After several decades in which the social and cultural sciences have dealt with theories and practices of memory and remembrance in a highly differentiated and successful manner, questions about the future are increasingly becoming the focus of interdisciplinary research in cultural studies in view of current global discourses on crises and catastrophes. In contrast to scientifically oriented modeling, cultural studies usually take a second-order observer position by asking, for example, which historically and culturally conditioned concepts of the future societies produce, how knowledge of and about the future emerges, which forms of contingency handling (Kontingenzbewältigung) and steering knowledge (Steuerungswissen) are associated with these concepts of the future, and what part the imaginary plays in modeling these orientations to the future. The “present future” (Luhmann/Esposito) addresses a not-real or not-yet-real that is in principle dependent on media representations in order to be kept present as something absent. Accordingly, different narratives of the future, social and cultural practices, techniques, media, and artifacts shape the individual and collective imaginative constructs on which outlines of the future rest, at different times and in different cultures. In the paradoxical form of a “present absent” (eines “anwesenden Abwesenden”), the present future for collectives and individuals is connected to the possibility of action, orientation and planning as well as to diffuse expectations, fears and hopes. The aim of this year’s focus is to get closer to the different narratives, media and practices of the future within the framework of an interdisciplinary analysis. In doing so, we are interested in different cultural conceptions of the future as well as in the historical change of what is meant by the term “future.”

Following Erich Auerbach's guiding question on the relation of cultural artefacts, media, and the 'actual' the main topic of 2022 explores the question of the constructional character of reality and the associated ability to orient oneself in reality through imaginary ideas and to generate knowledge about it. We will ask about the points of engagement, perspectivizations, and insights that approaches in the humanities provide for questions of facticity, evidence production, and constructions of reality. The aim is to investigate the theoretical interconnections between aesthetics and social construction in an interdisciplinary exchange.

The main topic of 2023 concentrates on interdisciplinary studies of the various interconnections between culture and economy with regard to their historical entanglements as well as to present-day contexts. The focus should be on both the economic contexts in the fields of art and culture and, conversely, the role of cultural practices, discourses and forms of representation for the discursivization and plausibilization of economic processes and models.

The year’s main topic centers around the complexity of the term ‘world’ which has become ubiquitous primarily through the discourse around globalization. In contrast to its material correlation ‘earth,’ ‘world’ is a culturally and historically variable term which establishes [or: encompassing] a relation between nature and culture in that it denominates geographically mappable spaces as well as the human societies and imaginations situated in these spaces and thus adds a dimension of ‘planetary’ thinking or ‘mondialization’ to economic concepts of the globe and the global. Accordingly, the year’s theme aims at bringing a variety of disciplinary approaches and their respective uses of the term ‘world’ to the discussion in order to further delineate aspects of globalization like ideas of exchange, connectivity, mobility, and mediality as much as border demarcations, (re-)territorialization, marginalization, and exclusion.

The change in perspective to no longer take scholarly subjects and facts as given independently from research practice, but to reconstruct through which social, systemic, and medial practices and networks epistemic objects emerge, is by no means only relevant for experimental procedures in the natural sciences. Rather, praxeological analysis facilitates an examination of scholarly practices in the humanities as well as the processes of aestethic theory formation with regard to their sociological foundations. This is presently of particular importance, since in the course of digitalization a fundamental transformation of communicative and medial practices can be observed – especially concering those disciplines and arts working textually – that will have a massive impact on the process of knowledge production in the coming years.