Affective Challenges of the German Academic Precariat Through Gender, Race, and Class

Hanna was the name of a character through which The Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany illustrated the shortening of the time the contracts in order to assure innovation, creativity and circulation in a short animation. Hanna was portrayed as a young white, childless, middle-class person. In reaction to this, #IchbinHanna (I am Hanna) was the hashtag created in 2021 and widely used on social media to counter this image and protest increasingly scarce permanent positions and precarisation in the German academy. The precarity is intensified when one has children, performs care work or when competitive and dependent relationships arise between professors and others. One feature of German science is also its claim to ‘neutrality’, which puts any kind of so-called political engagement that restricts the contours of knowledge production. In this talk I give a public/personal account of catching up with ‘Hanna’ from an intersectional perspective.