Project Areas
- Generation and Stabilization of Knowledge (D)
Project Area D is concerned with the generation, stabilisation and destabilisation of knowledge. The generation of knowledge is achieved with the aid of practices of comparing embedded in contexts understood both praxeologically and epistemologically. Over time, individual actors and communities of practice systematised and stabilised, transformed and destabilised this knowledge. The knowledge thus generated transforms practices of comparing into an authoritative comparative formation in a wide range of fields before disseminating the corresponding routinised links between comparata and tertia comparationis, which are then often characterised as ‘objective’. The project area studies the connection between the generation of knowledge and comparative formations across different time periods in six projects. The topics range from social self-descriptions in Roman antiquity, late medieval English precedent law, travel literature and ethnology of the 17th to 19th centuries, through to knowledge formations in literary studies and natural sciences, as well as in the context of 20th and 21th centuries digital humanities.
Project Area D deals with the production, stabilization and destabilization of knowledge. The production of knowledge is achieved through practices of comparing that are embedded in contexts understood both in a praxeological and an epistemological perspective. Individual actors and communities of practice systematize and consolidate this knowledge, transforming and (de)stabilizing it, over time. The knowledge thus created transforms comparative practices into authorized comparative formations and disseminates the corresponding routinized constellations of comparata and tertia comparationis, often marked as 'objective', in numerous social spheres. The project area examines the connection between knowledge production and comparative formations across different epochs in six projects, whose topics range from social self-descriptions in Roman antiquity, late medieval English precedent law, 17th to 19th century travel literature and ethnology, to knowledge formations in literary studies and natural sciences, as well as in the context of 20th and 21st centuries digital humanities.
D01 (B04) | Comparing in Ethnographic Thought of Antiquity – The Roman Age to Late Antiquity (1th – 7th Century AD)
D02 | Comparative Approaches –Law of Precedent in Late Medieval England
D03 (B01) | Order in the Diversity: The Compared Body (16th-19th Centuries)
D04 (B03) | World Knowledge and Comparing the World. Ethnographic (Travel) Literature and Comparative Science (1850 - 1950)
D05 | Comparative Reading. Stylistics as a Method of Literary Studies - Formation and Critique
D06 (C04) | Comparing at the Interface of the Physical and Life Sciences, 1960 to 2000
- Limits of Comparing: Assertions of Incomparability and the Drawing of Boundaries (E)
The research projects of Project Area E further deepen the findings of the first funding phase by investigating the limits of comparing in a twofold sense: On the one hand, they investigate the limits placed on comparing: Where, how and with what success are limits to comparability asserted? How are comparative operations de-limited and re-limited when operating via algorithms? Conversely, interest is focused on the way in which practices of comparing themselves determine boundaries and confer social efficacy on them. The project’s sub-projects, enquire into the extent to which internal demarcations of boundaries in certain comparative contexts lead to rhetorical and performative assertions of incomparability and stabilise them, or how practices of comparing set boundaries themselves by demarcating units, persons, and groups from one another, thus rendering them recognisable, also for historiography, over extended periods of time.
E01 (C03) | Terms of Comparing. The Semantics of Comparison (16th – 21st Centuries)
E02 (C01) | Comparative Viewing. Practices of Incomparability and the Theory of the Sublime
E03 (B06) | Beyond Racial Discrimination: “Backwardness” and “Indigenous Peoples”
E05 (C05) | Medial Dispositives of Comparing: The Operative Image according to Harun Farocki
E06 | Comparative practices in the genesis, perpetuation, and transformation of «national literature». The case of German-speaking Switzerland
- Standardising and globalising: Expansive Comparative Practices (F)
Project Area F explores the relation between practices of comparing and processes of standardisation and globalisation. As the first funding phase has highlighted, processes of standardisation and globalisation – as well as their contestation – can be observed in increasing numbers since the 19th century. This relation has two dimensions, which the project area will examine in more detail in the second funding phase: First, practices of comparing have become standardised and have diffused globally. Entities as diverse and varied as "races", "companies", "writers", "real estate", "states" or "universities" have been construed as objects of comparison and compared and evaluated within the framework of a global comparative horizon according to uniform criteria such as "artistic value," "prices," "development," "power," or "excellence." Second, practices of comparing have also themselves contributed to processes of standardisation and globalisation. The projects in project area F therefore study the preconditions, manifestations, limits, and effects of processes of standardisation and globalisation initiated and shaped by practices of comparing across a wide range of research topics—from 19th-century discourses on race, Nobel Prizes in literature, cars and real estate markets to contemporary power comparisons and rankings.
F01 (A03) | (World) Order and Concepts of the Future. Racist Practices of Comparing in the Caribbean (1791-1912)
F02 | “Greenwich Meridian of Literature”? The Nobel Prize as a Global Standard of Comparing
F03 (A02) | Practices of comparing in Supplier Competition and Customer Orientation: The American and the German Automotive Industry in the 20th Century
F04 (B07) | Invest Globally, Comparing Locally? Nationalisation and Internationalisation of Property Valuation Standards since the 1970s
F05 (A01) | Comparing Power in Times of Global Political Change, 1970-2020
F07 | Analogies between Comparisons as Mechanisms of “Departicularization”? On the Construction of Resonances between Colonial and Metropolitan Formations of Comparisons in National “Founding Debates” in the German Empire (1871-1918)
- Central Projects (INF / Ö / Z)
INF | Data Infrastructure and Digital Humanities: Digital Practices in the Humanities
Ö | Making of: Communities of Practice. Humanities and Society in Relation
Z | Central Tasks of the Collaborative Research Centre
- A04 | Comparative Cultural Discourses in German War Journalism during the First World War
Das Teilprojekt untersuchte die deutschen Rundschauzeitschriften als wichtiges Medium der deutschen Kriegspublizistik in den Jahren 1914-18 und arbeitete dabei die Operationen und Funktionen des kulturellen Vergleichens heraus. Der Forschungsansatz des TP bestand darin, diese Zeitschriften als ein spezifisches Medium zu begreifen, das durch seine formale Organisation als Netzwerk von unterschiedlich gearteten Texten und durch seine thematische Ausrichtung auf die Beschreibung der eigenen Nation in der Konkurrenz mit anderen selbst eine umfassende Praxis des kulturellen Vergleichens darstellte.
Leitung
Kai KauffmannMitarbeiter
Malte Lorenzen- B02 | Modernity between "Indigeneity" and "Blackness": Inter-American Comparative Practices in Cultural Production, Social Science, and Politics
Das Teilprojekt untersuchte die in den Amerikas in den ersten Dekaden des 20. Jahrhunderts neu entstehenden identitätspolitischen Vergleichspraktiken in Kulturproduktion, Sozialwissenschaft und Politik. Dabei interessierten vor allem die Vergleiche zweiter Ordnung: a.) Mit Rückgriff auf welche Vergleichshinsichten werden Individuen und Gemeinschaften verglichen? und b.) Durch die Verwendung welcher unterschiedlicher Hinsichten ergeben sich Inkommensurabilitäten oder fügen sich die in den Vergleichen auftretenden Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zu einem kohärenten Gesamtbild, d. h. zu einem übergreifenden komplexen Vergleich auf der Grundlage von ‚Indigeneity‘ bzw. ‚Blackness‘, zusammen?
Leitung
Olaf Kaltmeier
Wilfried RaussertMitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter
Pablo Campos
Susana Rocha Teixeira- B05 | Literary Comparative Practice: Social Dynamics and the Novel in 18th Century Britain
Der englische Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts kann als Ort der Verhandlung gesellschaftlichen Wandels betrachtet werden, wobei explizite und implizite Vergleiche zwischen Figuren, die sowohl thematisch als auch durch erzählerische Mittel hergestellt werden, eine zentrale Rolle spielen. Entscheidend ist dabei, dass gesellschaftlich-diskursive Vergleichspraktiken nicht nur mit literarischen Mitteln thematisiert, kommentiert und bewertet werden, sondern dass literarische Figuren auch dem Aushandeln neuer Vergleichshinsichten dienen, welche ihrerseits in die Gesellschaft zurückwirken. Das TP untersuchte dieses Ineinandergreifen literarisch-diskursiver und gesellschaftlich-diskursiver Vergleichspraktiken vor dem Hintergrund der Modernisierung der englischen Gesellschaft.
Leitung
Marcus Hartner
Ralf SchneiderMitarbeiterin
Kristina Ebeling- C02 | Nonkommensurable? The Comparative Self in Pre-Modernity and Modernity (11th - 19th Century)
Das Teilprojekt entfaltete eine Epochen übergreifende Paradoxie in der Erfahrung und Gestaltung von Subjektivität: Das Individuelle gilt als unvergleichlich und wird doch durch einen sozial-gesellschaftlichen Kontext des Vergleichens hergestellt. Autobiographische Texte bilden eine exponierte Form dieser grundlegenden, durch vielfältige historisch-narrative Operationen des Vergleichens evozierten und zugleich dargestellten Spannung. Das geschichts- und literaturwissenschaftliche Projekt verfolgte die dabei implizit und explizit zum Ausdruck kommenden Vergleichspraktiken exemplarisch an Texten des 11./12. und 19. Jahrhunderts.
Leitung
Franz Arlinghaus
Walter ErhartMitarbeiter
Carina Engel
Lena Gumpert
Mareike Gronich
Simon Siemianowski
