Space and vigilance are, at times, mutually constitutive. Thus, all forms of vigilance, including prescriptive and reflective vigilance, are modulated by spatial constellations: dangers and opportunities can be positioned within these spaces, the degree and likelihood of attention/awareness calculated/established, and even states of accountability can be dependent upon where those or that which is affected are located. This relationship is however also potentially reversible and thus, in a significant fashion, temporally unstable. It can undergo substantial variation on social, performative and discursive levels (as well as on others), by the emergence of new information, the arrival of a new group or authority, or simply dusk becoming night.
Project B01
"Keeping the king’s watch”. Ominous celestial events and their political significance in Assyria and Babylonia, 7th-6th centuries BC
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).
Project B02
Denunciation and reproval – attentiveness as a resource in the implementation of law in late medieval and early modern urban society (1400–1650)
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.
Project B03
The Challenge of the Senses. Veiling and Suspicion in Early Modern Madrid
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.
Project B04
Against Plague and Corsairs. Averting Danger in Corsica, c. 1650-1800
This project investigates vigilance on the coasts of 17th- and 18th-century southern Europe.
Project B05
Two Modes of Vigilance, Two Logics of Prohibition. Spiritual and Social Vigilance of Bektaşî Sufis after the Bans of 1826 and 1925
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.
Project B06
Dilemmas of Belonging and Vigilance Among Racialized Latinx in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region
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.
Project B08
Vigilance in Japan’s neighborhoods during the COVID-19 pandemic
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.