Another application

Your Small American
Application to the 2007-2008 ____________

Communities, Research, Action, and Community Research/Action in Berlin, 1918-1933

My project for the 2007-2008 X$#%* seminar will investigate the seminar’s theme of “Communities: Research and Action” through the lens of my dissertation project, which is an analysis of communities of sexually unorthodox people, their research, their action, and what I argue was their “research/action” in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. My dissertation asks, “What is community?” and answers that question by examining two key components of community: research and action. For example, members of Berlin’s lesbian, gay and transvestite communities engaged in research that led to action. This, I argue, was “research/action.” Activists such as Magnus Hirschfeld, German homosexual celebrity, renowned in Europe and North American(1) as a sex scientist, founder of his own research institute in the Tiergarten and swingin’ transvestite, researched the sexuality of other people and then took action by dressing up as women. The police thought Hirschfeld was running a brothel(2) but he was actually running a research institute. My dissertation asks “and why is that so often the case??” and you will too, when you read my seminar project, “Communities, Research, Action, and Community Research-Action.”

I would be an upstanding member of this seminar because I have participated in many seminars, as well as in communities, in research, and naturally also in action. My deep interest in receiving the $5,000 stipend for participating in this seminar will allow me to bring to the seminar an interdisciplinary perspective on communities, research and action, and also to buy milk frother. My new milk frother will, indeed, bring to the seminar its interdisciplinary perspective on the actions of milk frothing and coffee drinking in the formation of communities of lesbians, gay men and transvestites in Berlin and elsewhere. I am sincerely committed to the concept of receiving $5,000, thereby putting my research into the action of buying clothing, food and, indeed, a milk frother, and look forward to participating in the important work of the seminar, which will contribute a new perspective to scholarship on communities, their research and their action.

1 By which I mean, North American except for Mexico and probably not most of Canada, but maybe Toronto.
2 Really!