Research Fields and Themes
“Applied humanities” serves as the center’s focal point and keyword. We aim to delve into its conceptual underpinnings throughout historical contexts and to reconstruct historical situations and constellations in which the term “applied humanities” has been used. At the same time, we understand "application" as an analytical term, as well, in order to highlight the potential for application in the humanities, particularly where it’s not conventionally recognized. In our initial funding phase, our research center will explore two primary research areas: the “politics of practice” and “infrastructural thinking” within the humanities.
Politics of Practice
Our first focus, “Politics of Practice,” challenges the prevalent notion of the humanities as solely theoretical domains. Instead, we investigate the array of micropolitical practices within the humanities that implicitly or explicitly disseminate guiding knowledge to the public that perpetuates cultural repertoires of experience, or that involves professional expertise and connoisseurship as well as the development of specific techniques of reading, commentary, translation, critique, and reflection.
Infrastructural Thinking
The second focus, “Infrastructural Thinking,” examines the reciprocal relationship between humanities practice, political theory, collective imaginations, and infrastructures such as universities, publishing houses, funding institutions, and political and technical systems. Applying a lens of serial contextualism, we aim to discern how infrastructural measures across various regions and time periods have influenced the thought and action in the humanities, while providing a critical space for ethical reflection on dominant social structures and fostering alternative forms of life and knowledge
Across these research areas, the center will concentrate on four topics:
Knowledge Archaeology of the Digital Humanities
This thematic field is dedicated to the history of analogues and partially forgotten humanistic practices of collecting, sorting, standardizing underlying today's digital architectures, data regimes, and tools. We will scrutinize their impact on scholarly publishing, including negotiations over data standards and the dynamics of digital scholarly communication.
Practices of Provenance Research
This theme entails a historical examination of provenance research as a humanities practice of attribution and commentary, tracing its evolution since the eighteenth century. We aim to historicize its methods and active practice amid its contemporary global political ramifications.
The Humanities and the Promise of Globalization
This thematic field delves into the discourse of the Global South, originally a political-activist concept that has now become institutionalized but is falling short of its initial promise to rectify North-South power imbalances. We seek to deconstruct Western-influenced and seemingly universalistic research tools and ways of thinking in the humanities and bolster approaches from world humanities approaches.
Historicizing the Environmental Humanities
This theme explores the emergence and implications of contemporary environmental humanities against the backdrop of historical humanities discourses. By examining long-standing humanistic debates about dichotomies such as nature versus culture, or matter versus spirit, and the strict separation of natural sciences and humanities and concepts of life, time, and space, we aim to expand perspectives on present-day environmental knowledge.