Interdisciplinary Research

The interdisciplinary research initiative ‘The Disruptive Condition’ brings together researchers from Leuphana University Lüneburg, TU Dresden, the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development and the Universities of Hamburg and Göttingen. Part of the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) at Leuphana University Lüneburg, the research network combines different disciplines from the Humanities, Cultural Studies and Social Sciences to analyse and critically question the disruptive condition in its differential constitution. Participating researchers form working groups focusing on different empirical and theoretical aspects of the disruptive condition.

We take as our starting point is the hypothesis that the disruptive condition is more than just a discursive construction. As a generative moment of contemporary societies, it produces specific social, economic, technical, legal, political, aesthetic, epistemological and ecological forms and practices, which we aim to reconstruct in their genealogical contexts of origin, present constellations and speculative future scenarios.

The research focuses on individual and collective strategies of dealing with contemporary experiences of rupture: Acceptance and adaptation, resignation or hope, trust and (caring) concern, resistance and protest are possible reactions that seek to cope with the disruptive condition and that prove to be constitutive for the reproduction of contemporary societies and their functional areas of politics, law, economy, art and science. Of particular interest here is the immanence of rupture. Logics of rupture determine not only the self-description of contemporary societies, but also their capacity to produce the world as such: the threat of collapse often gives rise to reactions in the mode of rupture. In this sense, we explore the extent to which rupture or disruption – i.e. the tearing apart, interruption or also disruption of processes, structures and orders – has been historically constituted as a form-giving moment of contemporary societies, and which formations and futures it generates.

The research initiative analyses and critiques the disruptive condition and its underlying logics of rupture in a number of areas, for which the following questions are central:

• What re-orderings occur under the disruptive condition? What forms of organisation result from the disruptive experience?
   
• Which subjective and collective identities develop from the disruptive experience? What possible worlds can be imagined and critiqued under the disruptive condition?
   
• How is knowledge generated from the disruptive experience? What does knowledge production mean under the disruptive condition?
   
• How do we want to live in an age of disruption? How do we want to inhabit a world experienced as disruptive? What does coexisting under the disruptive condition look like?