On the topic of “Flight, Sex, Discourse,” the educationalist Paul Mecheril gave a guest speech at the New Year’s Reception of the City of Bremen on January 13, 2016.
He succeeds in his speech in an “easily understandable, profound and far-reaching analysis of a very current topic: flight. He explains the causes of flight, postcolonial backgrounds, demands modesty instead of growth of the geopolitically privileged and explains why the current talk about refugees and migrants in Germany takes his breath away. For example, because ‘racist representations and speeches […] are socially acceptable again in post-national-socialist Germany of the 21st century [sind]’, such as the much-discussed cover of Focus after the sexual assaults in Cologne, which sets up contrasts between ‘us’ and ‘the others’ that we already know from colonial times.”(Dresden Postcolonial)
“[…] How is it possible for people to live well and not at the expense of others, especially those who are distant near. In my opinion, this is the ethical question of the 21st century. How can we live well here in Bremen without children and women in Bangladesh having to work under the most deplorable conditions? Dealing with this issue is first and foremost a political task. But it is also a pedagogical task, in my opinion, I speak as an educationalist and pathetically, the pedagogical task of the 21st century. Thus, the first maxim of pedagogy of the 21st century is. so not: How can we train human capital? How can we contribute to subjects that serve the more and more totalized economistic logic? The first maxim of pedagogy in the 21st century is also not: What contribution can we make to the preservation of a particular “we”, such as the nation or the people? […]”(Excerpt from the speech by Paul Mecheril)
The entire lecture can be downloaded as a manuscript in the second version on the website of the University of Bremen.