The Research Centre "Genealogy of the Present" investigates how present and past societies perceive and thematize themselves, how they assure themselves of their respective present while projecting themselves into the future. How do these self-perceptions and designs for the future relate to institutions, media and techniques for shaping nature, society and subjectivity? How do they model everyday life and encourage people to behave in a certain way? How are these interventions in the present legitimized, but also criticized, rejected or undermined?

The participating researchers are investigating these questions from different disciplinary focuses. From a historiographical, cultural-analytical and sociological-praxeological perspective, they examine the connections between diagnoses of the present, social transformations and subject formation. They are particularly interested in the ways in which material orders of meaning, unfolding in discourses and practices, shape perceptions and thus constitute reality.

The aim of the Research Centre is to establish the "genealogy of the present" as an innovative field that allows to describe the emergence of the modern world in a new way. The Research Center serves this project as a site of interdisciplinary and cross-faculty collaboration, where scholarship on this topic is networked, developed and initiated.