Research
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F. Schleiermacher, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, 2nd ed. 1830, § 132.
The perfect understanding of a speech or writing is a feat of art and requires an art theory or technique, which we designate by the term hermeneutics.
Research profile of the Faculty of Humanities
The Faculty's highly differentiated humanities culture has led to a diverse research landscape. We see this breadth of topics and methods, which cannot be reduced to a few key concepts, as a distinguishing feature of our research culture.
Agile research design formats are characteristic of this. In contrast to tightly pre-planned and therefore seemingly externally determined large-scale projects or highly complex and therefore sluggish collaborative research apparatuses, they are based on individually manageable, almost non-hierarchical and therefore quickly responsive structures. Such lean architectures, which are appropriate for the advanced 21st century, ensure that the research capacities of FB 02 are not blocked by extensive application, Coordinator or reporting tasks, but benefit scientific and social progress almost undiminished. Modern principles such as the careful use of given research resources, strict problem-oriented interdisciplinarity or internal structural economy are guiding principles for the targeted and therefore effective research culture of the Faculty of Humanities.
Nevertheless, the Faculty is also involved in two university-wide research priorities in which several of its subject areas collaborate across departments and disciplines: in Cultural and Gender Studies and in Empirical Educational Research. Other areas of focus include „Textwissenschaft und Textkompetenz“, „Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung“ and research into the work and influence of the Brothers Grimm.
Main research areas at FB 02
Publications of the Faculty
Amelie Bendheim & Jennifer Pavlik (Hrsg.): Ästhetik des Anderen. Minoritäre Perspektiven in Literatur, Theater und (neuen) Medien. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2024.
How are concepts of the Other staged in literature, film or theater? The contributors look at the potential of aesthetic forms and reflect on how these can contribute to making sections of reality visible that often remain unconsidered: Perspectives of the Other. Beyond essentializing attributions, the aim is to reveal hybridities and ambiguities in order to question widespread and sometimes rigid thought patterns. Only in this way can a differentiated world and self-perception emerge that includes the other as a fundamental experience and understands it as an opportunity for irritation and amazement.
You can find more information here.
Andreas Wicke: Fünfzig Jahre voller Samstage – Paul Maars „Sams“-Romane. KinderundJugendmedien.de. Wissenschaftliches Internetportal für Kindermedien und Jugendmedien. 2023.
"Now I can only hope that you enjoy the story of Sams nearly as much as my (unfortunately not entirely objective) children", writes Paul Maar in 1971, when he sends the manuscript for A Week Full of Saturdays to the publisher Friedrich Oetinger. Since then, eleven novels have been published, selling over six million copies. The stories about Mr. Taschenbier and Sams have also been adapted as audio books and radio plays, films and plays, musicals and computer games. The first volume was published in 1973, so Sams will be celebrating its 50th birthday in 2023 - and in that time it has become one of the best-known German-language children's book characters. However, the novels are not only popular with children; there are now also many different approaches to analyzing and interpreting them in German studies. In Fifty Years of Saturdays, Andreas Wicke casts twelve literary-scientific spotlights on Paul Maar's impressive children's literary success project, and excerpts from the original Sams manuscript and the correspondence between author and publisher are also published here, some for the first time.
To the individual chapters:
- Origin and reception
- On the interpretation of the main characters
- Dimensions of fantasy theory
- Social-historical and political background
- Illustrations
- Intertextual play
- Sams on the stage
- The Sams in radio play, audio book and film
- Language, comedy and poetry
- Translations
- Sams at school
- Literature and reality
Click here for the overview page: https: //sams.kinderundjugendmedien.de/
Andra Ioana Horcea-Milcu / Ann-Kathrin Koessler / Adrian Martin / Julian Rode / Thais Moreno Soares: Modes of mobilizing values for sustainability transformation. In: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (64).
There is broad agreement on the potential role of values to incite intentional transformative change towards sustainability. However, there is no proposed heuristic on how to mobilize values for sustainability transformation, especially in the context of multilevel decision-making. We aim to fill this gap based on a literature analysis conducted as part of Chapter 5 of the IPBES Values Assessment. We outline four modes of mobilizing values for sustainability transformation: enabling, including, shifting, and reflecting. They differ in terms of the mix of agency and conversely of outside steering needed for each value mobilization mode. We then explore key tensions and insights that emerge through this classification: interdependencies between the modes of mobilizing values, tensions between shifting versus enabling and including values, tensions between which values to shift and which values to enable, and tensions between levels of values intervention (individuals, community, and society).
Mark-Oliver Casper / Giuseppe Flavio Artese (eds.): Situated Cognition Research. Methodological Foundations. (Series Studies in Brain and Mind). Cham/Switzerland: Springer 2023 (=Studies in Brain and Mind 23).
The book is dedicated to a progressive part of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the so-called "situated cognition" approach. This volume brings together proponents and critics of situated cognition research to assess the subtleties, presuppositions, possibilities, and scope of a methodology for this branch of research. The contributions are divided into three categories. The first category comprises contributions that deal with a methodology from the perspective of epistemology and philosophy of science. It discusses whether explanatory pluralism or monism is to be supported and discusses possible trade-offs between different positions found within situated cognition research. The second category deals with ontological questions concerning the synchronic and diachronic constitution of cognitive phenomena and the localization of cognitive processes. The third category deals with how the theoretical and practical commitments of situated cognition research lead to empirically supported investigations of various phenomena, such as the study of affordances or (chronic) pain. The book represents an overdue first step towards a systematic and positive response to methodological concerns in situated cognition research. Without this and further steps, research into the situated mind could falter. With such steps, situated cognition research can method(olog)ically structure and more promisingly realize its ambitions of having a greater impact on the research practice of cognitive science.
Nikola Roßbach / Angela Schrott (eds.): Wiederholung und Variation im Gespräch des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Reihe Historische Dialogforschung). Berlin: de Gruyter 2023 (=Historische Dialogforschung 6).
Repetition is a basic cultural activity that occurs in all areas of human life and activity, including communication. This interdisciplinary anthology examines the creativity of repetitive patterns of conversation in the pre-modern era. The contributions from the fields of history, linguistics and literature analyze German, Spanish, French and English textual evidence from the Middle Ages and early modern period and examine the tension between the apparent identity of repetition and its potential to creatively generate differences. The fundamental linguistic and cultural functional contexts of this interrelationship between repetition and variation will be explored: Do repetitive patterns of conversation create community or do they sharpen contrasts? Is repetition an orienting principle of composition or does it have a destabilizing effect on speech constellations through variation? Does it stand for continuity and consolidation of linguistic forms of expression or for the possibility of creative renewal?
This volume explores repetition and variation under the aspects of structure and function, transformation and subversion, rhetoric and aesthetics and deals with didactic dialogues, legal texts, narrative literature and theater.
Angela Schrott / Johanna Wolf / Christine Pflüger (Hg.): Textkomplexität und Textverstehen. Studien zur Verständlichkeit von Texten. Berlin, De Gruyter 2023 (=Linguistik – Impulse – Tendenzen 106).
Text comprehension is a dynamic process in which readers enter into a dialog with the text. For disciplines concerned with the comprehension of texts, it has proven extremely fruitful to define text complexity as the totality of dynamic interactions that arise when the linguistic and cultural levels of a text are activated in the process of comprehension. These activations contextualize the text in its linguistic, cultural and epistemic environments and generate a mental model of the text through semantic constructions in the process of reception. If texts are available in multimodal and multicodal formats, the demands on cognitive processing are additionally increased. This multidimensionality of text comprehension requires interdisciplinary research into text complexity and text comprehension. This volume therefore outlines a research design that combines text linguistics and text-based didactics across disciplines. The contributions propose theoretical models for interdisciplinary research into text complexity and text comprehension, provide text-type-specific analysis models and offer suggestions from the practice of language and cultural mediation.