Article 3
Performance Only in Hollywood
Searching for the Agency of Support Structures in Academia
Once, a director’s phone call could end an actress’s career, and the film-making industry ran for decades on that consuming fear. After a century and one loud year in 2017, Hollywood workers cultivated the conditions to answer back: a union with teeth, a press hungry for the story, a public willing to believe the smaller – yet known and widely loved – voice. This did not instantly bring justice, not reliably; but it created a lever which can be pulled. German academia has spent that same century perfecting the opposite art: the high levels of hierarchy that never have to explain themselves, and in the rare cases they do, all happening behind closed doors, in a complicit silence. And sadly, a doctoral researcher screamed at, threatened with a ruined future, harassed, has no lever at all: no famous name, no structural body to fight their cause. They only have the established institutional processes, slow and fully dependent to the power abusers. These processes lacking autonomy and agency are worth tracing, because the gap they leave is a scandal that never quite becomes news.
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