DFG Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies: "Futures of Sustainability"
The DFG Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies is a space for engaged international debate, bringing together doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers and international fellows from a range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to work collaboratively on a theory-driven analysis of the present in the face of a shrinking habitability of the planet. The Centre started its work in September 2019 for a first funding phase under the leadership of Sighard Neckel and Frank Adloff, and will start its second funding period in December 2023 under the leadership of Frank Adloff, Christine Hentschel and Stefan C. Aykut. The new phase is particularly dedicated to questions of social conflicts over environmental sustainability, futures in the face of crises and catastrophes, and different social relations with nature.
The starting point for the second funding phase of the DFG Humanities Centre "Futures of Sustainability" is the intensification of conflicts around sustainability in the context of ongoing ecological destruction. In the face of entangled and mutually reinforcing crises – the climate crisis and weather extremes, Covid-19 and lockdown protests, the war in Ukraine and inflation – the future rather appears as broken and dystopian than as an open horizon that can be positively shaped.
At the same time, situations of crisis also create new spaces for action. In light of increasing pressure by diverse social actors and protest movements, new thinking evolves about societal relations to nature and the role of the state in the economy; new infrastructural investments are planned for and legal innovations introduced. In the second funding phase, we will thus reflect on these societal struggles and examine their theoretical implications by pursuing new thematic foci on four social arenas: the arena of participation and inclusion, the arena of law, the arena of taxonomies, and the arena of meaning-making and spirituality.
Beyond the academic debates with international fellows The Humanities Centre is also committed to a public sociology and seeks the exchange with various political and societal actors in Hamburg and beyond. This will be facilitated by partnerships with cultural institutions and through our “Writers in Residence” programme, which offers a space to engage in fruitful collaboration with journalists, writers and artists who explore matters of sustainability in their work.
More information on the website of the Centre [Link].