Congratulations! Waterloo Centre for German Studies announces winners of Diversity and Inclusion Grants

The Waterloo Centre for German Studies is pleased to announce the recipients of its first-ever Diversity and Inclusion Grants. These grants have been created to support scholars and programs in their efforts to diversify German studies in Canada.

The recipients are:

• Maria Mayr (Workshop: Anti-Racist Pedagogies in the Language Classroom): A workshop focused on educating language instructors about anti-oppressive and anti-racist pedagogy in the language classroom. The workshop is organized by faculty members from Memorial University’s Modern Languages, Classics, and Linguistics departments as a response to the urgent need to self-critically re-examine the often-unconscious harmful premises and blind spots of language teaching philosophies and practices in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation and Black Lives Matter.
• Angelica Fenner (East Germans: (Re)Claiming Black Identities Through Cultural Activism): In cooperation with the Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) and Rutgers University-Camden Department of Africana Studies, the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Toronto will host a virtual/online series of lectures fostering engagement with the field of Black German Studies.
• Elizabeth Nijdam (Indigenizing the Canadian German Studies Curriculum): This event series and curricular development project will assist the German program at the University of British Columbia in meeting the goals of UBC’s Indigenous Stratgic Plan by focusing on the intersection of German studies and Indigenous studies.
• Michael Boehringer (Dis/ability in German Culture): The project is organized around a graduate seminar at the University of Waterloo and aims to further current efforts to consider disability from a minority rather than a medical perspective. The course and associated events will explore both the theoretical underpinnings of critical disability studies and the representation of disability in German culture from the 19th to the 21st century, exposing continuities in the representation of disability and promoting more inclusive ways of living.
• John Plews (CSSG Content Diversification): The Canadian Summer School in Germany will expand its already diverse offerings to include experiential learning with a youth graffiti artist group, a webinar on a BLM exhibition in Kassel, a live-streamed walking tour of Afro-German life and history in Berlin, and three live-streamed/recorded walking tours of LGTBTIQ-Berlin, Turkish Berlin, and Jewish Berlin.

$12,000 in total has been awarded. The award holders will be making the results of their work public, and the Waterloo Centre for German Studies will publicize this information as it comes available. Please join us in congratulating these colleagues on the work they’re doing to make German studies in Canada more inclusive. Please visit our website for more information about the WCGS Diversity & Inclusion Grants.