Projects
Here you will find an overview of all the Projects within the CRC.
Project Area A "Transformations"
Cultures of vigilance can only be understood through their long history and broad cultural variability, and must be conceived as historically changeable. The term “transformations” refers to processes of reshaping that cannot simply be understood as a diachronic sequence—that is, along a hierarchy of ideal-typical forms of society (e.g., antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern era, or the transition from face-to-face society to the more anonymous constellations of modernity). They frequently take place effectively even below the threshold of epochal turning points and can also be identified as effects of cultural transfers and transcultural interconnections.
Both transcendental salvation and vigilance against the dangers of evil demand equal degrees of attention simultaneously.
The project reconstructs and analyses this ambivalence using the German police force as an example, relying primarily on a discourse-analytical approach and including various documents from individuals within the force and organisations closely connected to it.
The project analyses vigilance in pre-modern Benedictine monasteries, using the Congregation of Bursfelde between ca. 1400 and 1618 as an exemplar.
This project investigates the contribution of subaltern groups to the administration of the late Roman state.
This project examines collaborative practices of vigilant reading that emerged in the first half of the 19th century in state institutions, the book market, and the literate public.
The project investigates the transformation of concepts and practices of vigilance caused by the introduction of new technologies, as well as the implications for the now-expanded assemblage of actors due to the involvement of international cooperation.
Project Area B "Spaces"
Space and vigilance are, in part, mutually constitutive. Thus, all manifestations of vigilance—including its prescriptions and reflections—are modulated by spatial constellations: dangers or opportunities can be situated within them, the degrees and probabilities of perceptibility are already inherent, and even the assumption of responsibility may depend on the location of the person concerned. However, this relationship is also potentially reversible and, in doing so, significantly temporally unstable. It can vary considerably in social, performative, discursive, and other ways—for instance, through the arrival of a group, an authority figure, or information, or simply through the onset of twilight.
In Phase II, B01 asks how the relationship between observing, reporting, and interpreting celestial phenomena affected political decision-making in the Assyrian Empire (864−612 BC, focus: 7th century BC), and the succeeding Babylonian Empire (625−539 BC).
The project examines the interplay between the expectations of attention permanently prescribed within these urban societies and the specific settings in which a violation of dressing regulations for women and (male) officials was met with a particularly high level of readiness to advert them to the respective authorities by the city’s inhabitants.
B03 investigates which effects and which requirements the integration of the sensory perception of the population of pre-modern cities had on political and social tasks.
This project investigates vigilance on the coasts of 17th- and 18th-century southern Europe.
The project investigates the double, spiritual and social vigilance of Bektaşî Sufis throughout the Ottoman and post-Ottoman eras. It carries the vigilance issues studied during the first phase of the project onto conditions of prohibition and persecution which arose when the Bektaşî Order was been banned in 1826.
The project focuses on the vigilance of persons of Latino descent in San Diego who are racialized as migrants despite being U.S. citizens. It examines processes of upward social mobility and the resulting ambivalences toward belonging.
This project analyses the pervasiveness of this type of self-restraint and the establishment of practices of vigilance directed both towards the self, as well as third parties, in the semi-public space of local neighbourhoods, which occurred as a result of interaction between administrative structures and cultural elements.
Project Area C "Practices"
What techniques and practices are used to encourage, enable and stabilise links between individual awareness and culturally conveyed goals set by others, or concrete courses of action and communication? Again, a significant degree of variation must be assumed to exist here among the techniques and practices: unusual or everyday objects and practices, such as mirrors, the methodisation of reflections on sin, observation and writing techniques, or taking a walk might be cited as examples. In doing so however, it is important to determine the points at which these objects and practices break free from their everyday functions, becoming instruments with which vigilance is established - when for example does a normal walk become a patrol?
The project investigates how Christian vigilance in the context of repentance, confession, and penance is thematised, propagated, and reflected upon in vernacular texts dating from the late Middle Ages, and how the dynamics of self-observation and the observation of others are expanded upon in the religious vernacular literature of that period.
The project explores the tension between shame and vigilance in relation to theories and practices of gender standardisation during the early modern period.
Italian literature in the 17th century inhabited a space at the intersection of religious censorship and poetological criticism: a space which is often reductively modeled as one dominated solely by restrictions and constraints. However, the project is dedicated to mapping the creative potential and special writing techniques that existed under such watchfulness, and explores forms of attention related to it, based on innovative (for the time) non-Aristotelian standardized genres such as the novel and opera in particular.
The project examines vigilance as a practice, a discourse, and as a societal mission at a local level. Using two cities as examples, the project aims to investigate how vigilance towards the publicly visible sex work being carried out by women from the Roma ethnic minority was generated and how this attentiveness was translated into action.
This project examines the relation between unknowingness and vigilance in England at around 1600, particularly in the works of William Shakespeare.
Completed Projects
This project looks at how, in the American colonies, religiously inflected forms of vigilance (the Puritan “ideology of control”) are being increasingly secularized during the eighteenth century.
The project deals with the question of how the relationship between theatre, politics and the public sphere changed between 1918 and 1936 as a result of the abolition of censorship, increased financial commitment by the public sector and control by public opinion, understood here as the press and the theatre audience.
This project investigates transformations of privacy in the United States during the 20th and 21st centuries by examining techniques of self-monitoring and the surveillance of others.
The aim of the project is to highlight, using a multi-perspective approach, the cultural value system of all participants, as well as the practices used, within this closely monitored space. In order to do so, a keen focus will be on case studies relating to marriage migration from Russia to Germany and the project will investigate how the relevant institutions in Russia conduct checks into spouses wishing to immigrate to Germany and how couples cope with them.
Our project sets out to explore the ways in which social vigilance is engineered, rehearsed, reflected and represented in the culture of the early modern English playhouse.
The project will examine fasting and the voluntary abstention from food as both a practice and an object of political, medical and religious disputes.