FOR 1939:  Un/doing Differences. Practices of Human Differentiation

• Subject Area: Social and Behavioural Sciences ; Humanities
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222346160

What unites the members of our Research Unit is a shared interest in discovering how cultural differences between individuals within society arise, are superimposed and are neutralised, in other words, in studying the "doing" and "undoing" of differences. We thus plan to examine the practices of human categorisation. Such practices include the use of demarcation strategies for the purpose of community formation ("them and us"), the use of linguistic, religious, ethnic and national labels as well as the use of intra-societal divisions based on gender or status. In a comparative approach, we intend to look at heterogeneous cases of human categorisation and the demarcation between communities; our focus will be primarily be on examining the contingency aspects of these processes, the conditions underlying differentiation and its undoing and the mechanisms involved in the actualisation or neutralisation of variants of such differentiations. The Research Unit will thematically organise the methods of making distinctions analysed in the various disciplines and research areas of its members, and will also make a comparative analysis of them as culturally specific methods of making distinctions. The Research Unit’s long-term goal is to establish transdisciplinary perspectives capable of uniting social and cultural science methods - perspectives from which the practices and procedures used to distinguish human beings from one another can be empirically observed and their mechanisms and functions analysed.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Belgium, Côte d´Ivoire, France, Ghana, USA

Projects

• Coordination Project (Applicant Hirschauer, Stefan )
• Enterprising Evangelicalism: Distinction and Inclusion in Contemporary American Christian Religious Periodicals (Applicant Scheiding, Oliver )
• Non-school evaluation. Universities and free schools between the requirement of differentiation and institutionalized contrasts (Applicant Kalthoff, Herbert )
• Performing the nation and subnational differences in African national days (Applicant Lentz, Carola )
• The becoming of fathers and mothers. Gender (de)differentiation in prenatal parenthood II (Applicant Hirschauer, Stefan )
• The Making of Centenarians: New Forms of Age Differentiation Through Autobiographies in the US (Applicant Banerjee, Mita )
• Theatre between Reproduction and the Transgression of Physical Individual Differentiation (Applicant Kreuder, Friedemann )
• Transgressive practices of self-naming: Marking differences through free name changes in Sweden (Applicant Nübling, Damaris )
• Un/doing Albinism: Recodings of a bodily difference through historically shifting frames (Applicant Krings, Matthias )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Stefan Hirschauer