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EXC 2036:  Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS)

Subject Area Social and Cultural Anthropology, Non-European Cultures, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies
Ancient Cultures
History
Theology
Term since 2019
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390683433
 
This cluster with its interdisciplinary and comparative structure establishes an internationally visible Center for Dependency Studies. Academic debates on forms of human bondage and coercion have traditionally focused on slavery. In addition, the transatlantic experience of slavery, which was entangled with the creation of the modern West, continues to inform our notions of what freedom and a lack of freedom mean. The Bonn cluster overcomes this binary opposition of "slavery versus freedom" by proposing "asymmetrical dependency" as a new key concept, which includes all forms of bondage across time and space, including debt bondage, convict labor, tributary labor, servitude, serfdom, and domestic work as well as forms of wage labor and various types of patronage. This goal will be achieved by research on periods, regions and contexts in world history that have not been directly affected by Western colonization, e.g. ancient cultures and societies in Asia, Africa, and pre-colonial America. The cluster will explore this field from five different thematic and methodological vantage points. The first research area (Grammars of Dependency) will focus on textual articulations of dependencies by studying semantics, narratives, and discourses of asymmetrical dependencies. The second area (Embodied Dependencies) examines non-textual relics of dependencies, which have been "inscribed" in bodies and artefacts. The third research area (Institutions, Norms, and Practices) studies forms of dependency produced at the crossroads of institutions, norms, and practices. The fourth area (Labor and Spatiality) focuses on labor-related dependencies and mobility, while the fifth research area – Gender (and Intersectionality) – addresses dependencies that are associated with gender, status, class, ethnicity, religion, and age.The infrastructure of the cluster, which will provide an ideal context for research, encompasses the following components: A graduate school, a postdoctoral program, and a fellow program will integrate 40 PhD students, ten postdocs, and nine fellows into the activi-ties of the cluster. Five professorships that will be implemented by the University specifically for the cluster complement the expertise of the PIs. Our publications, intensive PR activities, an international MA program, a Center for Digital Humanities, and a global research network are the most important measures that will disseminate the cluster’s research results among researchers and the general public as well as in academic teaching. Quality moni-toring and equal opportunities constitute further important components of our overall strategy. The cluster will turn Bonn into an internationally visible hub for Dependency Studies with an emphasis on European and non-European, "pre-modern" societies that meets the challenge of continuing to deconstruct prevalent Eurocentric representations and interpretations of the past.
DFG Programme Clusters of Excellence (ExStra)
 
 

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