Gramling and research team outside the Department of Intercultural German Studies at Göttingen. Left to right: David Gramling, Yamaç Gelgeç, Lukas Eschenbach, Sophia Betker, and Dr. Jacqueline Gutjahr.
In Summer 2026, Professor David Gramling visited the University of Göttingen.
As a Hannah Arendt fellow, Dr. Gramling spent the summer in Germany leading the project “Linguistic Disobedience and the Democracies of the Future”, a follow-up to a book he wrote in 2019 with Michelle Moyd and Yuliya Komska. Gramling’s research team included Yamaç Gelgeç, Lukas Eschenbach, Sophia Betker, and Dr. Jacqueline Gutjahr of the Department of Intercultural German Studies at Göttingen. Together, and alongside youth partners as young as 14 years old from around the city of Göttingen, the team built two workbooks on the practice of linguistic disobedience—one in German, one in English, to be collaboratively published in the coming years.
The political context for this work was intense. In the fall of 2026, various provinces in Germany are considering a vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to be elected to government. Student movements around the country are trying to stop this rightward, fascist lurch. Gramling took part not only in research on civil and linguistic disobedience in this current moment, but also joined student-led actions and blockades against the AfD around Germany—in Erfurt, Berlin, Göttingen, and elsewhere.
AfD is an explicitly anti-migration, anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-Muslim, climate-denialist party that seeks to return Germany to an ethnically exclusive, white supremacist nation. The research team’s work therefore needed to bridge research in Applied Linguistics and German Studies with the political and cultural matters of the day that were urgent for Göttingen youth of various multicultural, multilingual backgrounds.
Gramling’s Winter 2026 German 101 and 102 classes will draw on some of these recent experiences, sharing with CENES students what it was like to be on the ground in the midst of a momentous student-led movement to strengthen pluralism and democracy for the future in Europe.
