Kritik und Kultur. Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven

In these times of intensified crisis rhetoric, the concept of culture is once again being put to the test. Indeed, crises do not arise outside cultural structures but within them; crises are perceived, interpreted, and negotiated culturally. This conference explores the practices, media forms, and theoretical concepts of critique across three thematic strands: ecology, economy, and aesthetics. It examines the status of culture(s) between tradition and innovation, power and subversion, and globality and locality. By interrogating taken-for-granted social assumptions, relations of power, regimes of truth, and political exclusions and occlusions, this conference also puts the critical capacity of cultural studies itself to the test, along with the methods and approaches underlying the production of cultural theory.

The conference will take place across three venues in Berlin: the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (opening event and keynote lectures), the Department for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (parallel afternoon panels), and the ZfL (reading).

The conference is organized by the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (KWG) in cooperation with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Department for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the ZfL.