Assembling: Medial, Spatial, and Political Constellations

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Prager
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426798101

The proposed Scientific Network examines mechanisms of action and collective forms of communication of assembly phenomena from the contexts of politics, art, popular culture, and religion by analyzing practices, procedures and operations of assembling (these include chanting, clapping, playing, testifying, preaching, and praying as well as story-telling, liking, or twittering, but also eating and sleeping). An inter- and transdisciplinary investigation of concrete practices, procedures, and operations of assembling in their respective political, media-aesthetic, historical, and cultural contexts has so far remained a desideratum. In highly topical assembly phenomena (e.g. Occupy, Pegida, performances of fugitives at the theatre, or the solidarity concert in Chemnitz), questions about the overlaps and demarcations of politics, art, popular culture, and religion, but also those concerning relations of assembly events become virulent. Previous approaches have largely neglected these questions. In order to deal with the complexity of assembly events, the planned network pursues a twofold goal: firstly, it seeks to describe heterogeneous practices, procedures, and operations of assembling from a diachronic and synchronous perspective as cultural techniques located in intermediate areas of politics, art, popular culture, and religion. As cultural techniques they will be examined regarding their medial, spatial, and political constellations. Secondly, assembling is to be established as a central category of analysis in media and cultural studies research. From a methodological point of view, the planned academic network draws on research on cultural techniques and thus shifts the focus of previous research from the level of “the assembly” to the level of “assembling” – from the conceptual field of nouns to the field of action and verbs. In cooperation with national and international scholars* from the fields of cultural studies, media studies, theatre studies, comparative literature, philosophy, history, and sociology as well as with artists* and curators*, the research approaches outlined in the application work will be continuously tested and further developed. For this purpose, various material analyses will be carried out in four workshops and a final conference over a period of 2.5 years. At the same time, the working principle of the network itself and the physical-habitualising, materializing, and knowledge-political effects of scientific assembly practices (such as meetings, networks, or collective authorship) will be discussed in a self-reflexive manner. Through the intended publication of a "Compendium of Practices, Procedures, and Operations of Assembling" (open access strategy) and a net-based knowledge architecture in the form of an "Interactive Cartography", the network would like to open up to further interdisciplinary connections.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks