55 Voices for Democracy: Sabine_ Hark

Sabine_ Hark on Caring in Solidarity
“What would a democratic way of life look like that gives plurality central importance?” asks the 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow Sabine_ Hark in their address. Through the lens of Thomas Mann’s anti-fascist radio broadcasts Listen, Germany!, the sociologist and professor of Gender Studies invokes ideas of living with differences through a shared social bond and individual accountability-notions that lean on Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi, political friendship, and Olga Tokarczuk’s understanding of tenderness. Sharing and repairing the world, Hark_ argues, encompasses awareness for divisions, the willingness to embrace, and live alongside them: “We must reinvent ‘caring in solidarity’ as a global political practice, actively resist the normalization of violence, and encourage tenderness towards everyone, regardless of their belonging and identity. For this is the essence of democracy.”
Sabine_ Hark has been Professor of Gender Studies and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Technical University of Berlin since 2009. Hark has researched and taught at universities around the globe, including in Germany, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, and the USA. In addition to numerous positions as a board member and co-founder (of, for example, the organization WIR MACHEN DAS - wearedoingit e.V.), Hark was a co-editor of the journal Feministische Studien from 2008-2023.
The series is presented by the Thomas Mann House in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
For more information visit vatmh.org/55voices