Website: www.anschliessenausschliessen.de
The Research Training Group focuses on practices of connecting and excluding („anschließen – ausschließen“). Connectivity is considered as an essential prerequisite for participation in globalized networks. As a consequence thereof, the RTG is concerned with the “other side” of connecting operations in the networks of media, society, economy, politics, law, science, art and culture. In particular, it addresses the exclusions that accompany the established practices of connectivity in globalized networks. These are the deviating structures that can be demonstrated with regard to the practices of local particularization beyond the ideal of global standardization and networking, which is decisive for different concepts of modernity. Thus, the references of the research profile stretch beyond national and cultural borders and predefined historical periods. For this purpose, the RTG assembles media studies, art history and cultural studies, philologies, cultural anthropology and additionally cross-cultural disciplines and artistic and design practice. It brings together expertise for European, East and Southeast Asian, North and South American and Sub-Saharan African and Arab research fields of the last two centuries. At the same time, diverging cultural concepts and terminological constructions are being questioned regarding the local practices of connecting and excluding (oneself). In order to do this, a new transdisciplinary methodology that focuses on processual action and dialogue will be developed to examine the interplay between participation and dissidence. In comparison of historical processes of change and different global, regional and local spaces, this leads to questions of power, participation, self-determination and heteronomy as well as the fragmented perception and symbolic narrativization of the world. Thus, the RTG deals with key issues of the global present, which is resolving and emerging in local practices and their operations, while at the same time questioning the binary constellations of their established – disciplinary – explanatory models. The content-related discussion is inseparably intertwined with the qualification goal of a dialogical approach based on pluralism and processuality. The self-reflective cooperation of the participating students and graduates from different cultural and disciplinary background guarantees the transdisciplinary orientation of the research training group and gives reason to expect outstanding research results for the participating disciplines.