Since 2017, the Critical Theory Summer School at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin takes place every year in collaboration with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Each year, the summer school takes up a topic which is central to Critical Theory, politically relevant and systematically promising. In addressing its themes, the summer school confronts the approaches specific to a Critical Theory of society in the Frankfurt School tradition with conceptually and methodologically different perspectives.
The format mixes elements of workshops with text-based, advanced seminars. Over the course of one week, young researchers, graduate students and senior scholars jointly discuss new systematic perspectives and “classic” texts from the Critical Theory corpus. A series of public round-tables channels and sharpens the preceding exchange.
July 1st-6th, 2019 // Berlin
Democracy is in crisis. Various phenomena such as the electoral success of authoritarian leaders, distrust in public institutions and media, rising social tensions, neo-nationalism and reactionary family politics certify this. But what are the underlying reasons for such developments? Is this crisis democracy’s own crisis, or does it originate elsewhere in the social order?
From July 16th-20th 2018 // Berlin
Why do people often accept, and even embrace, social and political conditions that seem to run counter to their own interests? How is it possible that we sometimes support forms of domination with our ways of behaving and thinking without intending or even realizing it? One answer to these questions refers to the notion of ideology. Ideologies are more or less coherent systems of practices and beliefs that shape how individuals relate to their social reality in ways that distort their understanding of what is wrong with that reality and thereby contribute to its reproduction.
From July 17th to 21th 2017 // Berlin, Humboldt University
Is there such a thing as moral or social progress? How do we understand phenomena that might be seen as instances of social regression? And how, after all, are we to conceptualize social change?
While some Critical Theorists hold that we need a notion of progressive social change (and its counterpart) in order to understand and evaluate the dynamics of the transformations we undergo, the very notion of progress (as it is entrenched in the self-understanding of western modernity) seems to be ambivalent and is strongly contested.
