Coordination Funds

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Endreß
• Subject Area: Medieval History ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313809822

Speaking of ‘resilience’, various academic disciplines have recently adopted scientific approaches from (in particular) Social Ecology and Developmental Psychology aimed at a specific class of social processes: They investigate strategies, resources and conditions that can potentially ensure the survival or preservation of individual and/or social ‘systems’ in cases of external existential threats (e.g., natural disasters or social damages). References to ‘resilience’ are more specifically framed by contrasting it with phenomena of crisis, threat, vulnerability, and risk. In contrast to these concepts, resilience focuses on the potential of social and societal structures and units to persist and resist when faced with exceptional, disruptive processes of social change. Before this background, the Research Group aims at developing and refining a concept of resilience in dialogue between the historical sciences and Sociology. This concept should allow for analysing non-linear and multi-layered socio-historical processes characterized by a close connection between phenomena of continuity and discontinuity, such as they have been observed in historical processes of the 13th to 17th centuries. This innovative approach, which conceives of ‘resilience’ not in essentialist terms but as a heuristic for analysing processes, will enable the Research Group to explore both the needs of transformation when adopting the resilience approach of the socio-ecological discourse, and the resulting potentials for socio-historical research. In this way, the Research Group builds on the insights and proceeds of the first funding period, continues its work in view of the concepts developed thus far, which have proven to be extremely fruitful, refines them further, at the same time complementing their theoretical and empirical bases. Research during the second funding period will focus especially on analysing the connections between phenomena of continuity and discontinuity in historical processes, and on the perception and meaning of disruptive phenomena in socio-historical phases of disruptive change. The concept of resilience used in the analysis of both modern and 13th- to 17th-century constellations will be compared, in view of its analytical potential, with other socio-historical conceptions of process; its sustainability and its conceptual surplus will be tested empirically. The Research Group will consider the historical variation in the notions concerning the times, the current threats, and the concomitant ideas concerning human agency. The group will draw on a set of project-specific methods: techniques of sequential analysis from qualitative social research; textual comparison as current in historical hermeneutics and semantics, and the analysis of historical networks.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2539: Resilience