Research Fields and Themes
The term “applied humanities” is the center’s focal point. We delve into its conceptual underpinnings, aiming to reconstruct how and why the term has been employed in different historical situations and social configurations. At the same time, we take “application” as a novel analytical and heuristic concept, investigating how exactly humanities knowledge is applied and how those processes of knowledge application impact politically upon their surroundings. Such world-making effects can be seen, for instance, in the humanities’ critical reflection on and reconfiguration of social structures, ways of life, and public discourse, or in the provision of specific bodies of knowledge such as visual habits in art history and listening skills in musicology.
In the center’s initial funding phase, we will primarily explore two areas: the politics of practice, and infrastructural thinking in the humanities.
Politics of Practice
Our first focus, “Politics of Practice,” challenges the prevalent notion that the humanities is a solely theoretical domain, shaped by contemplation, thought, and a distanced viewpoint. Instead, we turn to the array of micropolitical practices within the humanities that implicitly or explicitly disseminate “guiding knowledge” to the public—in other words, knowledge that perpetuates cultural repertoires of experience or that nurtures professional expertise and particular techniques of reading, commentary, translation, critique, and reflection.
Infrastructural Thinking
The second focus, “Infrastructural Thinking,” explores the interaction between humanities practice, political theory, collective imagination, and infrastructures such as universities, publishers, funding institutions, and political and technical systems. We examine a series of different historical contexts to ask how infrastructural measures across different regions and periods have influenced thought and action in the humanities, and how the humanities, in turn, have provided a critical space for ethical reflection on dominant social structures and fostered alternative forms of life and knowledge.