ACADEMIA AND POLITICS – ENTANGLED, YET NOT THE SAME (original) (raw)

The COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the increasingly prominent LGBTIQ* movements as well as growing political incentives for professionalized academic outreach have intensified debates on relations between academia and the public-raising, in turn, (once more) the question of the relation between academia and politics. These debates take place in very different contexts and, thus, political constellations and are perhaps more explosive in the United States at present than in the German context from which we argue here, although they are fiercely contested there as well. But as important and revealing as it is to shed light on the respective discourse constellations and sometimes severe consequences-think, for example, of the banning of certain socio-critical study material-we will focus on one aspect in the following paper. The point of departure is the accusation, appearing in many of these debates and contexts, that gender studies is an example of an (excessively/inappropriately/dangerously) politicized scientific discipline.