University of Erfurt involved in the new "Imaginamics" Cluster of Excellence

The Cluster of Excellence "Imaginamics. Practices and Dynamics of Social Imagining" in the humanities and social sciences focusses on what holds societies together at their core: shared ideas, narratives, world views and visions of the future. The aim of the cluster is to contribute to a better understanding of social conflicts and debates. "How we understand society, how we imagine the future and look to the past is currently undergoing drastic changes," says Professor Johannes Grave, Professor of Modern Art History at Friedrich Schiller University and speaker of the new Cluster of Excellence. As the current crises – climate change, the pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the return of far-right ideologies – have shown, social imagination can not only bring people together and promote solidarity, but also create conflict and division. The research network, which involves Friedrich Schiller University Jena and nine other institutions, including the University of Erfurt and the Max Weber Centre for Cultural and Social Science Studies, focuses on questions about the emergence of these social imaginations and understanding how we deal with them.

Professor Hartmut Rosa, Director of the Max Weber-Kolleg, is working together with Professor Lambert Wiesing from Friedrich Schiller University on the so-called Theory Hub. Here, theories and practices of social imagining are to be reflexively brought into dialogue with one another across disciplinary boundaries in order to develop an understanding of central concepts and their emergence. This is done by taking into account different approaches, such as phenomenology, the history of knowledge, the theory of narration or image theory.

In the working group "Mediating Difference, Substantiating Truth", Professor Bernhard Kleeberg examines borderline figures between science and religion. "Here, the Erfurt History of Science will contribute its research on political epistemology and the praxeologies of truth and discuss them in an interdisciplinary, international framework from antiquity to the present in order to understand how figures such as the "sage" or the "martyr" are imagined as mediators between different cultures," says Kleeberg.

In addition to theoretical groundwork, the participating researchers are combining well-founded empirical studies that are intended to open up cross-epochal and cross-cultural perspectives.

"Imaginamics" is supported by a network of strong regional co-operation partners. In addition to Friedrich Schiller University, the University of Erfurt and the Max-Weber-Kolleg, the Bauhaus University Weimar, the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, the “Klassik Stiftung Weimar”, the Ettersberg Foundation, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society and researchers from the University of Halle are also involved.