FZ: The Centre for Continuing Education (ZEW) is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and the first continuing education course "Social Justice and Diversity Training", which you led, took place back in 2012. This course is not only one of the oldest, but also one of the most popular courses at the continuing education centre. When you take stock - what successes can you look back on?

GP: The continuing education course "Social Justice and Diversity" has been running at ZEW since 2012 and has been received with great interest and commitment right from the start. It is now the 24th course, which will soon come to an end, with three more courses starting in 2025 and two more already planned for 2026. When we think back to 2012, when we advertised our training course and the rapid and ever-growing interest in it, it becomes clear that the training course is in great demand.

Participants come from all over Germany, but also from Austria and Switzerland. In the meantime, we have already organised six training courses in parallel. This is a great success for us and also a success for ZEW. The continuing education programme offered is a unique selling point of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam,  i.e. this continuing education programme is not available anywhere else. This is because we train social justice and diversity trainers according to our concept, as described in the "Praxishandbuch Social Justice und Diversity" (2012) and then together with Mac Czollek and Corinne Kaszner (2019, Beltz/Juvenat Verlag) and in further articles.

We at the Institute for Social Justice and Radical Diversity are very pleased to have managed to bring a very specific diversity concept to the market so successfully and to realise that it has been a highly valued and widely used approach for some time. However, it has always been important to us not to stand still, but to revise and develop our concept, to remain in the current discourse, which we are still doing today.

Our success is therefore the demand for our programme, but above all the fact that the trained participants carry the content and methods of the "Social Justice and Diversity" concept that we have developed into a wide variety of professional fields - from social work, social projects in the areas of children, young people and adult education to political education programmes in hospitals and care facilities, universities, colleges, schools and authorities or the arts and culture. We are also pleased to have played an active role in shaping some of the 30 years of ZEW.

FZ: What surprising or challenging experiences have you had during the training courses? Have you encountered any misunderstandings or resistance?

GP: When we look back at individual training courses, it is less surprises than challenges that we have experienced. In our concept, we don't work in a moralising way, with "praise and blame" or prohibitions, and we have repeatedly experienced that this approach was initially alienating for some participants. There was sometimes a sense of alienation and caution until participants began to trust this approach.

At the beginning of our training programme, our structural approach was not yet as well known as it is today; there were sometimes challenges in communicating it. In order to make it clear that certain people do not only experience everyday discrimination, but that discriminatory practices are deeply rooted in social fields, we focussed on this and developed the term structural discrimination, i.e. the interconnectedness and interaction of the individual, institutional and cultural levels of discrimination. You can read more about this in our book and articles.

What we also experienced over the years was that there were always new phenomena that we had to deal with intensively, for example the demand for a trigger warning when a thematic focus was on violent topics. It wasn't the trigger warning that was challenging, but the choice of where to place it, as our topics are violent topics because our training programme focuses on issues such as anti-Semitism, racism, classism, sexism, etc. There were few misunderstandings.

There have been few misunderstandings, only occasionally over the years have some participants expected something different in terms of content, for example further training on organisational development or conflict resolution. However, we were able to counter this by organising mandatory information evenings, integrating FAQs on our website and thus clarifying what we do and do not offer. Perhaps there are also some surprises: looking at the many training courses we have organised so far, we are also surprised at how many people we have been able to inspire with our concept. There are self-organised SOJU groups in various cities, a regular SOJU Zoom Caf¨¦ etc., i.e. places where graduates can exchange ideas, form alliances and spread the word about our concept.

FZ: What is your vision for a fairer and more inclusive society?

GP: That's a very big question. In our book "Praxishandbuch Social Justice und Diversity" (2029), we describe the vision as a concrete utopia with radical diversity as the foundation of plural societies and their institutions. This emphasises that diversity cannot be conceived solely on the basis of the given distribution of privileges and/or visibility, as diversity in contrast to a position of dominance or a supposed normality, for example. Rather, we are interested in thinking of diversity from a state in which the social conditions would already be different, and in aligning our own practice with this. This utopia is concrete insofar as it is anchored in actions in the here and now in the form of a critical practice. This means acting with regard to institutional spaces, discourses and cultural practices in favour of the realisation of social justice (as justice of recognition, distribution, empowerment and realisation) and in favour of a mainstream of heterogeneity, diversity and radical diversity.

In the training programme, we teach radical diversity as a critical practice that is concerned with changing homogeneous institutions and practices towards a mainstream of radical diversity and social plurality. Together with the participants, we explore concrete options for action in their areas of work and life. We therefore directly link the concrete utopia of radical diversity with strategies for change and action aimed at an inclusive and participatory society for all people in their radical diversity.

What is important to us here is that it is not about people being different because they do and look at things differently, because they feel or act differently; rather, their radical diversity only becomes relevant when they have privileges or experience discrimination due to certain diversity categories. The concrete utopia we are concerned with is a plural society, a plural democracy in which people can live without discrimination. Holding on to this does not mean being naive and thinking that we will live to see it. It means formulating a distant goal in order to be able to focus on and tackle practices that are critical of discrimination. We do not use the term plurality to mean being able to do anything. For us, the frame of reference is always central, namely the principle of non-violence and the validity of the UN Charter of Human Rights.