Who we are
Want to know who's behind this comic and what all this “green” is about? Meet the whole team below!
The writing: Grünbergkollektiv
We are a multi-professional team at the University of Tübingen, Germany, involved in social sciences in a variety of ways. We have a penchant for cinnamon tea, good humor, powerful women and smart thinking.
Prof. Dr. Ursula Offenberger is a professor with a focus on teaching at the Methods Center of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences. With an interest in pragmatism, sociology history and gender studies, and a penchant for comic experiments, she initiated the comic project. She also explained what she had in mind in a lecture series organized by the Methods Center in the winter semester 2019/20 (for more on this, see related information and here.)
Karina Wasitschek, Leah Stange, Sofia Kohler and Wasiliki Papagianni are students at the University of Tübingen and are crazy about social science topics. And they love cake.
We also received writing support from the participants of the seminar on "Chicago Pragmatism" during the winter semester 2019/20. In particular, David Ratzel, Felicitas Braun, Katharina Weyland, and Lennart Harting each created a background text and kindly shared it with us. Thanks for that!
We all love the color green. For this reason, and because Ursula has a connection to the town of Grünberg, we named ourselves the Grünbergkollektiv.
We are aware that we are all white women with a European background and that this forms and shapes our view on how we see the world in general and the themes of the comic in particular. Our intention was to make the comic as inclusive and low-threshold as possible. In doing so, it was important to us to focus on people, places, and works that have received comparatively less attention from previous historiography. Telling histories means selecting and narrowing down. For example, our narrative about the Hull House Settlement is limited to a period in Chicago when the main influx of immigrants came from Europe. Because we (can) certainly not meet all needs in this webcomic, we welcome constructive criticism.
Zum Comic!
The drawing: Comicartist
Maike Gerstenkorn has a master's degree in literary and cultural theory and has been working as a freelance illustrator, comic artist and teacher for 10 years. Besides social science topics she loves fairy tales from all over the world, Egyptian and Norse mythology and pen and paper RPGs.
She was assisted by Maria Trofimova.
The visual: Filmmakers
Cinematically we were accompanied during the project by Eva Oswald and her team. With a lot of patience and even more tolerance for unusual settings, she made a short film for our project. You can see it here:
The Technology: Web developer
Kevin Körner has a degree in computer science and has been working in the exciting, interdisciplinary field of digital humanities since his graduation. His focus is on the creation of web-based applications as well as serious games and gamification. He likes to read comics and sometimes plays (online) games illustrated in comic style. With the help of the application JasCom (JavaScript Webcomic) he created, he gave the webcomic a place in the World Wide Web and thus brought it to life.
Annika Nagat supports the team by continuously configuring the JasCom application as new chapters are released.
We are incredibly grateful to have discovered these two in the Digital Humanities; they have shown us that social science and computer science can form a very rewarding symbiosis.
You can find out more about Digital Humanities in Tübingen here:
Digital Humanities