Save our language centre!

Dear friends of university politics at FAU,

On monday, June 21, 2021, starting at 5:00 pm, the student council will meet for the eleventh time this term.

This time we will discuss the current status of the budget reductions at the language centre, the preparation of the next meeting of the Stuve with the Chancellor of the FAU, Christian Zens, as well as the next meeting between Sprat and the university administration.

Please come by, we look forward to many guests,

Theresa and Richard

• Direct link to the Zoom-Meeting
• Agenda

All events will take place in german.

The Sustainability Weeks light are a festival where actors around the topic of sustainability can have their say and get into action! Not only scientists and experts present their lectures, but also artists, directors and many other interesting forces are invited. We – the ecoref of the Stuve – would like to bring the vision of a diverse, colorful and interactive festival to life with you students and interested people. Due to the Corona pandemic, we will not be able to participate in the festival in its colorfulness live and present on the Unicampus, but we will not let that get us down: We invite you from 07.06.-18.06.2021 to actively visit the individual contributions of the Sustainability Weeks light via Zoom. It’s worth it!

On 07.06 at 7 pm a lecture and panel discussion on transparency in supply chain practice will kick off. Only recently the concrete planning of a supply chain law became public. So the topic is topical.

On 14.06. we invite you to the Ökoplenum at 6 p.m. to discuss topics of sustainability together with us – a part of the student administration. Among other things, we will discuss the possibilities of a sustainable development of the university. Last but not least, we would like to encourage you to get involved: get to know us and work together with us and the university committees towards a more sustainable university!

On June 15, starting at 6 p.m., there will be three presentations on sustainable banking. Triodos Bank, one of Europe’s leading sustainability banks, will introduce the lecture trialogue. This will be followed by Umweltbank, which is said to be Germany’s greenest bank. Third, Sparkasse/Deka will present its sustainability concept. Find out here which initiatives the banks have taken for more sustainability and whether the innovative being outweighs the appearance of mere slogans.

The lecture series FAU against CO2 will take place on June 16 at 6:15 pm. Prof. Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark will present the necessity and significance of Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change (IPCC reports) from the perspective of a climate scientist in physics.

If you feel like watching a documentary on climate activism, you are encouraged to tune in on Wednesday, June 17 at 6pm. Here you can dive into the explosive events that took place in Hambacher Forst in 2018. From the dizzyingly high tree houses, the director Lukas Reiter lets you participate in the struggle for the Hambach Forest. After a joint film screening, the young filmmaker will be available to talk to you about his documentary, which won the Young Filmmakers Award at the Duisburg Film Week.

At the end of Sustainability Weeks Light, junior scientist Ha To-Trinh Nguyen (Berlin/Maastricht) will give an interactive talk on Bipoc – Sustainability – Mental Health. She will explore the questions of how societal structures affect the mental health of national minorities and how social change could look like, in that national minorities could also participate in health and well-being, but also fair work in a sustainable way.

We are very much looking forward to your participation and to a lively exchange on the particularly important topic of sustainability. You can find the Zoom-Link to the several events at [1]. More information will follow on Instagram [2] and the website [3].

[1] https://stuve.me/nach-wochen-light

[2] https://www.instagram.com/oekoreffau/
[3] https://stuve.fau.de/en/refs-aks-2/oeko-2/

As you could see from our last newsletter, we used the generic feminine instead of the gender asterisk. The reason for our use of the generic feminine is an awareness challenge initiated by student representatives. By using the generic feminine, we want to send a signal that the way we speak (and write) has an impact and that different groups feel addressed by different terms – or not.  Especially since May is the month of several action days on diversity and inclusion (17.05.2021 the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia and 18.05.2021 the German Diversity Day), we decided to make May Gender Sensitive Language Awareness Month. 

If you feel disturbed by the generic feminine, you should perhaps check your own privileges and ask yourself how people feel who are normally never “mentioned”. After all, the generic masculine is no different than the generic feminine, except that it identifies men as a privileged group in the first place. We are aware that the generic feminine is just the other extreme, but we just want to show that it does make a difference how you formulate gender-specific language. Just as people can feel excluded by the generic feminine, the generic masculine also excludes people who do not identify as male.

In a nutshell: If you are a male and you don’t feel included here, although you are included, then it is the same phenomenon that non-male persons are exposed to day after day.

The generic masculine is a linguistic phenomenon in some languages and refers allegedly to a gender-neutral use of masculine nouns. For example, while referring to yourself as an actress of a group of actors. “Actors” is used as generic masculine in this example and shall include non-male acting persons. 
If you are interested in the exact effects of the generic masculine, you can also read more in this study, which shows that there is a pro-male bias when using the generic masculine.

You want to take part in our Awareness Challenge? While writing  German emails use the generic feminine and add this text at the end: “Wenn Sie das generische Femininum stört, dann sollten Sie sich definitiv über die Verwendung des generischen Maskulinums Gedanken machen. Sprache beeinflusst!” (If the generic feminine bothers you, then you should definitely think about using the generic masculine. Language influences!)We are curious to see if we can achieve more awareness for gender-equal language through this! 

•   Working at a university
•   Selection in the tab “I work in institutions for the maintenance of public life”. 
  • “constitutional bodies/government/administration/judiciary”
  • “in a leading or particularly relevant position”.