shortcomings.
Contribution long abstract
As one of the poorest countries in the world, the contemporary Malawi state relies on external funding to cover roughly 40% of its budget, with many state services provided by or through non-state organisations. This is exacerbated during regularly recurring times of disaster, when additional humanitarian aid is needed to support its population, but also the state itself, to execute its tasks. The Malawi Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA) is charged with the overall coordination of disaster governance and humanitarian responses, but a large part of the funding and resources to do so are provided by donors and non-state actors. Moreover, the available resources are always insufficient. Grounded in 20 months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with DODMA civil servants at both national and district level between 2019 and 2024, I argue in this paper that humour played an important role in facilitating encounters between citizens and civil servants in rather desperate circumstances. In these interactions, humour enabled citizens to criticise the state and the situation they found themselves in, while civil servants were able to acknowledge and express the inadequacy of their work and the arbitrariness of the state’s ability to provide care, without themselves losing face or authority. In commoning state critique in this way, humour helped to reaffirm the durability of state-citizen relationships, despite the state’s material and moral shortcomings.
Contribution short abstract
This paper explores how Tibetan and Uyghur diaspora members in Switzerland use black humour to process memories of repression. Drawing on Žižek, it examines humour as a coping mechanism, a critique of authoritarianism, and a tool to foster solidarity among the diaspora.
Contribution long abstract
Through the lens of Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic philosophy, this paper examines humour as a tool for processing memories of repression and for denouncing dominant state narratives. Žižek posits that humour operates at the intersection of the symbolic and the real, revealing the gaps in ideological structures and offering a space for sublimated critique. By addressing dissonances indirectly, humour allows individuals to confront the unbearable truths of their socio-political realities while maintaining a critical distance.
Using examples from the Tibetan and Uyghur diaspora in Switzerland, the article examines how humour serves as a coping mechanism in the face of transnational repression. In light of my research, it became clear that Tibetan and Uighur diaspora members were able to extract their experiences of surveillance, propaganda and repression with great wit. The saddest stories were laced with the most amusing details and deliberately told with a great deal of gallows humour. One research participant even said that humour in the face of state repression was not simply catharsis, but a necessity for survival. The humour of the diaspora members transforms violence into stories that resonate with resilience and collective understanding. This humour fosters transnational solidarity, turning trauma into critique while creating a shared space for reflection.
Ultimately, the paper agrees with Žižek, humour has a transformative power and argues argues that it is both a means of survival and a potent tool for political resistance.
Contribution short abstract
This paper attempts to show, in an exploratory way, how different types of humor used by refugees, asylum seekers, naturalized migrants, and migrants with residency rights in Germany can be interpreted as an act of citizenship.
Contribution long abstract
In recent years, racist and anti-immigration discourses have become more pervasive in Germany than ever before. Remigration (massive deportations of people with non-German ethnic backgrounds) or stricter border controls are the two main themes of the xenophobic narratives in the media, among politicians, and also amidst German society. On the one hand, a quick glance at the German media’s leftist or immigrant-friendly contributions reveals that satirical humor has already evolved into a powerful tool for ridiculing far-right goals—or rather exacerbating existing social polarizations. Humorous enactments and presentations against racist and discriminatory notions have started to circulate social media and other digital spaces, used to criticize and challenge the dominant discourses. On the other hand, refugees, asylum seekers, naturalized migrants, and migrants with residency rights are forced to live in fear of being sent back to their home countries.
It is less well known whether or not political humor is used by immigrant communities in Germany as a means of solidarity and mutual support or as a nonviolent form of resistance to the dominant power. In an exploratory manner, this paper seeks to determine how different types of humor—such as satire, skits, jokes, cartoons, memes, and witty remarks—appear in digital spaces. It is possible to think of these virtual performances as a way to act politically by asserting rights, equality, and belonging. These instances of political action serve as the impetus for this paper, which raises the question: how migrant humor can be interpreted as a form of act of citizenship?
Contribution short abstract
The paper attempts to move beyond the logocentric understanding and definitions of humour by interrogating body as a site of production of humour. Through performances of kothis in India, it shows how humour produced through body leads to a form of commoning.
Contribution long abstract
The genealogy of humour tells us that origin of the term humour lies in medicine. Humour represented bodily liquids which thereby; determined the mood and temperament of a person. The physical and psychological interaction in the body was believed to influence human thoughts. In order to understand this process, there was a significant focus on linguistics. As humour walked through the lanes of philosophy and social science, the contours of understanding it became the verbal and the comical. Therefore, most studies on humour are preoccupied with understanding jokes because they have an empirically approachable verbal structure with laughter as a measure of humour. A move away from this preoccupation takes us towards the question of body. The performance of kothis in India opens up avenues of locating the body of/in humour. Kothis can be loosely understood as a subset of transgender population in India. Much like other transgender populations, there is a lot of stigma attached to the kothi identity. They are invited to weddings, birthdays and other celebrations to dance, entertain, and bless people. The performance of kothis urges to go beyond the logocentric preoccupation of humour and perhaps turn back to body albeit, not in terms of medical science. I argue that the dance by kothis opens up multiple avenues to understand humour and make space for the non-verbal in humour. Through humour and thereby; through the body, kothis also produce spaces of commoning for and with cis gendered people, however fleetingly, who are often discriminatory towards kothis.
Contribution short abstract
This presentation examines how humour is used as a coping mechanism among several tactics by women at the face of obstetrical violence in the highly medicalized childbirth practices in contemporary Turkey based on a qualitative sociological research.
Contribution long abstract
This presentation examines how humour can become a part of a coping mechanism in childbirth practices, considering the perspectives of mothers, doctors, midwives, and doulas. The qualitative sociological research is based on in-depth interviews with 40 mothers, with differing ages, spanning various social classes, socio-professional status and educational levels, who gave birth in private and public hospitals or at home, via vaginal delivery or c-section, over the past 30 years.
Officially formulated in 2007 in Venezuela, obstetric violence refers in general to disrespectful, non-consented care and abusive treatment of women by healthcare providers as well as a failure to adhere to evidence-based care, along with professional authoritarianism and sexist attitudes towards women.
Various mistreatments as well as medically unjustified interventions in the lack of consent by women during their childbirth are fragments of obstetrical violence. This research is an attempt to make visible women’s action (and refusal of action) and make audible their voices (and their silences) in their struggle for comfort, dignity and autonomy in the face of physical, verbal or psychological violence, in a context of absence of organized and overt resistance. Instead of portraying women as passive objects of medical surveillance, it is important to take into account the fact that women are active participants with some level of power whether they respond to reproductive technologies via assimilation, compliance or resistance.
Ignoring, oblivion and silence may become forms of coping with the authoritarian modes of governing women’s bodies. As silence may act as a means of coping with traumatic birth memories, humour becomes another way of dealing with the violence and the memory of that violence. For instance, in their narrative women who have witnessed some forms of mistreatment related with their birth would either cry or laugh telling that experience.