About this blog.
Here, researchers from the University of Oldenburg and guest authors write about how societies perceive and thematise themselves, how they reassure themselves of their respective present and, in doing so, project themselves into the future.
How are these self-perceptions and self-designs connected 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 given justified and legitimised, but also criticised, rejected or undermined?
These questions, whose interdisciplinary reflection is one of the central concerns of the Research Centre "Genealogy of the Present", are explored by the bloggers from different specialist perspectives and contexts of activity with a view to controversial topics such as migration, inequality, digitalisation, crime, health and ecology.
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Migration society 2040
Under the keyword "Migration Society 2040", the future workshop from 6 - 8 September 2018 was intended to collect and collate visions that are already circulating and possibly even develop new visions: what will, how must, how can and how should the "Migration Society 2040" look like? Or has the term "migration society" even become obsolete by 2040? In order to explore these visions, different, sometimes contradictory voices were combined in a video collage, which served as an "impulse" for our guests from various fields (art, science, politics, education) to creatively explore the vision(s) of "migration society 2040".
It was already noticeable in the process of creating this video collage that, despite all efforts to create and invent desirable, even liveable visions of the future, it is above all dystopian threat scenarios that inevitably come to the fore and are therefore brought up with critical intent or - even more depressingly - depicted and performed: While some see a future "increase" in immigration as threatening in and of itself, others fear a "too little" (skilled labour) immigration in terms of labour market economics. Between these two poles, a third threat scenario emerges in which those affected by this threaten to be torn apart: pitted as "migrants" against "refugees", as "useful" against "superfluous", they have no prospect of finding "habitable zones" (Judith Butler) either where they come from or where they are going.
So is the "migration society 2040" really a "non-place"? Or do we just need to move on, listen more closely, look more closely, take more careful steps to track down Minima Utopia?