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Please Irritate Me: Female ambition
Event
- Starts on
- 06.05.25
- Ends on
- 06.05.25
19:00 — 20:30
BRICKS Club Berlin
Mohrenstr. 30
10117 Berlin
Event access: Public
When we question things that are supposedly self-evident, we start to see the world differently. How do we know what we should and shouldn’t feel? Why do bodies take on meaning? Helen Ahner researches the dreams, stories, actions, rules, and structures that shape our lives by placing everyday, normal things under the magnifying glass. She is currently studying feelings in sport and investigating how female ambition has changed over the past hundred years.
Looking through archives, Helen Ahner came across newspaper articles from the 1920s debating whether women were suited for competitive sport. From a modern-day perspective, this is an irritating debate – which is why she started researching the historical context and the change in sporting performance standards and in people’s feelings about them. Her aim is to better understand contemporary everyday life and its historical roots. Taking the example of female athletes, Helen Ahner shows how changes in body perception and the feelings associated with it eventually led to people questioning societal rules and changing them.
Ahner’s feeling of irritation acts as a signpost to new questions. Her research subject – the everyday and the supposedly mundane – harbors its own potential for irritation. She constantly finds herself having to explain why popular culture, rituals, or everyday objects are relevant research topics. And yet it is precisely the little things that reflect the bigger picture and make it tangible. Soccer boots that pinch because they were made to fit standard male feet, jokes about aerobics-mad housewives that disparage enthusiasm for sport as a self-indulgent pastime, and “girlboss” accessories that commercialize the female drive to achieve, treating it as a lifestyle, speak volumes about how social participation and ambition are negotiated every day.
The event will be held in German.
Please register on the website of the Wübben Stiftung Wissenschaft.
"Please Irritate Me" is a joint series of events organised by Die Junge Akademie and the Wübben Stiftung Wissenschaft.
- Topics
participating Members
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Helen Ahner
- person_research_subject
- Historical and Cultural Anthropology
- institution
- Universität Wien
- Phone
- +43-1-4277-44007
- helen.ahner@univie.ac.at
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