SFB 1095:  Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230856760

The appropriation and distribution of resources is a central challenge of present times. In order to safeguard their own existence and in order to make use of opportunities for development, actors are compelled to make use of resources. The need to have access to resources may limit future possibilities, potentially resulting in recurring conflicts. This situation constitutes a challenge for academic research: How do actors address their own situation, and what importance do resources have in this respect? How do actors speak about conditions of scarcity and deficiency? The CRS 1095 addresses such questions by looking into discourses of weakness and their impact on the question of dealing with resources. In what way do self-descriptions and self-perceptions of actors impact on the use of resources? How do these discourse address demands towards others, to what extent do they have a function in identity-building? These are some of the core questions of the Frankfurt CRC.Dealing with these questions is of secondary importance in the disciplines of natural science and economics. A humanities-based perspective of resources, which starts out with historical considerations can enrich our understanding of resources. Such an approach on the one hand enables a focus on norms and practices, which determine the handling and distribution of resources (resource regimes). On the other hand, it makes it possible to understand how actors think about their own situation and bring this into discussions (discourses of weakness). Resources here do have practical value and a formative power, since they open up new opportunities to act – nobody is able to produce all necessary resources on one’s own – and they also produce new situations of dependency, which can be construed as determining strength and weakness.One further goal of the research cluster is to overcome conceptual restraints brought about by focusing on natural resources or supposedly immaterial resources such as knowledge and instead to offer reliable alternatives to such distinctions. Such a focus calls for a cultural studies perspective, which from a historical and contemporary point of view deals with resources in an empirical, rather than normative way. The CRC 1095 thus sees the interdependency of discourses of weakness and resource regimes as an important point of departure for the development of new research perspectives. The long-term goal is to make use of these perspectives in order to deal with the question of how historical change can be modelled conceptually.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Completed projects

• A01 - Conceptions of National Weakness in Late 19th and Early 20th Century China (Project Head Amelung, Iwo )
• A02 - The Past as a Political Resource: Evoking the Past as a Strategy in Roman Greece (Project Head Moser-Gerber, Muriel )
• A03 - The Knowledgeable as a Resource and Legitimation of Power during and after the Crisis. Egypt during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom (Project Head Warner, Annette )
• A04 - Potestas, Iurisdictio and Dominium: Discourses of Weakness and Violence during the 13th and 14th Centuries (Project Head Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias )
• A05 - Europe's Decline: Discourses of Weakness as a means of Mobilising Resources (Project Head Cornelißen, Christoph )
• A06 - Situated Knowledge: Forms and Functions of Weak Bodies of Knowledge (Project Heads Epple, Moritz ;  Warner, Annette )
• B01 - The Use of Resources and Economic Calculation: Perception, Structures of Decisions and Practices of Adaption in the German Chemical Industry between 1860 and 1960 (Project Head Plumpe, Werner )
• B02 - Political Organisations beyond the State (Project Head Schröter, Susanne )
• B03 - Information as a Resource for Juridical Decision Processes. The Emergence of Modern Regimes of Information in Early Modern Papacy (Project Head Albani, Benedetta )
• B04 - The Hanse and her Legislation: Lack of Resources and Functionality (Project Head Cordes, Albrecht )
• B05 - From " Weak" Kinship to Kinship as a Resource of Communication. Transformations of European Kinship in Medieval Resource Regimes (Project Head Jussen, Bernhard )
• B06 - Flexibility through poverty - self-perception and tactics for accessing resources among local NGO-Agents in West Africa (Project Head Hahn, Hans Peter )
• C02 - The Knowledge of the pragmatici. The Presence and Meaning of Pragmatic Normative Literature in Ibero-America during the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries (Project Head Duve, Thomas )
• C03 - Membership as a Precarious Resource: Attribution of Status in Imperial Peripheries (Project Head Fahrmeir, Andreas )
• C04 - Sacral Objects as Military Resources in the Eastern Roman Empire from Justinian to Heraclius (Project Head Leppin, Hartmut )
• C05 - Knowledge in Intermediate Spaces: Forms of Complexity Generation and Reduction in the Study on Solid State Bodies, 1930-1970 (Project Head Epple, Moritz )
• Z - Central Tasks (Project Head Amelung, Iwo )

• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Participating Institution: Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie
• Spokespersons: Professor Dr. Iwo Amelung, since 1/2017; Professor Dr. Hartmut Leppin, until 12/2016