News & Activities

01/27/2024  Interdisciplinary Symposium: “Intersecting Inequalities: Race, Gender, and Capitalism in the U.S. Welfare State”

This interdisciplinary symposium brought together scholars and researchers to discuss multi-dimensional challenges of inequality within the U.S. welfare state. Building on race-conscious literature, race and its intersections with class, gender, and sexuality were central to the discussion. Individual presentations demonstrated how the neoliberal turn has shaped a new era of welfare policy, perpetuating a racialized narrative and further criminalizing welfare recipients. For example, a historical perspective shed light on how African American single mothers were targeted for discriminatory welfare practices that proved to have a long racial legacy and cemented further inequality. Welfare thus became intertwined with and essential to civil rights. The ensuing discussion centered on the exclusionary mechanisms of the welfare state and the notion of a White middle class as the only one deserving of welfare, as exemplified by the Clinton administration’s Health Security Act. Public housing has also become a contested terrain, as capital extraction and urban renewal plans foment housing insecurity and racialized dispossession, thus further deepening the effects of racial capitalism. Yet the retrenchment of the welfare state has given way to a resurgence of mutual aid organizations that have filled the void in the absence of state welfare. The closing lecture and book launch of Felix Krämer’s new book Living on Credit (2024) added an important but often overlooked aspect to the field: debt. He meticulously historized the intricate web of debt from the end of slavery to contemporary consumer and student debts, vividly demonstrating how forms of debt are utilized under a capitalist framework to produce an exploitable and often disenfranchised class.  

Many thanks to all participants for an enriching exchange and a fruitful discussion!

06/28/2023 Symposium  “A Critical Race Perspective on U.S. Welfare Regimes”

During the past decade, the refugee issue dominated the world's media headlines and has risen to the very top of the global policy agenda. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing stream of refugees to Germany or the U.S. for more than a year now brought renewed attention to the question of how to successfully integrate refugees and migrants. In the U.S. public opinion particularly among the conservative white population, but also government officials across parties have often demonstrated a racialized resistance to immigrants. Hence, a timely discussion is needed on how these newcomers are incorporated into U.S.-society at a time that is marked by increasing right-wing populism, an unregulated neoliberal economic system, a diminishing welfare state, and declining public support for immigration. The interdisciplinary symposium in conjunction with the Chair of American Studies’ BMBF research project on the U.S. welfare state provided an apt opportunity.

Karsten Fitz & Grit Grigoleit-Richter provided in the introduction a critical race framework for the symposium by shifting the traditional discussion from how immigrants are incorporated into the host society to questions of how immigrants and their communities are racialized and thus integrated into a racialized society. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Arizona State University, followed that critical approach and shared in her opening lecture insights from her latest research on how Ukrainian refugees are perceived and incorporated in the U.S. Drawing on Whiteness research she demonstrated how post-Soviet immigrants were collectively racialized as White, which also refers to upward mobility. Incoming Ukrainian refugees currently benefit from this racialization process as they are greeted with public support and have access to federal benefits including resettlement and cash assistance; benefits that are not readily available to other refugee groups who seek admittance to the U.S. Thus, racialization processes determine the redistribution and allocation of resources and accordingly spur or hinder immigrants’ incorporation into racialized communities.

The ensuing parallel lectures demonstrated how local histories, perceptions, and the framing of race and settler colonialism continue to shape structural inequalities among racialized populations. Andrew Torget, University of North Texas, vividly displayed the long history and continuance of race as a social construct in Texas. David Hugill, Carlton University, Ottawa, examined the long-lasting impact of settler colonialism in creating urban space, namely Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose racialized economy severely contradicts its “progressive” reputation.

  The final roundtable discussion Let’s Talk: Racism in the U.S. and Germany stimulated a larger and more comparative conversation on underlying racialized structures and the at times not so subtle forms of everyday racism that severely impact immigrants’ integration within both the U.S. and Germany. Eunike Piwoni, University of Passau, shared some findings from her current research on second generation experiences and perceptions of exclusion and forms of discrimination such as microaggression, racial slurs/jokes, barriers to educational opportunities, or even physical attacks. The ensuing lively discussion illuminated commonalities in the construction of "others" and othering processes as well as the deep entanglement of migration, racism and anti-racism in Germany and the U.S., even though differences in migration histories and contexts between the two countries exist.

06/28/2023  "Interactive Workshop" with the Gymnasium Vilshofen

The Interactive Workshop promoted dialogue among our student guests from Vilshofen Gymnasium and University of Passau in a combined Bar Camp and traditional seminar formats. They deliberated on four individual themes: “Migration,” “Settler Colonialism”, “Civil-Rights Movement”, and the “US Welfare State”. At the beginning , four experts offered brief expositions on the topics, supplemented with interactive maps, videos, and discussion questions. After the introductions, the student-led session began with selected participant experts to guide the group conversations. Groups collaboratively recorded their discussions and responses to their themes with the help of whiteboards. Students could visit the different E-posters and ask questions to other groups. They finally presented summaries of their talks to the larger group. In the end, the participants built a coherent portrait of the United States from critical race and intersectional perspectives concerning the themes discussed in the independent sessions.

11/25/2021  Cooperation with the Gymnasium Vilshofen

The senior classes of the Bavarian Gymnasium intend to extensively prepare the students for the Abitur and subsequent studies at university. For this educational objective, the close cooperation between schools and academia plays a vital role.

In this regard, the Gymnasium Vilshofen is now able to offer its students an important stepping stone within the subject of English: In the future, both the school’s W-seminar "America, How Are You?“ of the eleventh grade as well as the participants in the school’s North American exchange program have the opportunity of collaborating with the Professorship for American Studies at the University of Passau. Alongside a team led by Dr. Grit Grigoleit-Richter within the research project "A Critical Race and Intersectional Perspective on the U.S. American Welfare State“, the students get to explore how structural racism in the U.S. causes and exacerbates grand economic and social disparities within the country. Dr. Grigoleit-Richter and OStR Dr. Christian Große are delighted about the additional outreach: "With our cooperation we are able to carry the scholarly perception of the U.S. into the schools and make academia amenable. Vice versa, the students enrich the exchange and discourse at university with their questions and takes on our topics.“

After a first meet-and-greet with the school principal as well as the students, further meetings were arranged. Through this new network, the adolescents receive in-depth insights into the historical development and effective outcomes of racism in the U.S. as well as professional and methodological support for the term papers they are expected to compose next year. Another pleasant bonus is the school's indirect benefit from the project’s sponsoring by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Moreover, a former student of the school, Svenja Fricke, is on board as student research assistant. We are very much looking forward to an intensive and fruitful cooperation!

10/29/2021 Online Symposium on “Participation, Marginalization, and Exclusion in the U.S. Welfare State”

Poverty and subsequently anti-poverty measures and policies have been a contested terrain throughout U.S. history. The idea of public assistance commonly termed welfare has a strong moral content: it entails notions of how we should live and how others ought to live their lives. Hence, how Americans view poverty and who is thought to be worthy or unworthy of deserving welfare benefits is linked not only to more abstract principles such as equality, social responsibility, or justice, but to -at times- very nuanced understandings of marriage, family, motherhood, or work ethic. These understandings, however, are deeply ingrained in a white racial frame and as such create exclusionary and discriminating policies for various minority and immigrant groups thus fostering racial inequalities.
Our symposium “Participation, Marginalization, and Exclusion in the U.S. Welfare State” critically addresses the entangled relationship between race, class, and gender and the welfare state from various perspectives. Furthermore, our keynote lecture by Dr. Thomas Shapiro attends to the troubling issue of systemic inequality expressed in the widening racial wealth gap. 
We are looking forward to a stimulating discussion and welcome you to an exciting symposium.  

10/29/2021, 6:30 pm Keynote Lecture by Dr. Thomas Shapiro (Brandeis University): "Racial Wealth Inequality and the State":
The intentional racialization of wealth is a foundational dynamic of the United States, simultaneously creating wealth for some and imposing a highly restrictive welfare state for others. This process manufactures systemic inequality and racial injustice while framing its legitimacy.

Symposium Program

07/24/2021, 12:30 pm  Public Keynote Lecture by Dr. Cedric Essi (University of Osnabrück): “It’s all in the Family: Kinship, Property, and Structural Racism after Trump”:
The rise of Barack Obama to the White House was accompanied by national debates about the possibility of an imminent “post-racial” era in the United States. But in the wake of the Trump presidency, “structural racism” has become the new key term in mainstream diagnoses of the state of the Union. My talk traces how this shift has been shaped by changing notions of American kinship and highlights how historical links between kinship and property continue to determine racism in the Biden era.

07/23/2021, 12:30 pm Public keynote lecture by Dr. rosalind hampton (University of Toronto): “Canadian Academia as Colonial Continua”:
Discussing the development of higher education in the settler colonizing of Canada and in the transnational context of empire building, the talk will address contemporary contexts and take up notions of continua to critique social relations and the cycles through which coloniality is reproduced, as well as resisted and interrupted, within academia.

Flyer Bavarian American Academy Student Conference

04/19/2021Lecture in the current Lecture Series "Mapping the Margins, Revisited: Intersectionality and American Studies":
Dr. Grit Grigoleit-Richter: "At the Intersection of Race, Gender, Class: Constituting the Welfare Queen"