Individual Research Projects
Funding Source: DFG Research Grant
Principal Investigators: Oliver Victor, Christoph Kann (Department of Philosophy)
Duration: 04/2023 – 09/2025
The project intends to revise the history of Albert Camus’s development as a philosopher. Against the background of the generally dominant image of Camus as a modern literary classic as well as his self-concept as a creator of art, its main goal is to make Camus’s philosophical works accessible with a focus on still largely unknown juvenilia. Insofar as Camus’s early philosophical work has already been widely received, this has been done by concentrating on his thesis "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism" (1936) as well as on the central work "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942). In the German-speaking world little or no attention, however, has been paid to the aforementioned juvenilia, which are indispensable for a more complete, coherent picture of Camus’s thought, especially his cultural philosophy with its leitmotifs of the European and the Mediterranean, his anthropology and his aesthetics. In the context of the project, Camus’s "Écrits de jeunesse", written between 1931/32 and 1934, will be edited, translated into German, commented, and made accessible to scholars with regard to their philosophical significance. The aim of the project is to provide further research with an important textual basis, to provide a foundation for a philological and philosophical exploitation of the writings, and to contribute to a more adequate image of Camus through historical and systematic studies of them.
Further information (German only)
Funding Source: LVR Rhineland
Principal Investigator: Jasmin Grande („Moderne im Rheinland“/Zentrum für Rheinlandforschung)
Duration: 04/2022 - 05/2024
The project examines artist colonies and the groups and movements founded in the Rhineland from 1900 to the present: the naming and genesis, the respective programme, structure and organisation, members and guests, activities and networks, the diversity of artistic practices. To this end, research and analysis are embedded in relevant scientific fields: How and to what extent do artists' colonies contribute to "modernity"? What do the moments of change say about the changed society, resp. to what extent do they become precursors, i.e. "avant-garde", or conservative preservers? What is their significance for the discovery of landscape and region? The project ties in with the cultural-theoretical methods of transculturality. The results will be included in a "map" and networked with existing cultural places as well as digital offerings.
Funding Source: DFG Research Grant
Principal Investigator: Jacopo Romoli (Department of Linguistics)
Duration: 09/2023 – 08/2026
Linguistic utterances are processed incrementally as they unfold in time, resulting in a temporal asymmetry between the before and after of a given expression. The present project addresses the fundamental question of whether observed asymmetries are merely a by-product of linguistic utterances unfolding in time, or whether they play a direct role in linguistic knowledge and representations. Addressing this question is critical because it has important potential consequences on the very way we conceptualize the meaning of sentences and how they interact with contextual information. This bears on the general issue of how linguistic knowledge and other cognitive faculties interact; a core issue in the study of language and the human mind. Asymmetries in the interpretation of presuppositions - a particular aspect of linguistic meaning, which characteristically interacts with both the linguistic and extra-linguistic context - provide an ideal case study for investigating this issue. To illustrate, the presupposition trigger 'stop' in the sentence in (1) introduces the presupposition that Mary used to come to class, i.e., (1) is typically uttered in contexts where this is already taken for granted: (1) Mary stopped coming to class. Importantly, presuppositions in complex sentences are traditionally thought to be asymmetrically computed, such that the presupposition of a trigger (e.g. 'stop') requires support in the preceding discourse context. This is illustrated by the contrast in (2). Introducing the material supporting the presupposition before the trigger, as in (2a), makes for a felicitous utterance, while the reverse configuration (2b) does not (indicated by '#'). (2) a. Mary used to come to class and she stopped (coming to class). b. #Mary stopped coming to class and she used to (come to class). However, such contrasts may (at least in part) be due to independent factors, e.g. redundancy constraints, and could reflect violable processing constraints rather than being grammatically hard-wired. The effect also may vary across connectives, e.g., in disjunctions or conditionals. Finally, basic data points such as (2) leave open whether the effect is due to linear order or the underlying hierarchical structure assumed to be crucial for the computation of meaning. Thus, the issue of asymmetry in presupposition projection is far from resolved, and so multi-faceted that careful experimental investigation is called for. The present project will explore these issues experimentally and theoretically, combining fine-grained theoretical predictions about presuppositions, rooted in formal semantics and philosophy of language, with models of language processing. The outputs of this project will contribute to a number of ongoing debates in several disciplines in the cognitive sciences, e.g., linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neurolinguistics, thereby informing our understanding of the human mind more generally.
Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Principal Investigator: Oliver Hellwig (Department of Linguistics)
Duration: 01/2021 – 12/2023
While it is usually known from which period European text collections originate, the dating of pre-modern Indian texts proposed in research - and still valid - often varies by several centuries. The aim of the project is to develop quantitative methods that enable a more precise dating of these texts, which are important in terms of cultural and religious history, on the basis of linguistic features.
Funding Source: Fritz Thyssen Foundation
Principal Investigator: Stefan Marschall (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 05/2021 – 01/2022
The aim of the research project is to examine the individual communication and information behaviour of citizens for the 2021 Bundestag elections. Of particular interest is the role of the Wahl-O-Mat, probably the best-known online tool for political education. With the help of a four-wave panel survey, which is representative of the German online population, developments in the run-up to and after the 2021 federal election can be traced.
All in all, the project not only makes it possible to examine election campaigns and voting behaviour in special times, since against the background of the Corona pandemic, some conventional means of election campaigning and the associated search for information appear to be more difficult and harder to use. The project can also fill a scientific gap in the field of individual political communication research.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Yaman Kouli (Department of Historical Studies)
Duration: 2020 – 2023
For a long time, the rise of the European nation state was interpreted as a process which led to national alienation with countries that showed little interest in European or international cooperation. Recent publications, however, have proved that assumption to be wrong. First, influential networks of intellectuals and scientists had already developed during this period and world exhibitions for the most part took place in European capitals. Moreover, labour markets, capital markets, communication networks, infrastructure etc. were highly entangled – not only, but primarily in Europe. Second, it was an era of numerous intergovernmental congresses which often resulted in new international treaties. Third, the first wave of globalisation significantly increased the economic interdependence of all countries participating in world trade. Thus, some authors even go as far as to argue that the First World War harshly interrupted a development that could otherwise have continued for a long period of time. Given the dominant position of European states in this internationalised world, some historians are convinced that European integration has its roots in the pre-1914 era. According to this position, institutional European integration after 1951 and the high level of international cooperation before 1914 should be interpreted as one long-term phenomenon.The research project follows in the tradition of that historiography, yet also goes beyond it. It argues that European states used internationalism as a tool to protect and shield themselves from the effects of globalisation. By examining social policy and patent policy in Germany, France and Great Britain, the project seeks to demonstrate that European coordination was to a certain degree born out of necessity to secure and stabilize the functionality of national systems.The study has three goals: First, is to emphasize that the European nation state was not conceived as a politically isolated phenomenon, on the contrary. Since the second half of the 19th century, politicians have been fully aware of the fact that national regulations and laws can only function if the respective countries are embedded in a network of international contracts and regulations. Second, the project aims to better distinguish between the three notions of globalisation, internationalism and European integration. With a focus on social and patent policy, it can be shown that although international coordination was imperative, the strategies chosen were surprisingly different. Third, it wants to add a historical perspective to the current debate on European integration.
Further information (German only)
Funding Source: Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste
Principal Investigator: Stefanie Michels, Department of Historical Studies
Duration: 2021 - 2023
Cooperating partners: University Dschang (Kamerun); Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum (Mannheim); Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (Köln)
The Thorbecke Collection, which was previously scattered among various locations (museums, archives, libraries), will be brought together by the project. The project ensures systematic documentation according to scientific quality criteria. A translation of central texts makes them accessible to non-German-speaking researchers (e.g. in Cameroon). The provenance of the cultural goods, human remains, zoological, botanical and geological objects is to be clarified as far as possible on the basis of the written tradition (University of Düsseldorf). In addition, intangible cultural assets (images and sound recordings) will also be integrated into the project and questions of provenance will be addressed in this regard (for example, the question of voluntariness/unvoluntariness of participation in it). The results will be made available in various knowledge institutions in Cameroon (archives, universities, museums, libraries).
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Stefan Hartmann (Department of German Studies)
Duration: 2021 - 2024
This project addresses the question of how speakers of present-day German refer to future events and how the conventions for future reference have changed over the past centuries. To this end, a corpus-based approach is used, i.e. we take authentic data into account, using a number of different resources, some of which have become available only recently. The project can be divided into two broad areas: a) From a historical perspective, we investigate how the future construction werden ‘become’ + infinitive (e.g. “ich werde morgen nach Hamburg fahren” ‘I will go to Hamburg tomorrow’) developed and which other constructions can be considered predecessors or competitors of this pattern. For example, it is often assumed that modal verb constructions, especially sollen ‘shall’ + Infinitive, were used for future reference in earlier stages of German as well and that they could play a role in the grammaticalization of werden + infinitive as they might have served as analogical templates. In addition, werden + present participle is often discussed as a potential predecessor (“es wird regnend” lit. ‘it becomes raining’). This project approaches the highly controversial question of how these different constructions relate to each other with a data-driven approach. We extract all instances of all relevant constructions from the newly available reference corpora of historical stages of German and annotate them for semantic and syntactic criteria. By doing so, we can assess to what degree each construction is actually used for future reference, which of the numerous factors that have been proposed in the literature actually play a role in language users' choice of constructions, and how these factors interact with each other. b) From a synchronic perspective, we investigate which factors drive the choice between the two most important possibilities to express future reference in present-day German, namely the construction werden + infinitive on the one hand and the so-called futurate present (e.g. "ich gehe morgen ins Kino", lit. ‘I go to the cinema tomorrow’) on the other. We assume that register and text type (e.g. conceptually more oral vs. written communication) as well as semantic as well as syntactic factors play a role. Semantic factors include temporal distance, syntactic ones the occurrence of other constructions with werden ‘become’ in the immediate context or the occurrence in negated or interrogative contexts. Taken together, these studies about historical and present-day conventions of future reference in German can help to clarify a number of open questions that have been discussed extensively from a theoretical perspective in the previous literature but that can now be approached on the basis of a substantial amount of empirical data for the first time.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Stefan Hartmann (Department of German Languages and Literatures)
Duration: 02/2024 - 01/2027
Cooperating partners: Kristian Berg (University of Bonn)
Recent research has shown that the structure of words (i.e. their morphology) has an impact on their representation in written language in various respects. Spontaneous handwritten texts thus offer a highly promising way of studying the relationship between morphology and writing in more detail: They are often written without detailed conscious planning, and many of the corrections that writers make are transparent. This means that the factors that influence written language should manifest themselves in handwritten texts more clearly than in machine-written language. In addition, there are good reasons to assume that the specific form of words and letters can give clues to the mental representation and processing of words. These two aspects are key to our project, which sets out to investigate how morphology influences written language. In doing so, we take two complementary perspectives: On the one hand, we will investigate how the morphological structure of words influences the distribution of spelling errors and what this can tell us about the mental representation of words (graphemic perspective). On the other hand, we would like to investigate if the morphological structure of words has an impact on their concrete realization, e.g. in terms of letter forms and boundaries between letters (graphetic perspective). For both parts of the project, we make use of a transcribed and linguistically annotated corpus of A-level exams.
Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Principal Investigator: Stefan Marschall(Department of Social Sciences, Political Science), Project Coordinator: Daniel Hagemann (Department of Social Sciences, Political Science)
Duration: 04/2024 – 11/2024
During “Science Year 2024 - Freedom”, the project “My Freedom – Your Freedom?!” highlights and discusses different understandings of freedom. The aim of the project is to encourage a discursive exchange of ideas and discuss freedom with people of all ages and different backgrounds: Does freedom have limits? Must, can and may freedoms be balanced against each other? How can freedom be protected? How does the society perceive freedom in 2024?
Further information (German only)
Funding Source: BMBF
Principal Investigator: Dr. Dennis Frieß, Düsseldorf Institut for Internet and Democracy (DIID), Jun.-Prof. Tobias Escher, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Marc Ziegele (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 11/2023 - 10/2026
Online discussions have become a part of our everyday lives. However, the quality of these discourse is often poor. This can have many negative consequences. Among other things, it discourages people from getting involved themselves. IndI aims to develop AI-based interventions in an open research process to help make online discourse more inclusive than before.
To this end, ideas will first be collected together with citizens, civil society and online discourse organizers about what constitutes inclusive online discourse and how online discourse can be improved. Based on this, AI interventions are developed and tested with users. User feedback from the tests will in turn be fed into the research process in order to ultimately obtain a functional AI application. This will be tested in an experiment at the end of the project. The scientific analysis should show whether the AI application actually leads to more integrative online discourses and what users take away from these discourses.
More Information (German only)
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Jens Fleischhauer (Department of Linguistics)
Duration: 04/2025 - 03/2028
Cooperating partners: Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich Heine University), Maarten Boogards (Leiden University), Nadine Proske (Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache, Mannheim)
Typically, the predicate of a sentence is expressed by a finite verb (e.g., beobachte ‘observe’). German, as well as other languages, can also express sentence predicates through more complex expressions. One type of such complex expressions (e.g., unter Beobachtung stehen ‘to be under observation’) is referred to as ‘light verb constructions’ Despite decades of intensive research on light verb constructions, many central questions remain unanswered. In the first phase of the project, we examined systematic patterns in the formation of these expressions using corpus linguistic methods. The second phase of the project will focus more on the verbs occurring in these expressions and investigate whether and how they differ from other verbs (e.g., main verbs, auxiliary verbs).
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Christoph Spörlein (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 2019 - 2023
Cooperating partners: Cornelia Kristen, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg
This project builds upon a core principle in the sociology of migration, namely that immigrants are not a random sample of the origin population, but differ in certain characteristics from individuals who stay behind. The first aim is to provide a description of educational selectivity for a range of different immigrant groups across a variety of Western European destinations. In addition to educational selectivity, which is the main focus of this research, selectivity in attitudes also enters the account. The second aim is to theoretically disentangle and empirically investigate the links between selectivity and immigrants’ incorporation into the receiving societies. The focus is on a selection of important outcomes including cultural integration (in terms of language acquisition), positional or structural integration (in terms of education and labor market performance) and aspects of social and identificative integration (in terms of inter-ethnic relations and attitudes). An additional methodological aim is to contribute to the literature by systematically implementing improved measures of selectivity. In this project, selectivity is framed as an individual-level characteristic as opposed to the common approach of group-based specifications. We measure selectivity by recording an individual’s age- and sex-specific position in the origin country’s distribution of the selectivity characteristic in question. The resulting selectivity measure acknowledges that origin groups are typically composed of varying proportions of positively and negatively selected individuals. Advances in data availability allow making use of a variety of data sources, both for a large set of countries of origin and for various immigrant destinations throughout Europe. All data harmonization efforts as well as the scripts necessary for replicating the analyses carried out in the course of the project will be made available to the scientific community.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Gerhard Schurz, Gottfried Vosgerau (Department of Philosophy)
Duration: 2021 - 2024
How are concepts and their meanings cognitively represented? What happens in our mind when we grasp objects by their characteristic features and communicate about them with other people? A significant linguistic and philosophical approach to answering these questions is the Frame Theory of Concepts, which was further developed at HHU Düsseldorf within the Collaborative Research Center SFB 991. The DFG-funded follow-up project of the SFB, "Parametrized Frames and Conceptual Spaces," explores the extension of the Frame approach, based on the theory of cognitive spaces. In cognitive spaces, conceptual meanings are described in a spatial-geometric manner, resulting in a novel and particularly powerful theoretical approach in combination with Frame Theory. This research is undertaken by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schurz, Prof. Dr. Gottfried Vosgerau, Dr. Paul Thorn, Dr. Matias Osta-Velez, M.A. Sebastian Scholz, and Dr. Maria Sekatskaya from the Department of Philosophy.
Further Information (German only)
Funding Source: Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen)
Principal Investigator: Ines Soldwisch (Department of Historical Studies)
Duration: 06/2022 – 05/2024
Cooperating partners: Lisa Kallström (Lund University, Sweden)
The project examines the reception of Pippi Longstocking in Astrid Lindgren's books, which were allowed to appear in the GDR in 1975 and 1988. Two approaches are chosen: a historical and a cultural-scientific one. The first step is to analyze the political and social conditions under which the books were allowed to appear. This concerned political decision-making processes in the "GDR Children's Book Publishing House", but also political decision-making processes that were made up of a commission made up of GDR functionaries, GDR educators and GDR writers who decided which international books were allowed to appear in the GDR. This affected not only the printed text, but also the printed images in the book. What was allowed and what wasn't? What reasons were given for text modifications and image modifications? What associations should the pictures and text arouse in the children? These questions have not yet been answered in Swedish and German research. The joint project aims to close this gap. The project thus makes a valuable contribution to historical and cultural childhood research, dictatorship research and international picturebook research.
Further Information (German only)
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: David Hommen, Christoph Kann (Department of Philosophy)
Duration: 2020 - 2023
How do we conceive of the world? How does our mind represent objects, events, properties, relations, species and genera? Are the structures of our cognitive reference to the world analogous to those of our language? And what does the way we think and talk about things in the world tell us about the things themselves? The theory of frames represents a current approach to answering these questions. It assumes that cognitive and linguistic representations of everything from simple objects to complex states of affairs occur in recursive attribute-value structures – called frames – that reflect the ontological structures of reality. But is this model of the relationship between thought, language, and reality actually new – or merely a modern formulation of ideas steeped in tradition? If the latter, does frame theory inherit the well-known methodological and epistemological problems of its predecessor theories, or does it perhaps even point the way to their solution? These questions are pursued by Prof. Dr. Christoph Kann, PD Dr. David Hommen and Frauke Albersmeier M.A. from the Department of Philosophy in the DFG-funded research project "Presuppositions of Frame Theory in the History of Philosophy."
Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Principal Investigator: Lea Schäfer (Department of Jewish Studies)
Duration: 11/2018 – 04/2022
Cooperating partners: Columbia University Libraries (USA)
"Syntax of Eastern Yiddish Dialects" examines syntactic structures that can be found in the questionnaires of the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry. As a main goal the project wants to map the variation that can be found in this source of Yiddish dialects which did not attract notice for long time. Analyses of selected phenomena (e.g. negative concord, partice verbs, word order, relative clauses) will follow. The project also holds a focus on the influence oft he coterritorial languages and the relationship to Western Yiddish and older stages of Yiddish.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Simon David Stein (Departmente of English and American Studies)
Duration: 12/2023 - 11/2026
Listeners do not only evaluate what someone says, but also how someone talks: they have so-called language attitudes towards languages and their varieties. For example, one language or variety (e.g., French, Southern Irish English) may be perceived as sounding more “pleasant” than another (e.g., German, Birmingham English). Such attitudes have serious political and social consequences, including discrimination. One of the big unsolved questions about language attitudes is how they emerge. Which factors lead us to have evaluative reactions towards language? One area of research, indexicality research, assumes that attitudes do not result from linguistic features themselves, but from how we perceive the groups of speakers who use these features. Another area, iconicity research, suggests that judgments are also influenced by the properties of the linguistic features themselves. Both hypotheses may contain truth, but little research investigates them simultaneously and tests directly how they interact.
This project investigates the effects of both social predictors (indexicality research) and phonological-phonetic predictors (iconicity research) in the generation of language attitudes. Bringing the two research areas together, it asks which social and linguistic variables are predictive of (which) evaluative meaning associations, whether some associations are more reliably predicted by one of the two clusters of variables or the other, and whether we can find evidence for interactions between the two.
It does so by eliciting attitudes in an increasingly experimentally controlled way: by having listeners react to (1) real, unmanipulated speech stimuli of languages and varieties, (2) to manipulated stimuli, in which some features are selectively replaced by others, and (3) to pseudovarieties, i.e., stimuli of non-existing varieties constructed from scratch. The studies will test a diverse set of languages from different families, as well as a set of different varieties of English. They will statistically model many evaluative dimensions (e.g., likeability, competence, beauty, intelligence) by different social predictors (e.g., exposure to language and cultural context, distance of stimuli to the listeners’ languages) and linguistic predictors (e.g., syllable structure, F0, sonority, voicing, isochrony). The project will culminate in the development of a new theoretical model of evaluative meaning, bringing together indexicality and iconicity in a unified theory.
Ultimately, then, this project will help disentangle the social and linguistic mechanisms underlying evaluative form-meaning associations on an empirical level, better understand their nature on a theoretical level, and teach us how to better combat linguistic stereotyping on a societal level.
Funding Source: Ministry of Culture and Science North Rhine-Westphalia
Principal Investigator: Jasmin Grande („Moderne im Rheinland“/Zentrum für Rheinlandforschung)
Duration: 11/2021 - 04/2024
From 1949 to 1991, NRW was the host state of the Bonn Republic. The interdisciplinary research project examines the mutual influence of region, history and the memory space of the Bonn Republic from a cultural topographical perspective. The research results of the project are presented on a separate homepage, which, however, explicitly represents a participatory claim.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Guido Thiemeyer (Department of Historical Studies)
Duration: 2020 - 2023
The project analyses the consequences of European Integration for German Federalism. Starting with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952, the Federal Government transferred important parts of national sovereignty to the European Communities. This, however, meant that the German Länder lost their competences in these political sectors. To regain their influence in the respective policy areas, the Länder Governments tried to establish informal structures – partly against the interests of the Federal government. The result was a new political system called "Multi-Level-Governance" that was characterised by a mixture of formal and informal structures. Even though the Western German constitution was not modified in this respect, the German political system changed fundamentally between 1950 and 1992. The project examines the emergence of this new political system in the Federal Republic of Germany on the basis of three examples: The European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Agricultural Policy are political sectors that were europeanised very early. Education policy, by contrast, is one of most important competences of the German Länder, but the European Commission also gained considerable influence in this sector. The project analyses the emergence of multi-level governance in Germany on the basis of archival resources now available for the 1980s.
Further information (German only)
Funding Source: Ministry of Culture and Science
Principal Investigator: Andrea von Hülsen-Esch (Department of Art History)
Duration: 01/2024 - 12/2024
Cooperating partners: Rheinisches Archiv für Künstlernachlässe (RAK), Bonn (Rhenish Archive for Artists’ Legacies – RAK)
The project provides revealing insights into the prehistory of the Düsseldorf artists' association Das Junge Rheinland and the German art scene of the first half of the 20th century. Already during his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Clarenbach played a key role in the Düsseldorf exhibition scene and was a member of numerous artists' associations over the years, including the Sonderbund. In cataloging and researching the written legacy, the focus is on two research questions that are important for the structure of the contemporary (Rhenish) art scene as a whole. On the one hand, the (exhibition) networks of Rhenish artists and artist groups in the first quarter of the 20th century are to be made visible using Max Clarenbach as an example. On the other hand, the role of female artists in the Rhineland will be examined by analyzing the diaries, correspondence and notes.
Funding Source: VolkswagenStiftung - Opus Magnum
Principal Investigator: Valeska von Rosen (Department of Art History)
Duration: 04/2021 – 05/2023
European artists' self-portraits in all artistic media and materials - from the emergence of the "independent" portrait in the 15th century to the establishment of the first genre-specific collection in the late 17th century - are subject of the planned monograph. The aim is to reconstruct the figures of thought relevant to the production and reception of the works of self-formation, reflection and experience with the questions of when and in what form they attain medial and material concretion in the early modern period. The aim of the planned publication is thus a counter-proposal to Jacob Burckhardt's claimed "birth of the individual" in the 15th century, which was still recently cited as a justification figure for the emergence of self-portraits. According to the thesis, it is not a matter of unmediated "self-expression" and "originality". Instead, a poietic 'self-forming' or 'self-modelling' is assumed here. These terms, like the "(Renaissance) self-fashioning" apostrophised by Stephen Greenblatt, are neologisms derived from the verbs formare (to form) and fingere (to form, model), which are dominantly used in the historical portrait context. Self-fashioning' in the early modern sense has not only its means but also its end in the literal, even manual and processual activity of shaping. In a metaphorical sense, 'self-shaping' means the habitualised adoption of emotions, roles and patterns of behaviour.
Funding Source: DFG Research Grant
Principal Investigator: Harald Conrad (Departemnt of Modern Japanese Studies)
Duration: 04/2024 – 03/2027
This research project investigates the social and economic (re)organisation in traditional craft industries and their markets in 21st century Japan. Despite its rapid development as the third largest industrialised country, Japan has managed to maintain various crafts and craft districts with distinct regional characteristics into the present. While research has cited demand- and supply-side factors for the ‘success’ of Japanese crafts, it remains unclear to what extent these explanations are still relevant today and how the crafts have evolved since the early 1990s. Around the world, the middle classes are showing a growing preference for handmade products, which play an important role in discourses on sustainable production, ethical living, consumer values and authenticity. In the wake of this development, the new Western crafts entrepreneurship has also received academic attention. However, the current reorganisation of existing craft districts is poorly researched. Our analysis of recent changes in Japanese crafts will therefore not only shed light on the specific Japanese dynamics of organising in craft districts, but also contribute to broadening our basic understanding of the structural foundations for a possible revitalisation of communities and regional development through craft production in industrialised countries. In doing so, the project takes an economic sociological approach. In order to identify commonalities and differences in structures, practices, problems and problem-solving mechanisms, three types of contemporary crafts will be compared in three different Japanese craft districts (silk weaving in Kyoto, lacquerware industry in Fukui and resist-dyeing in Kanazawa). Since all three districts are characterized by complex organisational structures involving cooperative division of labour, subcontracting, and distribution networks, they represent ideal locations for studying the dynamics of such organisational fields. To enable a comprehensive comparison, the project focuses in particular on a) the changing social and economic structures of the respective organisational fields, with special attention to the organisation and distribution of risks in collaborative production processes, subcontracting, and distribution, b) the role of expert knowledge and training systems and their respective effects on entry barriers and generational renewal of the organisational field, c) discourses about the relationship between craft and machine production, d) the influence of national craft policies and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Kilu von Prince (Department of Linguistics)
Duration: 01/2024 - 12/2026
Cooperating partners: Stefan Hartmann (Heinrich Heine University), Kristian Berg (University of Bonn), Eleanor Ridge (Massey University, New Zealand)
The project investigates the phonological and graphemic realisation of word boundaries in the two related Oceanic languages Daakaka and Dalkalaen. It also generates the first grammar sketch of the previously undescribed language Dalkalaen.