Online conference of the joint project "Transformation through community. Processes of collective subjectivisation in the context of sustainable development" (TransGem)

...whether understood literally or metaphorically: The niche expands the space. It adds a recess and thus opens up an opportunity to retreat, to step aside, to pause for a moment. It combines turning away from the big picture with the freedom to be (different) and to develop. It invites you to stay in the small, in the marginalised, where the world with its adversities and impositions remains outside and is therefore absent. In this movement of detachment, the niche develops as a relational time.space, which can only be created as its own in the difference to its outside.

In the context of sustainability, the niche is booming. Numerous initiatives such as community gardens, repair cafés, car-, bike-, food- and tool-sharing schemes, solidarity agriculture, house projects and eco-villages are implicitly or explicitly seen as niche activities that set a good example and are already realising a better future on a small scale. They set out to show that society could be different and how, and in this endeavour - often labelled with attributes such as "local", "community" and "transformative" - they are supported by academia, privately and state-funded and presented to the public through journalism. They harbour the hope and expectation of being the starting point, both in terms of time and space, for something new that is able to radiate into society as a stimulus, as an anticipatory and intervening moment.

But what does this figure entail? What does it mean for society to want to reinvent it from niches? What exactly is the individual, political and scientific appeal of local, collaborative sustainability projects and their understanding as a niche? How is the difference between the niche and the rest of the world created, maintained or overcome? What ideas of social change,
of the political, of time, of the future, present and past, of empiricism and theorising are inherent in the niche? What pitfalls and potentials are associated with it?

We want to focus on these and other perspectives at the online conference at the University of Oldenburg from 18 to 20 November 2021 in order to redescribe, better understand, critically examine and question the niche.