24.09.2015

Threat and Order, Existence and Power. An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Thursday, September 24th - Friday, September 25th 2015

Sonderforschungsbereich 923 “Bedrohte Ordnungen”
Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft
Institut für Soziologie und die Abteilung für Ethnologie

Threat and Order, Existence and Power. An Interdisciplinary Symposium <link file:248286 download file>Flyer

University of Tübingen, September 24th-25th 2015

Discourses and experiences of threat play an important role in processes of emergence and disappearance of social orders. In this workshop existence and power are considered as two basic entry points to approach these dynamics and to develop a more differentiated understanding of the complex relationship between social orders and situations of threat. Simultaneously, the inquiry into the concept of threat enables to examine the interplay of human existence and sociality; it illustrates how the highly contingent and vulnerable nature of human existence articulates with specific historical conditions. As much as situations of threat demonstrate how existential themes and affect interfere with the social order, they exhibit how they are shaped and manipulated through existing power structures. In this sense, threat elucidates both the existential dimension of social order and the social dimension of existence.

In order to discuss the dynamic space between threat, order, power and existence we invite scholars and thinkers from different disciplines to rethink these multifold relations through the lenses of their particular fields of expertise and the intellectual problems they are occupied with. This workshop aims at opening a space for collective thinking about a basic problem of the social and cultural sciences.

Conference Program:

Organizers: Boris Nieswand, Jan Hinrichsen, Gabriele Alex, Reinhard Johler

Venue: University of Tübingen, Lecture Hall “Klassische Archäologie”, Schloss Hohentübingen, 72070 Tübingen

Please register for participation at <link mail window for sending>jan.hinrichsen@uni-tuebingen.de

The Collaborative Research Center 923 “Threatened Order – Societies under Stress”:

The Collaborative Research Center 923 investigates threatened orders. In line with the wider meaning of the German Ordnungen, orders are conceptualized as arrangements of elements that are related to each other in a specific way and that structure social groups or even whole societies. It is the view taken by the Research Center that orders are threatened when agents become convinced that their options for action are uncertain, when behavior and routines are called into question, when they feel they cannot rely on each other, and when agents manage to establish a threat discourse.

Researchers in different fields within the social sciences and cultural studies studying the past and the present collaborate in order to develop a model of threatened orders, the objective being to historicize current crisis diagnostics, investigate modes of rapid social change, renew space and time categories in the social sciences and cultural studies, and elaborate a platform for the social sciences and cultural studies in an age of globalization.

These broad goals are achievable because ‘order’ is central to political and social thought in multiple disciplines and epochs. Linking this concept to the notion of ‘threat’ furnishes a valuable lens through which to scrutinize current interdisciplinary debates on issues of order, crisis, modernization, social change and revolution, risk, security/insecurity, vulnerability, resilience, and emotion. Thus the CRC addresses issues now being extensively discussed in national and international contexts, and which are currently targeted by diverse research programs. Its preferred approach is to identify, within the brief moment of threat, the basic patterns of social order. By connecting threat and order in this way, the existential aspects of a given threat can be analyzed, along with the constancy and variance of a given order.