Situated Knowledge: Forms and Functions of Weak Bodies of Knowledge (A06)

• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230856760

Modern societies are characterized by relationships of social weakness and strength organized by the state. These are molded by social practices whose stately organization is shaped by a recourse to “knowledge” as an important resource in the realms of medicine, welfare, and social deviance. In a constellation, in which the stocks of knowledge of socially strong actors face socially weak actors, a complicatedly mutually interrelated constellation of the knowledge of social weakness occurs. There is, on the one hand, the knowledge about social weakness and socially weak actors, on the other hand, the knowledge of weak actors about their own condition. The two forms of knowledge have different functions in regard to how stately resource regimes deal with social weakness.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1095: Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes
• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Moritz Epple; Professorin Dr. Annette Warner