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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Workshop "Prevention, intervention and sensitisation"

from Team

from Team

Workshop: Prevention, Intervention and Responsibilisation. On the genealogy and cultural effectiveness of contemporary diagnoses

The workshop deals with the "genealogy" (Foucault) and "cultural effectiveness" (Koschorke) of diagnoses of the present in various social contexts of action such as the health system, the labour market or environmental policy from a historical, sociological, cultural studies and philosophical perspective - in other words, it takes up questions such as those we have developed in the context of the WiZeGG. Accordingly, we understand diagnoses of the present as performative elements of practice in the sense that they a) (implicitly) guide practice, b) function as an appeal aimed at change or c) can themselves become effective as (elements or drafts of) practice - and thus become tangible as an organon of cultural self-transformation. Since the 18th century, for example, the human approach to "natural hazards" has expressed a specific attitude towards the future, which people no longer passively allowed to happen to them, but actively attempted to deal with - as a preventive production of security. Against this backdrop, social sensitisation to ecological issues has developed since the 1970s into transformation scenarios that project human coexistence in terms of economic and ecological "sustainability". In a similar way, concepts have been established in the world of work and the healthcare system that are aimed at constituting the individual as a "self-responsible" subject in a "risk society" that has been reconfigured as a "prevention society".

The workshop is less about presenting elaborated research results than about discussing research approaches (in particular the "added value" of a genealogical or praxeological approach) and reporting from our own research workshop. The format provides for a short input, e.g. on the basis of a previously submitted text, followed by a discussion along the lines of the question outlined above (in particular with regard to the performative dimension of diagnoses of the present under the aspects of prevention, intervention and responsibilisation).

Organisers Nikolaus Buschmann, Malte Thießen, Rea Kodalle in co-operation with Nicolai Hannig (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München),
Participants Matthias Leanza (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), Frieder Vogelmann (Universität Bremen), Yen Sulmowski (Leuphana Universität Lüneburg) and from Oldenburg Maxi Berger, Tomke Hinrichs, Christoph Haker, Nico Lüdke, Isabel Schnieder

Date 1 July 2015, from 7 pm: GET TOGETHER in the Caldero Bar, Am Markt 23, 26122 Oldenburg, phone: 0441-36137080
2 July, 10 am - 6 pm: Workshop, Room A03 1-109

(Changed: 11 Feb 2026)  Kurz-URL:Shortlink: https://uol.de/p49148n7816en
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