Current Research
- Social climate change impact and transnational governance for sustainability in southern Africa
- Comics studies: questions of form, postcoloniality and underviolences
- Into the Wild? Eine Einführung in die Gesellschaft (und auch in die Kultursoziologie)
1. EPIC-GREEN: Epistemic Governance and Cultural Practices in Green Transformation
EPIC-GREEN rests on two assumptions that challenge the dominant discourse. It rejects the notion that rural and disadvantaged communities lack climate literacy. Our recent research shows that there is great expertise available as people in the communities are well informed. Such expertise, situated at the interface between traditional knowledge and science communication, needs to be recognized by the major social and political actors and integrated into mainstreamed agendas. We strategically foster the civil society sphere as an important realm for civic participation, agency, and the readiness to take responsibility on local level, focusing on the common good of a GT of the Botswana society. It is key to EPIC-GREEN to collaborate with the social actors in the communities and develop a platform for civil society communication and networking on behalf of GT that enables actors to improve their agency and introduce new and better sustainable practices.
2. Underviolences and Comics: Forms of Violences in Graphic Narrative [a research project in absolute preparation]
Our time is marked by many explicit violences and by the emergence of new, persistent forms of violence that are not readily perceived in public or private domains and that are often only suggested or intimated through representation. We propose the underviolences concept to account for violences that are material and real, but manifest beneath physical bodies and places, existing beneath the threshold of social recognition. Underviolences are implicit, formative, subtle forms of violence that are hidden within representations of violence. By exposing underviolences, this research will develop a new paradigm to better understand current forms of violences that demand social response. Research on violence – aggression against common values and individuals – focuses on acts of manifest violence and forms of structural, symbolic, or epistemic violence. We continue the study of media representations of violence, advancing the underviolences concept, its representation and real-world relevance through an examination of underviolences in comics, a medium that is particularly able to communicate underviolences due to its formal ambiguities and inherent gaps. Through multi-disciplinary lenses and across nations and comics genres, the proposed project will explore how comics frame underviolences, develop a new understanding of the forms violences take in our world, and introduce conceptual tools that can lead to a more nuanced and exhaustive understanding of contemporary world violences and the challenges they foster.
3. Into the Wild. Eine Einführung in die Gesellschaft (und auch in die Kultursoziologie)
Was Gesellschaft ist, wie sehr wir in die Gesellschaft integriert und an sie gebunden sind, wird vor allem deutlich, wenn wir Gesellschaft verlassen wollen. Insofern verhandelt der sog. „Aussteiger“ auf paradigmatische Weise die Frage nach der Ordnung der Gesellschaft, nach ihren Grenzen und ihrer hegemonialen Kraft. Das Buch führt aus kultursoziologischer Perspektive ein in Grundbegriffe der Soziologie. Dazu folgt es Sean Penns Spielfilm Into the Wild (USA 2007), an dem sich exemplarisch lernen lässt, wie sich Gesellschaft zu ihren Individuen verhält.