Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature Award); The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights); and Body, Remember: A Memoir.  He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out.  He received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship and grants from the DAAD and Canada Council for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College

Roundtable: Undoing Discrimination? Diverse in Berlin?

29th May 01.00 – 02.30 pm | Miriam Camara, Sanni Est, Kenny Fries, Rhea Ramjohn Moderation: Samie Blasingame

Diversity is a "must-have" in the identity of most Berlin cultural institutions. Sometimes they even invest resources for the multicolored flag that flies over them. So are diversity measures just another set of methods of solidifying what they claim to change? This panel, moderated by Samie Blasingame, puts it to the test: what does it look like in Berlin's cultural landscape? What are the inconspicuous formal routines, the small informal habits, the official and unofficial rules that create the feeling of running into a wall that one claims is not there? Are there any institutions somewhere that are undercutting the perfidious game and are there any impulses, strategies, methods, or people that are at least beginning to dismantle the supposedly non-existent walls? Are there perhaps even already best practice examples?

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