Current research projects

Collaborative projects and research foci

Lafiteau
SFB 294: Structural change of property Subproject A03 "Property and Habit"
Politics of Truth. Erfurt Research Centre for Political Epistemologies To the project website
PECEE logo
Research Centre Political Epistemologies of Central and Eastern Europe (PECEE) To the Subpage
Logo WIssG of the self
DFG Network: Knowledge Histories of the Unavailable Self To the network website

Research focus on the history of (social) psychology

Preview image

The research focus combines various projects on the history of (social) psychology. Nora Binder completed her doctorate on Kurt Lewin's field psychology and is currently working on the topic of social competence. Towards an epistemology of the interpersonal in the 20th century. Yves Hänggi completed his doctorate in Basel/Erfurt on psychological longitudinal studies in the 20th century. Sandra Janßen completed her doctorate on the history of knowledge of imagination phenomena and subject concepts in 19th and early 20th century psychology and literature and is currently finalising her habilitation thesis on the totalitarian subject in psychology, political theory and literature of the 1930s and 1940s. Bernhard Kleeberg is researching balance, dissonance and conformity in mid-20th century social psychology and the early history of consumer psychology. Verena Lehmbrock works on East German social psychology and its transnational interdependence as well as the polyvalence of its interventions between the individual and society. Ricardo Neuner completed his doctorate in Konstanz/Erfurt on the influence of American consumer psychology on economic thinking. Carolin Piotrowski is completing her doctorate with the thesis Wanyamwezi. Biography of a Song, 1900-1914 on the interweaving of psychology and (music) ethnography. Carola Oßmer is doing her doctorate on the invention of the normal child through research into developmental norms since the beginning of the 20th century.

Since 2017, an annual workshop for experts and young researchers on the history of the sciences of the psyche has been organised in cooperation with the Forum Geschichte der Humanwissenschaften. More information

In January 2024, the DFG-funded academic network Wissensgeschichten des unverfügbaren Selbst. Individual and Collective Subject Figures in Psychology, Sociology, Ethnology and Cultural Studies 1850-1980swill begin itswork.

 

Individual projects

Conference flyer

Russia's policies of truth and its self-staging as an anti-colonial protective power

Habilitation project | Johanna Hügel

   The aim of the project is to analyze these deeper narratives and strategies that underlie the profound restructuring of reality and social belonging in the Russian Federation. Methodologically, the project draws in particular on approaches from political epistemology and praxeology. Such an analysis of the epistemological level of current Russian politics is not only indispensable for understanding the processes within the Russian Federation, but also for deciphering the appropriation of postcolonial theory by the global New Right. It can also provide approaches for analyzing why parts of the global left and the decolonial school do not clearly distance themselves from Putin's regime. The appeal of this rhetoric points to the legacy of Europe’s colonial past ... More

Placeholder Janssen

The totalitarian subject. On psychology, political theory and literature of the 1930s and 1940s

Habilitation project | Sandra Janßen

The study aims to show that one of the central elements of totalitarian discourses in the 1930s and 1940s was a conception of the subject whose epistemological foundation can be inferred from contemporary psychological knowledge. According to the thesis, the fact that this subject can be addressed as a 'totalitarian' one implies a constitution that can by no means be defined solely in political terms. It is assumed that models of subjectivity that can be described in terms of the history of knowledge are relevant for the political theory of this period, as they also permeate imaginative forms of political and social participation. This epistemic connection is particularly evident in the literature of the period under investigation: in it, psychological and political understandings of the subject come together and corresponding forms of 'subjectivation' are staged.

Placeholder

Anti-Anti-Science

PhD project | Meike Katzek

A description of Meike Katzek's doctoral project will follow shortly.

Pre-astronautics as a popular culture of knowledge from 1968 to the end of the Cold War

PhD project | Erik Kaiser

The aim of the research project is to produce a history of knowledge and media of the knowledge culture of pre-astronautics from the late 1960s to the end of the 1980s. Pre-astronautics was and is a parascientific branch of research, predominantly carried out by amateur researchers, which supports the hypothesis that the earth was visited in the past by extraterrestrial space travellers who had a significant influence on the biological, cultural and technical development of mankind. It can be described as an esoteric-technical system of knowledge based on speculative assumptions with a claim to explain the world, which can be seen in the context of the counter culture at the beginning of the 1960s and united political, religious and scientific counter-models to the prevailing thought structures of the time... More

Tesla Radio

‘Intelligence’ as a Form of ‘Sociological’ Thinking around 1900

Habilitation project | Alexei Lochmatov

My project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), deals with the question of how ‘intelligence’ has become one of the central research objects in both the natural and social sciences. Within this project, I intend to investigate the political and social factors that  catalysed the rapid development of the discourse of intelligence in the 20th century. My idea is to explore this phenomenon in relation to central ‘sociological’ categories such as social grouping, morality, stability, and normality. I will also examine how the scientific authority of intelligence ... More

Cooking up Significations: Foodways and Racialisation in 19th-Century American Literature

Habilitation project | Antonia Purk

The research project investigates the connection between "foodways" (including the consumption and preparation of food, as well as texts about it) and "racialisation" in 19th century American literature. With a view to both "whiteness" and "comparative racialisation", the project considers food as part of a signifying system on the one hand, and the performativity of interactions with food and how these are linked to attributions of different group affiliations on the other. More

Manès Sperber - a life between Judaism, Marxism and individual psychology. A biography and analysis of his work

PhD project | Sebastian Ripl

With my research project on Manès Sperber, I will analyse the life and work of Manès Sperber historically and contextually. Born in 1905 to a Jewish family in the eastern Galician town of Zablotow, Sperber's family fled to Austria during the First World War. In Vienna, the young Sperber joined the Hashomer Hazair and met Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology. After moving to Berlin, where he lived until Hitler came to power, Manès Sperber rose to become Adler's "master pupil" within the individual psychology movement. Sperber also became an active member of the Communist Party in Berlin. In exile in France, he left both individual psychology and communism behind him and developed ... More

Wanyamwezi. Biography of a song, 1900-1914

PhD project | Carolin Piotrowski

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a lively scientific interest in researching so-called primitive peoples with the help of the phonograph. The idea of an objective medium that allows cultures to be recorded in their orality without intervention is a guiding principle. The holdings of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, which comprised around 15,000 wax cylinders at the beginning of the 1930s, provide an eloquent certificate of this. The wax cylinders were inventoried and usually galvanised, the songs were transcribed into European musical notation and sometimes translated with hermeneutic zeal. Against this background, the project traces the path of the chants from the field to the archive.
Using three case studies, it describes the 'biography' of such songs, which circulate between the sciences - musicology, ethnology and experimental psychology - and develop a particular productivity in these border areas.
The first chapter traces the path of a WaNyamwezi song from the former colony of German East Africa to the Berlin archive. The second chapter focusses on the productivity that the examination of a Wedda song developed for the newly forming Gestalt psychology. The third chapter is dedicated to Hornbostel's only non-European field research, which he conducted among the Pawnee in North America. This change of perspective and his collaboration with the founder of cultural relativism, Franz Boas, led to an examination of non-European cultures that increasingly emancipated itself from evolutionist and culturally diffusionist patterns of thought.
Beyond the usual histories of the origins of institutions or ideas, the work can thus present a history of comparative musicology that explains its origins on the basis of the fundamental epistemic categories that developed in the concrete scientific practice of the protagonists.