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Diversity Talks

The network of queer* employees at TU Dortmund University - "Queer* Peers TU" invites you to a series of discussion events during Diversity Month in May.

The aim of these diversity talks is to raise awareness of (gender) diversity and queer lifestyles, to make them visible and thus also discussable.

Students, employees from technology, administration and science, as well as professors, are cordially invited to join in, get informed and start talking together. Because dealing with diversity concerns us all.

The talks are held in German.

We will be showing the short film speaking flowers by Conrad Veit and Charlotte Maria Kätzl and talking to them about their film afterwards.

Charlotte Maria Kätzl (*1993 in Rosenheim) and Conrad Veit (*1987 in Duisburg) are an artist duo who graduated in 2022 with a master's degree in fine arts from the Braunschweig University of Art. In addition to various group exhibitions (including Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Mönchehaus, Goslar, Landesmuseum Koblenz), their work has also been shown at the Berlinale, Kasseler Dokfest, European Media Art Festival Osnabrück, Hamburg Short Film Festival, Stuttgarter Filmwinter and internationally via the Goethe Institute (USA) and the British Film Institute, among others. In her works, fluid figures proliferate between animal and human, between plant and mushroom and between the sexes. The result is a bizarre cosmos in which the focus is on playing with the figurative and the different. A game that generates diversity and aims to create confusion by creating figures and identities based on Kätzl's costumes, which playfully and ironically question supposedly binary boundaries and cannot be clearly categorized. With the deliberate use of the simplest means of production, the constant recombination and decontextualization of set pieces from the pop culture of past decades and an almost exuberant citation and adaptation of film-historical styles, figurative stagings are created in film and video, photography and spatial installations. Kätzl and Veit prefer to work with analogue cameras, which become autonomous third players in their artistic practice when they photograph and thus alienate the naturalistic world in unpredictable colors, moods and disturbances.

Moderation: Sarah von Querfurth

Registration is not required, just come along!

To participate via Zoom

Many working women are confronted with menopausal symptoms. Symptoms such as hot flushes, sleep disturbances and concentration problems often affect women's career decisions. It can lead to them turning down promotions, reducing hours or retiring early. The MenoSupport project aims to support affected women and develop innovative measures for companies to promote workplace health for women going through the menopause.

Speaker: Julia Memmert from the MenoSupport project
Moderator: Pia Kluth

Registration is not required, just come along!

To participate via Zoom

With the rapid development in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the question of how diverse AI is is becoming increasingly important. How do such systems represent our bodies, for example, and what implications do such representations, especially with a focus on gender, have for our own perception?

Based on data on the gender distribution of occupational groups within the EU, we try to find an approach by assessing possible biases in generative AI. With the help of two multimodal models for the generation and evaluation of images, we approach the question of whether images generated by AI tend to be biased along socio-demographic axes such as gender and racialization, and what role our society plays in this context. We provide an insight into philosophical and sociological theories relevant to our research question. We will also show which methods we have applied to the empirical data generated by the AI.

Afterwards, we would like to invite you to a discussion in which we consider AI as a speculative tool for uncovering social biases.

Speakers: Lena Nedwed studies Philosophy and Gender Studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum. Lena's focus is on the topics of misogyny, antifeminism and feminist movements. Tim Trappen is studying for a Master's degree in German and Gender Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. Tim specializes in computer-aided linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Moderation: Volker Mattick

Registration is not required, just come along!

To participate via Zoom