GraL Workshop (LSS 2025) – Research on racism under conditions of racism

This year’s Late Summer School (LSS) took place from 4 to 6 December 2025 under the theme “Racist-Critical Research in Times of the Normalization of Right-Wing Positions”. Since 2022, the LSS has been organized annually by AG10 Migration Pedagogy and Anti-Racist Critique and the Research Workshop on Migration and Education.

This year, the three research projects KoNIR (Continuities and New Configurations of Institutional Racism in Schools), WuerD (Knowledge about Racism. Contemporary History Reflected in Biographical (Experiential) Knowledge of People Who Can Be Racially Discredited in East and West Germany), and GraL organized a workshop.

GraL’s workshop took place under the title “Research on Racism under Conditions of Racism: An Approach to Questions of Research Ethics and Research Reflexivity.” Our starting thesis was that research on topics related to racism does not take place outside the socially structured social world, but is permeated by relations of power and domination that are also shaped by racism. In this sense, researchers are confronted with racism-relevant orders at all stages of the research process: not only in the analyses, but also in the field, during the research itself, with regard to gaining access to the field and during field visits. In the workshop, we discussed together what this means for us as researchers, what it does to us, what forms of risk we are exposed to there in different ways, and how we can approach collective practices of reflection as a structural part of research processes.