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SFB 1369:  Cultures of Vigilance. Transformations - Spaces - Practices

Subject Area Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term since 2019
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Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 394775490
 
Collaborative Research Center 1369 investigates the historical and cultural foundations of vigilance. It starts from the observation that achievements within societies that are usually attributed to institutions, including counter-terrorism, public security, rule of law, and health, are to a large extent based on the participation of non-institutional and formally non-responsible persons. They partially devote their attention to the service of corresponding tasks, consider this as a form of vigilance and interact with political and social incentive systems, technical possibilities and institutions. The overarching goal of the CRC is to clarify how attention can become functional in this way. To achieve this goal, the CRC has established and successfully applied the novel and highly relevant approach of vigilance cultures. Vigilance is defined as personal attention coupled to supra-individual objectives and thus integrated into clearly identifiable functions. Reaching back historically to the cultures of the Ancient Near East, the CRC reconstructs how the procedures of involvement and the roles of vigilant actors changed under new institutional, religious, technological, and political conditions. The CRC’ approach is interdisciplinary, involving the fields of history and law, ethnology, medical history, and literary studies. One result of the first phase is the finding that the idealization of vigilance relies on a model of individual performances, while its realization is often the result of distributed achievements, in which individuals participate only situationally and in part. Another result is that the efficient orientation of attention and a longer-term involvement of actors depend on the fact that a certain degree of indeterminacy of what is to be observed remains. Thus, it is precisely those structures that are efficient in which what is to be observed remains hidden, unclear, and therefore in need of observation and interpretation. As a consequence of these two findings, the CRC in its second funding phase considers on the one hand more distributed achievements in settings of vigilance. On the other hand, with the model of latency, it clarifies the question of the efficacy and functioning of such under-determinations. The task of the second phase is to further consolidate the methodology and empirical basis. To this end, the questions of setting and latency will be clarified, and the inclusion of Latin America and Japan will provide an even more intensive cultural comparison. In addition, the safeguarding and sustainable dissemination of the CRC’s findings is being prepared, which will result in a scientific Handbook of Vigilance Cultures and a virtual and medially attractive Atlas of the Cultures of Vigilance aimed at a broader public.
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Participating Institution Orient-Institut Istanbul
 
 

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