The crises in Europe are piling up - climate crisis, refugee crisis, democracy crisis. These are compounded by accelerated digitalisation, polarising globalisation and singularisation of our living worlds, and for the last two years, a bitter war has been raging in Europe. In response to these multiple crises, the humanities, social and cultural sciences increasingly make critical diagnoses, pleading for new types of society models. While the current existential risks concern the general elementary ways of being and living of humans, there are emerging concepts in the humanities and social sciences that dissolve the general and universal ones into historical-cultural ones or regard scientific methodology as a political agenda and even lead to the radical conclusion that matters of facts are to be transformed into matters of concerns. Without any doubt, Science and Technology Studies, Cultural- , Gender-, Postcolonial- , and Animal Studies introduce important perspectives on the effects and influences of cultural, political, and social contexts on the different ways of establishing phenomena and producing science. Paradoxically, this very revival of the historical, cultural, and social political contexts puts into question objectivity or even the intersubjective validity of scientific research, which is supposed to produce those new generally valid social models of societal cohesion.

The fundamental problem, that arises here and is to be discussed at the conference is the relationship between the real social facts and events, which are referentially and indexically based on experience, data and all that is facticity, to the inherent logic of meaning systems and, in addition, to the lifeworld self-interpretations and its historical-semantic self- referential reconstructions. We welcome contributions to both analytic, hermeneutic- phenomenological, existential-analytical and other theoretical approaches of conceptualization in the humanities, cultural, and social sciences, as well as reflections on their corresponding consequences for new lifeworld practices and modes of existence that can lead to a new spirit of coexistence.

Until 31. March 2024 you can send an abstract to one of the Organisers:

Gallina Tasheva (Münster) – gallina.tasheva(at)uni-muenster.de
Marta Soler (Barcelona) - marta.soler(at)ub.edu
Frank Welz (Innsbruck) – frank.welz(at)uibk.ac.at
Carsten Ohlrogge (Münster) – carsten.ohlrogge(at)uni-muenster.de