Applicant, temporary member of the executive committee of the DFG research college "Identity and Heritage" and supervision of doctorates.
Contemporary debates about social values and orientation, aiming to provide new cultural and political foundations for the coherence of societies, usually recur to a concept which was and still is to be found in processes of nation building: the constitution of collective identities through an assumed unity of state, history, people, culture and heritage. We aim to argue that the concepts of identity and heritage are interdependent, and that their relations and meanings are neither stable nor permanent. Rather, in the context of community building, uncertain relationships and ambiguities are characteristic of the conflict-permeated fields of identification and appropriation of cultural heritage.
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Project manager of the SFB1265, Project A05: "Biographies of the Middle Classes: Spatial Experience and Meaning in the Life Course Narrative"
This research project investigates spatial constitutions of members of the middle classes from a biographical perspective in Kenya and Germany. It explicitly focuses on translocal spatial references of the family sphere on the one hand and the working environment on the other. Based on narrative-biographical interviews, relevant biographical spaces are reconstructed and analysed with regard to their similarities and differences. Due to the explorative character of the project, different comparison categories (e.g. rural/urban, gender, age or religiosity) will be equally tested and their explanatory value challenged. Comparing German and Kenyan middle classes will only be one of many comparisons. We expect this category to be of explanatory value because middle classes in Kenya mainly emerged in the last decades under the conditions of a globalized world economy without the framing of a welfare state, whereas the emergence of German middle classes at the end of the 19th century was a process deeply interwoven with the establishment of the German welfare state. The aim is to develop an empirically founded conceptualization of typical biographical strategies in coping with the tension between the sphere of reproduction and the world of work from a spatial perspective.
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