Symposium at the End

The research group formed a forum for the diverse activities and research surrounding collecting and the different collections at the University of Erfurt. The aim of the joint work was to develop a theoretical perspective on collecting as a cultural technique. In this way, the research group continued the cultural technique research that had already been tested in previous years with a new focus at the University of Erfurt. The researchers' interest was focused on processes of collecting that are linked to practices and operations of selecting, arranging, preparing, preserving, storing, classifying, systematising or sorting etc. and that constitute something like a collection in the first place.

Through its members, various disciplines cooperated with each other in the research group: history, literature and communication studies, history of science and theology, but also colleagues from the Gotha research institutions – Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection, Gotha Research Centre for the History of Knowledge of the Modern Era and Friedenstein Castle Foundation – as well as representatives of media and cultural studies at the Bauhaus University Weimar. Numerous discussion events, workshops and conferences contributed to the networking of the Thuringian research locations Erfurt, Gotha and Weimar.

The research group "Cultural Techniques of Collecting" had emerged in 2021 from the research group "Spatialisation and Cultural Techniques" (2017–2020), which was already based on the work of the Cultural Techniques Laboratory Group (2015–2017).