Coordinators: Dr. Urs Lindner, Dr. Christine Unrau (on leave)

Introduction

Remembering is not a purely mental process. It also has a material dimension. But what exactly does this materiality consist of, and what effects does it have on the politics of memory? While these questions have always been of interest to memory studies, they came to the forefront in the analysis of sites and objects of remembrance during its so-called “second wave” in the 1980s and 1990s. In the current “fourth wave,” they are imporant to the turn toward posthumanism and the Anthropocene. However, so far, they have not been systematically explored.

The laboratory aims to address this gap. Its two main questions are: How can the materiality of memory be theorized? And how can it be operationalized in the study of concrete practices and regimes of remembrance? The lab thus focuses on bodies, objects, and collectivities. Remembrance is always embodied and has an affective dimension. It occurs in relation to all kinds of things, from monuments and theme parks to mundane memorabilia and archives. Additionally, it is socially shaped in the double sense of being part of a specific collective that connects embodied humans to non-human objects, and being conditioned by broader memory cultures. One particularly relevant question in this context is how “collective memory” can be understood within a materialist framework. The lab explores this question further by reworking concepts such as “assemblage memory” (Red Chidgey) or “agonistic memory” (Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen).

Coordinators: Prof. Dr. Franziska Martinsen, Dr. Sebastian Meurer, Prof. Dr. Andreas Niederberger, Dr. Eva Weiler

Introduction

Climate change and the sustainability of human existence are undoubtedly among the greatest challenges currently facing us. It is therefore hardly surprising that political, social and scientific debates are dominated by the question of how to address the threat posed by climate change and how to realise more sustainable ways of living. The debate on the relationship between sustainability and democracy has so far primarily centred on whether and how democracies can respond adequately to climate change. In light of this focus on governance, a central debate concerns the question of whether democratic procedures are best suited to bring about the necessary policies or whether forms of enlightened authoritarianism or expertocracy might be more suitable. Corresponding discussions aim at reflecting on the dimensions and characteristics of democracies that hinder or possibly even counteract necessary solutions. For example, research highlights the tension between short-term election cycles and the need for long-term strategies, the tension between anti-elitist and populist tendencies and the recognition and utilisation of scientific insights, as well as the tension between the local nature of democratic processes and the global nature of climate change and its effects. The lab builds on the existing research, but also aims to go beyond it and therefore asks, for instance, whether the usual, rather externalised relationship between climate change/sustainability as a problem on the one hand and democracy as the way to deal with/solve the problem on the other hand is the only or even the most plausible way to examine their complex relationship. It may well be that democracy itself generates or promotes unsustainable ways of living and doing business, or that democracy presupposes certain ‘natural’ conditions or resources that make its continued existence in the current circumstances (more) precarious.

At the heart of the lab is a ‘Fellow Group’ that brings together experts from various disciplines and from the non-university sector to jointly explore promising avenues of interdisciplinary research on the relationship between climate change/sustainability and democracy as well as to identify potential points of political intervention. The group of UDE members and external fellows meets repeatedly for intensive workshops and experiments with new formats of collaboration in the process. The Fellow Group is united not least by their willingness to engage in interdisciplinary collaboration and to explore initially unfamiliar and unusual perspectives and approaches beyond their own research and reflections.

Coordinators: Prof. Dr. Andreas Niederberger, Dr. Christian Scheper – currently on hold

 Intoduction

Our interest in this thematic field is based on the impression that we are currently not only witnessing new fundamental social conflicts (e.g. over border regimes and migration; labour, production, trade and consumption; identity and recognition; ecological planetary boundaries), but also new forms and narratives of carrying out conflicts or of conceiving of what is being fought over in them. These conflicts have both domestic and transnational dimensions and they do not (necessarily) lead to increased or new forms of transnational cooperation, but they are also not necessarily carried out in a purely violent manner. Especially where cooperation itself is of high normative importance and does not result directly from economic calculations, individual actor interests, shared values or other interrelationships between the respective conflict parties (e.g. global climate protection), it often seems to fail. Here we see an interesting starting point for a search movement for new explanations for the changes of the transnational and especially for the political dimensions of its reconfiguration.
So far, there have been three main types of explanatory models for the emergence of cooperation: first, material interests or goals that can ultimately only or better be achieved cooperatively; second, shared normative or value attitudes that commit actors to mutual reference or respect, even if they do not arise directly from their interests/goals; and third, finally, political decision-making in and about the shared social space under the premise that this decision-making is an ongoing and revisable process and does not permanently and exclusively privilege some interests/goals over others. In view of what we are currently observing, we would venture the following diagnosis: The conflictual nature of the transnational constellation is by no means to be seen as a ‘malign’ feature per se – as the failure of a normative global cooperation project, so to speak. Rather, it represents a qualitatively new phase of the (always already existing) genuinely political moment of social cooperation that also becomes visible transnationally – that is, of what has already been indicated in the third explanatory model. At the same time, however, the changes cannot be explained solely in terms of a politicisation of global governance; nor can they be explained solely by observing an increasing questioning of the liberal script and corresponding markers of normative insecurity. Rather, it seems to us to be more fundamentally about the question of the constitution of authority, that is, about what actually constitutes the political negotiation and interweaving of interests, goals, and so on and what distinguishes it from mere imposition or domination. For some, for example, the political requires specifically the concession of being able to renounce in principle the realization of interests, while for others it presupposes the very recognition that certain identities or interests are non-negotiable. Social conflicts are not only about different interests or ideas of norms, the primacy of which is the subject of political struggle, but also about forms of collectivity, the constitution of agency, and the formation of political authority in general.
We therefore propose to investigate in Research Lab 3 the dynamics and contested nature of authority and its formation (or not). How and when does authority emerge transnationally? How does supposedly stable authority become unstable and an object of conflict? More fundamentally, we can ask: How is the transnational changing with regard to the reasons and drivers for social cooperation? And what is global cooperation if we understand it not primarily as a normative goal, but as an expression of changing social conditions and political authority?

Previous Coordinators: Prof. Dr. Stephan Scheel, Dr. Laurens Lauer, Prof. Dr. Sigrid Quack – currently on hold

 Introduction

This research strand is concerned with how the production of different forms of knowledge and evidence, but also various types of non-knowledge, shape and reconfigure societal life and transnational cooperation in times of datafication, fake news and post-truth. Recent scholarship has shown that the initiation, implementation, (re-)evaluation and development of transnational cooperation in various policy fields, ranging from environmental protection to policing and crime control, infrastructure planning, global health or migration management is shaped by the production of knowledge, but also different types of non-knowledge, such as ambiguity, doubt, ignorance, secrecy or undone science. Particular artefacts of knowledge production such as statistical tables, maps, rankings or graphs depicting numerical facts play a key role in constituting certain issues as shared ‘matters of concern’ (Latour) and to gather a set of diverse, previously unconnected actors around a policy issue. These knowledge artefacts initiate and shape forms of cooperation, but they may also help to destabilise and undo them. In fact, they themselves frequently become the subject of disputes, contestations and fierce political struggles and debates.
The situation accordingly resonates with the public to an increasing degree, too, affecting citizens’ perception of relevant matters, their political attitudes, and – more generally – the conditions of their coexistence in various ways. On the one hand, the amount of available data and information has reached new levels, which leaves people with unprecedented opportunities to gain insights into various subject areas, events, and ways of life. On the other side, data and information are not equally prevalent or consumed (i.e., echo-chambers), nor do they have uniform effects. In fact, the adverse repercussions of this development dominate the scholarly debate and draw attention to the variety of involved interpretation schemes and rationales that imply disparate understandings of facts, validity, and truthfulness and resorts to different orders of worth. These phenomena cannot be grasped in terms of their underlying logics alone, though, since they rest on social practices that constitute social groupings, their experts, and authorities in the first place and, thus, connect and separate different social strata and institutional domains.  
These interrelationships take on particular weight in the context of global and transnational cooperation, where the production of knowledge is shaped by epistemic communities and struggles, professional standards, and political economies of (de)funding. What’s more, technological and methodological innovation have fundamentally changed the preconditions for transnational or global cooperation and created new fields of action altogether. International networks of investigative collectives using open data to collaboratively researching crimes against human rights, global tax evasion schemes, or public mis-/disinformation are telling examples for this development. They also draw attention to data’s context of origin, possible intentions of their generation (if any), and expedient ways of utilizing them, as recent debates about ‘the end of theory’ in the age of big data have pointedly emphasized. The points lead back to the practices of knowledge production and their inherent logics in a range of social sectors and policy fields and asks how the interrelated production of knowledge and non-knowledge affects and is shaped by transnational cooperation in times of fake news and post-truth and the datafication of everything.