Focuses
The research of the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is focused on the interconnected crises of capitalism and democracy. Within this research field, the Centre chooses an annual topic which guides its theoretical work and public activites.
Focus of the year
Trajectories of Solidarity 2023–2024
It is the task of social critique to identify what is fundamentally broken in a society and say what does not and what cannot work. Social critique looks at crises aiming to understand how they come about and uncover systematic reasons that show that a given crisis is not just a result of random chance. Such an analysis is important because otherwise any attempt to overcome the crisis only leads back into a repeat of the same crisis or possibly into a subsequent one. Each and every time. To fail again is then always new, but never better.
All Focuses
Focus 2023-2024
The Centre for Social Critique at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is inviting fellowship applications for the academic year 2023/24, beginning October 1st, 2023 and ending September 30th, 2024.
Social Transformation 2022 - 2023
The times they are a-changinʼ—the world is changing. Change has been coming and happening for quite some time, and in most parts of the world it has been accompanied by crises carrying existential threats for the vast majority of the local populations. Now, however, even in the global centres of prosperity a “turning point” is being proclaimed because overlapping crises are exacerbating each other as they come together. The word “turning point” is still used as a defensive spell to prevent the changes already impacting most of the world from also having a massive effects where decision-making power and prosperity accumulate. But at the same time, the proclamation of the “turning point” also calls for a fundamental restructuring of Western societies, including drastic “impositions:” [Y]ou better start swimminʼ or you’ll sink like a stone.
Structures of Domination
Domination has many faces. So many that it becomes dubious what connects all these instances in which humans dominate, oppress, exploit, subjugate, disrespect, humiliate, discriminate against (and the list could go on and on) other human beings. The concrete engagement with the various forms of domination has helped society to recognize them and to strengthen the struggles against them. However, these concrete engagements provided no answer to the connection and relation of all the various forms. Today, attempts to bracket all the experiences of domination, oppression, etc. are rather abstract and lifeless. They are in particular unable to grasp the contrary forces that hinder the struggles against different forms of domination to unite in one great stream that washes away domination as such.