Sociology of the Un/Available

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katharina Block
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441796652

Current diagnoses of time and socio-theoretical perspectives suggest that we are currently experiencing a caesura that can no longer be adequately grasped with the forms of modern thought. The essential constitutives of this caesura are concrete phenomena of the unavailable. The projected network would like to show that such concreta of the unavailable actually exist in the areas of (a) societal relationships to nature, (b) human-technology interactions, and (c) political mobilization and lead to a caesura that challenges and even calls into question established research practices and forms of knowledge. Accordingly, sociology lacks a specific perspective that not only includes the handling of the unavailable, but places it centrally as an object. The aim of the network is to systematize the social thematization of the caesura and its emerging concreta of the unavailable on the basis of its multi-perspectivity guaranteed by its members and thus to specify the contours of a sociology of the un/available. The sociology of the un/available is to be developed on two different levels and by relating these levels: First, the caesura must be identified on the basis of concrete phenomena of the unavailable. Secondly, within the framework of an innovative inventory of existing social theories, it is necessary to explain to what extent these are still suitable for grasping the emerging caesura, the expression of which is the concrete unavailability, without leaving essential social changes unobserved: Which basic theoretical approaches can offer points of reference? Which innovative approaches need to be further developed and where should new concepts be introduced in order to initiate a renewal of the sociological imagination? Which established approaches are to be dropped? Finally, it is necessary to discuss which practical-transformative consequences could result from the concrete phenomena of the unavailable along diverse object references within the three above-mentioned object areas. What forms of socialization does the unavailable evoke? And can a sociology of the unavailable develop action- and solution-oriented contributions? By examining existing sociological theory offers on the one hand and new horizons of thought from the cultural sciences and the humanities on the other, a theory formation is promoted with which this caesura in sociology can be adequately grasped. Such theory formation has so far been a desideratum within sociology and will therefore be developed in the network.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks