Gegenworte: new partner, new issue

The German journal Gegenworte (Counterwords) is dedicated to the search for a common ground of our science-based society and the dispute about knowledge. Gegenworte‘s editor-in-chief, Hazel Rosentrauch, phrases the journal’s scope in the following way:

There are efforts underway to make science comprehensible, but we believe that it is not enough simply to popularise the findings of researchers. We need to find new ways of communication in order to eliminate the reasons for both the blind faith in, and hatred of science.

Gegenworte aims to constitute an experimental space for a language that neither simplifies unnecessarily nor excludes the lay reader.

Among the themes taken up by the biannual are: freedom of research, fraud in science, interdisciplinary cooperation, digitalisation, science and art, utopia and dystopia, the question of a new social contract with science, the relationship between myths and science, and, the most recent issue deals with the question of reduction as a method of scientific research.

Die Reduktion frisst ihre Kinder (The Reduction devours its Children) is the title of this latest issue to which authors like Hartmut Böhme and Svetlana Slapsak have been contributing. In his editorial, Dieter Simon talks about complexity and the decline of interdisciplinarity. Reading on, Martin Korte’s Tag- und Nachtgeschichten (Tales of Day and Night) tells stories about filmteams preferably wanting to hear stories about the brain as the biggest sexual organ from scientists rather than on the brain as the most important organ coordinating our thoughts, conception, memory and action (and, as a consequence of this, also all sexual functions). But, surprisingly, Korte does not go as far as to condemn the media, its lust for sexy stories and the transmission of short and simple findings. Still, he concludes, it is worthwile for the scientists to step into the dialogue with the public and risk that their findings lose some of their shine and complexity because there is approachability and a sense of communication to gain.

Furthermore, Svetlana Slapsak’s article on Ancient Strategies of Complexity is also available in Eurozine. Slapsak undertakes a reading of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae “which is usually translated as Philosophers at the Feast, if it is translated at all.” In the setting of a symposion, philosophers discuss everything and anything ­ touching of course also upon the subject of women. Slapsak states that precisely because the “old boys’ club” reflects from a position of power, new options for dealing with complexity appear, and the ancient alterity is being replaced by an intellectually challening process of inventing new spaces for womens’s identities.

More about Gegenworte in the partner section.