Project Details
Projekt
Communicating Pipes. Pipelines as Networking Media
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Susanne Strätling
Subject Area
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543294515
Networks of spaces and actors depend on infrastructures through which goods, subjects and data can circulate. Of all the infrastructures that potentially come into focus here – such as railroads, waterways, power grids or air bridges – this project focuses on pipelines. Their jey role in the transportation of materials gives pipelines a symbolic function that goes far beyond their technical purpose. The guiding hypothesis of this project is that this symbolic-technical dual function of pipelines makes them priviledged media for the negotiation of narratives of cross-border entanglement and disentanglement. The project examines this hybrid function using three major pipeline routes between Eastern and Western Europe: 1. the Soyuz pipeline, whose construction was designed as a resource-driven program of transnational friendship, 2. the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod pipeline, which was propagated as a “physical, living link between east and West” (Blinken 1987:34), and 3. the controversial Nord Stream 2, which was referred to by critics as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop pipeline” and which mutated into a key infrastructural object of the turning point in German-Russian relations in 2022. From the 1970s to the present day, all three energy transport lines mark crucial points in a tense geopolitical development dynamic. At the same time, the specificity of the case studies allows for a series of differentiations which concern the complex history of their cultural imaginations. The key questions of the projects are: What do these pipelines transport beyond fossil fuels? How do they operate as polyfunctional media of symbolic and material transmission? How are relationships between contact and conflict negotiated through them? What chronotopoi of transcultural circulation and communitization develop along their routes?
DFG Programme
Research Units
