GRK 2015:  Life Sciences, Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience

• Subject Area: History
• Term: from 2014 to 2023
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244248598

The embeddedness of humans in a sociocultural context, on the one hand, and in a sphere of materiality, on the other, has spurred the subdivision of disciplines into the natural sciences and the humanities in a historical perspective, later on the life sciences, and today also the social and cultural sciences. In human everyday experience the considerable authority of the life sciences paired with the social outreach of scientific explanatory models, comes to the fore in an often existential way. At the same time, clinical practice is subjected to the ideal of the rational and evidence-based problem-solving, qualities that are so characteristic of the life sciences. Parallel to this development and since the second half of the previous century, the humanities and cultural studies have experienced an increasing orientation towards the subject and its manifold forms of access to the world. It is owing to the new possibilities in biomedicine and the related boundary experiences of human life, that the humanities and cultural studies, in particular, have generated stimuli to acquire complementary approaches towards these boundary experiences. An emphasis on oppositions, dichotomies, and the incommensurability of competing perspectives on the individual further reinforces the perception that biomedicine and the life sciences are fundamental and natural components of our life-world experience. Consequently, it is essential to focus on the understanding not only of the models and practices of the life sciences but also of the life-world experiences as narratives, with the ultimate aim of finding common methodological venture points. As our previous work has shown, boundary experiences of human life are being influenced and shaped by professional biomedical and life science narratives to a much larger degree than had previously been assumed. It is for this reason particular attention has to be paid to the way in which individual narratives on boundary experiences in the areas of capabilities, temporality and corporeality are generated as epistemic meeting grounds, in which the scope of biomedical and life science-oriented explanation for individual self-representation comes to be negotiated; and tot he contexts through which historical processes, in which biomedicine and the life sciences have gained such a sustainable and radical impact for the significance of the lifeworld and the construction of meaning. Moreover, what needs careful consideration ist hey way in which narratives compete for transformative significance, which implies a potential dominance in changing the lived and shared “reality” through discursive practices, both on the level of individual biographies, but even more so on the basis of collective boundary experiences.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Norbert W. Paul
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Mita Banerjee; Professor Dr. Manfred E. Beutel; Dr. Ralf Dahm; Professor Dr. Thomas Efferth; Professor Dr. Tilmann Habermas; Professorin Dr. Dagmar von Hoff; Professor Dr. Alfred Hornung; Professor Dr. Thomas Lemke; Professorin Dr. Susanne Michl; Professorin Dr. Eva Mildenberger; Professor Dr. Michael Simon