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.

For a society, the public sphere is the space for exchanging views on questions of communal life. This freedom for non-private debate, for publication and for political action has always been conditional, from the Greek agora and the Roman forum (with the exclusion of the “unfree”) to the absolutist royal court and the theater and salon culture of the bourgeoisie in the 18th and 19th centuries, which was supported by the humanist utopia of education. In the ever-expanding social spheres of modernity – from the economic interdependencies of the “nation states” to radio and television and the platforms of the digital age – media play an increasingly important role. Such a “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (Jürgen Habermas) has paved the way for mass societies and given rise to the bourgeois public sphere of affluent societies as a core element of the democratic community. From today’s perspective, the media also represent the dispositive of a pluralization, faceting and, in part, separation of the public sphere. This corresponds to changes in the political climate in many parts of Western democratic societies. The shift of liberal democracies towards illiberalism, “competitive authoritarianism” and fascism that can currently be observed worldwide gives rise to renewed questions about the functioning of the public sphere and the strategies of its destruction.

Which new forms of the public sphere can be identified in the face of digital change, which social and political, but also cultural and media practices shape the public sphere, and to what extent can they be understood as a critical instrument in and for democracies? Does the pluralization of competing public spheres offer the opportunity to revitalize the “nostalgic trope” (Seyla Benhabib) and to discuss aspects of deliberative politics (Habermas) or a “sensus communis” (Hannah Arendt) anew, without ignoring questions of exclusion, inequality and participation? What is the relationship between the political, the social and the private in the different models of the public sphere, which ideas of community are addressed by them, and how does the discourse on the public sphere relate to state institutions and the spheres of law, culture and the sciences? What is the function of the key distinction between public and private in times of overlapping spheres and the transformation of social spaces in “social media”, when, on the one hand, (semi-)public exchange increasingly affects the “private sphere” and, on the other, the “public” appears increasingly segmented and exclusive?

Alongside contemporary and systematic analyses, the annual focus also invites historical contours of public spheres. Social and political dynamics, networks as well as cultures of dispute in public space or the movements and changes that objects experience when entering or crossing public spheres are just as much of interest as historically oriented conceptual work.