Panel Discussion : Poverty and body

With: Daniela Brodesser (author), Francis Seeck (researcher in gender studies and cultural anthropologist)

With »Qui a tué mon pére« (Who Killed My Father), by and with Édouard Louis, and Alexander Zeldin’s »LOVE«, we are showcasing two productions that tackle questions of participation and the fair distribution of wealth and resources. The answers to these questions also depend on whether we are looking at them from a local or a more global perspective: in Germany, almost 20 percent of the population are affected by poverty and social exclusion, and the numbers are increasing. The effects of the social division into rich and poor can even be seen in people’s physical bodies. From a global perspective, however, despite the steadily growing inequality at home, almost all of us in Germany are part of the »complicit« rich of this world who benefit from the outsourcing of the costs of our wealth. How can these two perspectives be reconciled? Especially since, from an ecological point of view, an expansion of our materially privileged zone is neither plausible nor reasonable. How can people be mobilised to take part in a local class struggle if that simultaneously means we should all have less in order to help the global South, or in the very least, that we should significantly decrease our consumption? 

Daniela Brodesser is a writer and activist. A mother of four, she writes openly about her own experiences of poverty and the fears and existential emergencies it can lead to in her »Armutprobe« (»poverty test«) column and on her Twitter account. In her public lectures and writing, she fights against the stigmatisation of financially disadvantaged people. Brodesser is a jury member of the journalism prize »from below«.

Francis Seeck is a cultural anthropologist, gender researcher and antidiscrimination trainer. Seeck researches and teaches on classism, care work and gender diversity, after a substitute professorship in sociology and social work science at the University of Applied Sciences Neubrandenburg now as a postdoc at the Humboldt University Berlin. In 2020, the anthology »Solidarisch gegen Klassismus. Organisieren, intervenieren, umverteilen«, edited by Francis Seeck and Brigitte Theißl, was published.