Lesekreise. Kollektive Praktiken der Lektüre

Reading groups are currently experiencing a renaissance. They can be found in libraries, queer bookshops, prisons, and online reading groups as well as in the context of trade union work: Communal reading has different effects to individual reading. But what specific forms does it take—and what spaces of experience and possibility does it facilitate?

Assuming that practices of collective reading intertwine the aesthetic, community-building, and political dimensions of reading in unique ways, this workshop will explore the format of the reading group. We want to highlight historical as well as contemporary forms of collective reading within political, academic, artistic, or trade union contexts.

The workshop brings together academics from different disciplines with facilitators and members of reading circles, librarians, booksellers, and publishers. Drawing on their respective areas of expertise, experiences, and perspectives, they will collectively reflect on the practices and potential of collective reading. The format of the reading group will be explored in two ways: Through presentations and panel discussions, but also through explorative formats in which modes of reading will be tried and discussed together on site.

A cooperation between the cluster of excellence 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective with the ZfL, the Literaturforum im Brechthaus as part of the AK Politische Ästhetiken, and diffrakt | centre for political periphery.