Subject area
Knowledge Production and Truth Regimes Between the Public Sphere and Expert Discourse
Current debates about a »post-truth« era reflect a growing distrust of academic expert knowledge. Meanwhile, approaches to knowledge rooted in personal experience and emotions are enjoying great popularity. This subject area investigates knowledge production and paths to apprehension in societies of the past and present, examining the era-specific contexts of plausibility, factuality and legitimacy. What role do emotions, imaginations, genealogies, materiality and medial inner logic play in the creation of epistemic authority? How do editorial, popular and academic practices of interpretation correspond or compete? The projects specifically deals with different creations and authentications of historical narratives, with performative historical practices as well as with the visualisation of ethnic-national groups.
Research topics
Experience and Memory of Soviet Deportations (1944-1955)
This research is based on the oral histories of victims of Soviet deportation from the western part of Ukraine to territories in the East of the USSR, such as Siberia and Kazakhstan. The deportees lived in the so-called “special settlements” that existed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1950s. The research uses narrative analysis and contextualizes stories of the deportees in the post-independence memorial culture in Ukraine.
Figurations of Truth Telling
The project compares literary and cinematic reflections on the transformation after 1989 in Eastern Europe and Germany. The focus is on stagings of truth and the tendency to radicalize discourses up to new forms of dissidence.
History as Ancestor Worship
As the number of approaches to history expand, conceptions of the past from the right-wing fringes are increasingly finding their way into mainstream, public historical culture. This project investigates how ethnicist and racist ancestor worship in popular and sub-cultural historical practices can carry far-right ideas into the heart of society.
Holocaust Memory in Ukraine after February 24, 2022
The project is devoted to the memorialization of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Based on approaches of oral history and digital history, it aims to document sites of memory and to trace the changes that Russia’s war against Ukraine has inflicted on the culture of remembrance oft he Second World War.
Institutionalized Memory and its Limits
The »German Resettlers from Bucovina« became a »Buchenland German Community« only after the end of the Second World War. The project examines the meaningful and identity-forming practices of the »Landsmannschaft der Buchenlanddeutschen« and, drawing on a large scale Oral History project, explores the limitations of community formation
Tracing Communism
Historical guided city tours relate history in a spatially bound, oral and interactive way. Taking the presentation of state socialism in commercial communism tours as its example, this project examines the popularisation, commodification and authentication of contemporary history in today’s tourism industry.