"The Disruptive Condition" Research Initiative: Collaboration with Leuphana University
The Dresden Research Network "Disruption and Societal Change Center" is part of the cultural and social science research initiative called "Die disruptive Bedingung" (The Disruptive Condition"). This consortium, led by Leuphana University Luneburg (headed by Prof. Erich Hörl), involves not only seven principal investigators (PIs) from Dresden but also researchers from the Universität Hamburg and Georg-August University Göttingen. The aim of this consortium is to develop "disruption" as an interdisciplinary foundational category for analyzing present and future relationships.
The interdisciplinary research initiative explores a specific socio-historical experience characteristic of today’s globalised societies: the appearance of disruptiveness as a central feature of social being. This experience, which has recently been described in terms of ‘permacrisis’, ‘polycrisis’ or ‘Zeitenwende’, did not emerge with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine or even the multiplying anthropocenic destructions, resource shortages, supply chain disruptions and market collapses.
Rather, contemporary forms of experiencing and acting in what seems to be a permanent mode of crisis express a momentous intensification of the experience of rupture already constitutive of modern societies, yet now divested of the containing and sublating representations typical for modernity, such as progress and emancipation, and without the horizon of an open future. With the acceleration of technology and capital in the second half of the twentieth century, societies have been increasingly confronted with breaks, discontinuities and uncertainties – to which, in turn, they tend to react in a mode of rupture. It is this immanence of disruptiveness, which determines the forms of experience and worldmaking in contemporary societies, that we seek to grasp as a disruptive condition. The research initiative aims to critically describe the various phenomena that pertain to this condition, their implications and potential transgressions.
The involved researchers of TUDiSC are:
Prof. Dr. Lars Koch, Co-Speaker
Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern, Co-Speaker
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Moritz Ingwersen, PI of the project TPM
Prof. Dr. Marc Wolfram, PI of the project DOUbT
Prof. Dr. Nikita Dhawan, Concept Group