Ideas about the university to come

Lüneburg. The cooperation between the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society and the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) focuses on a far-reaching problem: how can we rethink, reimagine, and redefine the role of the university in globalised societies confronted with multiple forms of disruption? What does the university mean and what is its purpose in the Disruptive Condition? The appointment of Erich Hörl, Co-Director of the Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies (LIAS) in Culture and Society and Vice-President for Research at Leuphana University, as an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) further strengthens the cooperation. Hörl will also become a member of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR).

Innovative questions and support for early career researchers
Under the working title Re:Timing the University. Apartitionality and the University-to-Come, LIAS and CHR are developing a new conceptualization of the university. They are building on the work of re-describing our situation, which has been taking place at Leuphana for several years under the title of the Disruptive Condition. After half a century of the breaking apart, shattering, fragmenting and disintegration of ways of life, modes of knowledge and thought, and socio-political programmes as a result of the impact of technical and economic innovations and the force of anthropocenic shocks, the psychosocial abilities and processes for dealing with radical change have been deeply shaken. In this context, the question arises as to the role and responsibility of the university in recomposing possible worlds and strengthening the sustainability of societies – and from different perspectives, across the divide between the Global South and North, across hemispheres.

In the future, the project will also aim to promote and exchange doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, which will result in an academic profile of interdisciplinary perspectives and global issues related to the problem complex of the university to come.

“The collaboration enables an unprecedented redefinition of the university's task while fostering critical dialogue between local and global perspectives,” explains Prof. Dr. Erich Hörl, who has been Professor of Media Culture and Media Philosophy at Leuphana University Lüneburg since 2014.

Visionary impulses from Lüneburg and Cape Town
Since its opening in 2006, the CHR, of which LIAS advisory board member Premesh Lalu is founding director, has established itself as a leading institution for humanities research in South Africa. It promotes innovative approaches to the role of the humanities in the post-apartheid society and broadens the global perspective on freedom, society and technology. CHR's work is characterised by a transdisciplinary, and transhemispheric orientation that operates at the interfaces between art, technology, and society.

A detailed discussion between Erich Hörl and Premesh Lalu titled “Unseating Mastery: The University and the Promise of the New” has just been published in the journal Theory, Culture & Society. It provides an insight into the topics and discourses of the cooperation on the upcoming university.

Further information: 
[LIAS]
[CHR]
[Erich Hörl]
[Premesh Lalu]

Download of the discussion between Erich Hörl and Premesh Lalu