Project Details
Projekt
Futures of Sustainability: Modernization, Transformation, Control
Applicants
Professor Dr. Frank Adloff; Professor Dr. Stefan Cihan Aykut; Professorin Dr. Christine Hentschel
Subject Area
Sociological Theory
Empirical Social Research
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 521852110
The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability” pursues a theory-driven analysis of the present that asks how societies change under different imaginaries of sustainability. In recent decades, sustainability has become a guiding concept of social change and a largely unavoidable frame of reference, but the goals and visions of the future it informs vary greatly. The Centre analyses modernization, transformation and control as three distinct paths of sustainability – each of which designs societal change differently and is shaped by different practices, (infra-)structures and imaginaries of the future. In the first funding phase of the Centre, the three trajectories were primarily located and investigated in three different social fields: modernization in the economic sphere, transformation in civil society, and control in the realm of the state. In the second funding phase, we place the focus increasingly on interconnections and overlaps between these fields and trajectories. On the one hand, we pursue the thesis that the path of control plays an increasingly important role in current efforts to govern sustainability. This leads us to investigate how control-based imaginaries and practices also reach into projects of modernization and transformation. On the other hand, we assume that current struggles over sustainable futures primarily unfold in a number of social arenas that form around specific issues and cut across the distinction between state, economy and civil society. They take shape around processes of participation, collective decision-making and cooperation (arena of participation), the renegotiation of fundamental rights and collective obligations (arena of law), emerging public and private systems of classification, valuation and evaluation (arena of taxonomies) and questions of cultural and religious interpretation of the world (arena of meaning-making). In these arenas, futures of sustainability are negotiated and prefigured through concrete problems. Finally, three overarching conceptual perspectives will guide our theory building over the next four years. The first perspective is dedicated to the diversity of social relations between humans and nature and holds that sustainability can only be adequately grasped analytically as multiple sustainabilities. The second focuses on questions of power and domination and examines how ecological emergencies and exceptional political situations exacerbate existing inequalities, but also how sustainability debates establish new powerful asymmetries. The third focuses on imaginaries and prefigurations of the future in the face of catastrophes and conceptualizes the struggle between defeatism, design optimism, and enlightened catastrophism.
DFG Programme
Advanced Studies Centres in SSH
