Spotlight on: Karoline Färber
Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Erfurt in Germany, where I’m Co-PI of a research project called KNOWPRO. Through KNOWPRO, we study knowledge production in German and European peace and security policy. My own part of the project takes the military intervention in Afghanistan as a case study. I trace how knowledge on Afghanistan and the mission circulates between think tanks, academia, and politics, who gets to be an expert in the first place, and which insights make it into policy (it’s not many!).
Outside of academia, I love to hike (that’s the German in me) and do Iyengar yoga, and I’m also an avid reader of contemporary and historical novels. Recent great finds were Susan Choi’s Flashlight, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere, and Michelle Gallen’s Factory Girls. I’m always looking for recommendations, so if you have any, I would love to hear them!
What are your research interests?
My research interests are grounded in a moment of feminist curiosity during the gloomy autumn of 2017. It was my first day as an intern at the German Federal Foreign Office. When I was shown the interns’ office, the sign next to the door read Praktikanten, the masculine plural of the German word for interns. As a woman, I felt as if I wasn't supposed to be there. (I didn't question my racialised presence, though. After all, everyone I saw was white like me.)
That small sign made me notice how gender, and later race and class, shaped my own and others' experiences of navigating the Ministry. Over the following years, these struggles became more visible: diplomats formed staff organisations, pushed for a reckoning with a patriarchal and often racist organisational culture, and asked who makes foreign policy, and for whom. Even after Germany committed to a feminist foreign policy in 2021, feminism remained deeply contested.
Today, I’m a scholar of diplomacy and foreign policy, working on feminist foreign policy; gender, race and class in diplomacy; and knowledge production in foreign policy.
Who is your favourite feminist icon?
That would be my Mama. She grew up in a working-class family as the daughter of a Silesian refugee and a farmer-turned-postal-worker, and was the first in her family to complete secondary school and go to university. What makes her my feminist icon is not just her defying expectations but that she’s never been willing to keep the peace for the sake of everyone else’s comfort. She is a feminist killjoy extraordinaire: she points out what’s wrong even if it makes her the ‘difficult woman’. Growing up with her taught me to notice the small everyday things and connect those to power structures, which is perhaps why a small sign on an office door made me curious about gender in diplomacy years later.
What are three sources you would recommend to others interested in feminist IR generally or your research topic in particular?
I have been influenced by many feminist researchers, but two stand out (and they’re both sociologists, not IR scholars): Dorothy Smith and Nirmal Puwar. Smith's Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People gave me my understanding of the social world and my method, and Puwar's Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place gave me the language for what I felt on my first day at the Foreign Office. Both have fundamentally changed how I see, know, and exist in the world. Looking at an institution from the standpoint of those who seem out of place uncovers how power works, but also where it is resisted and disrupted. Smith and Puwar also offer a powerful reminder that all feminist research should be research for people, and not knowledge produced for academia’s sake alone.
My third recommendation is fiction and popular culture. Novels, films, and TV series are a great way to learn about different experiences and social worlds beyond our own, which, to me, is the main driver behind my feminist curiosity. Take Michelle Gallen’s Factory Girls and Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls (one of the best TV series of all time, in my opinion). They both follow young women growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, and show how conflict, class, and gender shape everyday life, which is precisely where international politics are.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently working on the manuscript of my first book! It’s an ethnography of feminist politics in the German Federal Foreign Office, drawing on nine years of unique access to the Ministry before, during, and after the adoption of a feminist foreign policy, and I hope to submit it next year.
I am also developing my own research project on how East German diplomats imagined and tried to build a socialist world order. The idea came from an interview with former East German diplomats for a chapter on women in German diplomatic institutions. They spoke about their experience of a socialist system that promised equality but was still deeply gendered and classed, and I’ve been really curious to learn more about that.