Solidarity Infrastructures in DDFC and DDGC

Ervin Malakaj (University of British Columbia)

During a session of the DDGC 2025 Conference, “Interdependence and Solidarity Formations in German Studies and the Arts,” which I co-organized with Jeannette Oholi, presenters and audience members discussed ongoing programming devised to bring people together within the DDGC and our comrade organization the DDFC. The presenters—Siham Bouamer, Hannah V. Eldridge, Hasheem Hakeem, Suzuko Knott, Nichole Neuman, and Cynthia Shin—described various community initiatives and situated them within a broader critical outlook on the academy during times of various intersecting crises. To preserve their insights and stimulate ongoing conversations about the form of community and solidarity work in scholarly communities, we are featuring their presentations in this series of posts.

The DDGC has long been committed to the difficult labour that is developing infrastructures for solidarity work in the face of an unfeeling profession categorically positioned to let people wither. Each year we have more examples of pay-to-play scholarly organizations extracting money and other resources from their members only to dismiss these individuals, their political commitments, their communities, and by extension their loved ones in moments when institutional support would matter most.

When has the certainty of being a paid member of a scholarly organization ever facilitated safety and support for academics? The delusion that is purchasing a “membership” is so strong so as to want to give the impression to the subject hailed by the gesture that they belong to “the profession”—a “community.” But these financialized structures have never constituted the profession. They do not and can not hold our community. At their worst, financialized organizations have served—and continue to serve—as depressive instances for scholarly organizing. The ruse of the “membership” gives the scholar an excuse to opt out of the hard work that is being part of a community. You pay your way out of needing to do the work, for the financialized scholarly organization has told you that the best way to be in and support “the profession” is to support it. At their best, they have given some of us a chance to meet one another to realize that our ongoing work must take place elsewhere, away from these structures.

The contributions in this series variously speak to the practice of solidarity, community, and related work within academia. They describe the grind of solidarity and community work. There is much joy in this labor of building and maintaining community solidarity infrastructures. And there is much pain in this labor, too. For to work toward organizing within scholarly contexts always means working against the tide of precaritization and historic/structural oppression upon which the academy is built. Comrades in our field(s) are facing un/underemployment, imprisonment, censorship, and deportation; they don’t have the means to support themselves and their families in their daily lives, and in the professional setting they are facing hostile work environments. Yet others do not face these struggles but see themselves implicated in hostile structures; they try to show up when they can and support their comrades. Navigating the differential power dynamics among us is not easy and will not be easy. But some of us take it upon ourselves to figure out, wherever possible, how to continue to be together and work toward change.

It is now, as ever, urgent that people come together to support one another and work against the various intersecting instances of oppression that proliferate throughout our profession and indeed the world. That is the charge underpinning these contributions.

Table of Contents

“DDFC and the Shift Toward Solidarity Programming for Change” by Siham Bouamer (University of Cincinnati) & Hasheem Hakeem (Northwestern University)

“The DDGC Mutual Aid Network and the Praxis of Interconnectedness in German Studies” by Nichole Neuman (University of Indiana Indianapolis)

“DDGC Cooperatives and Support for Alternative Research Infrastructures” by Suzuko Knott (Connecticut College)

“DDGC Writes and Cross-Hierarchical Solidarities” by Hannah V. Eldridge (University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Cynthia Shin (Indiana University Bloomington)