Biography-Berlin

Zhang Shuangli is a Professor of Philosophy from the School of Philosophy, Fudan University, China. She is now the vice dean of the School of Philosophy, Fudan University and the vice director of the Center for Contemporary Marxism, Fudan University.

Her main areas of research are Marxist Philosophy, western Marxism (especially Georg Lukacs and Ernst Bloch), critical theory. She has authored and coauthored several books in these areas. Besides these, she has also published quite a few articles in Chinese or English in the academic journals like Philosophical Investigations (Beijing, China), Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences (English version)(Shanghai, China), Critical Research on Religion (SAGE journals) and etc.

In the recent several years, she has been doing researches about the Marx-Hegel relationship and has published a series of articles on this topic, including the chapter on “Marx and Hegel” in Oxford Companion to Hegel (Oxford University Press, ed. Dean Moyar, 2017).

She has also written some pieces about China, some of which were published in Actuel Marx (France) and Die Zeit (Germany).

Ulf Bohmann is a post-doc researcher at the Chemnitz University of Technology. He studied Political Science, Sociology, Philosophy and Social Psychology at the University of Augsburg and the Fernuniversität Hagen until 2007. He received his PhD at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in 2013 with a thesis on the notion of a critical genealogy in the work of Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor, under the supervision of Hartmut Rosa and Martin Saar. Until 2016, he was a post-doc researcher in the project “Desynchronised Society?” in Jena, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2017, he acted as a stand-in full professor in Chemnitz. In 2018, he was a fellow at the Degrowth Research Group in Jena. Latest publications: Special Issue: Tribute to Charles Taylor, Philosophy & Social Criticism 44(7), 2018 (with Gesche Keding and Hartmut Rosa); Desynchronisation und Populismus. Ein zeitsoziologischer Versuch über die Demokratiekrise am Beispiel der Finanzmarktregulierung, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 70 (Sonderheft 58), 2018 (with Henning Laux and Hartmut Rosa); Kritische Theorie der Politik, Suhrkamp 2019 (edited with Paul Sörensen, in print).

Project description:

At the Center of Humanities and Social Change, I’m working on a comparative reassessment of legitimation crisis theories. The motivation to do so is to be more specific than the widespread but undifferentiated talk of a contemporary crisis of democracy. I’m assembling five pertinent approaches to the motif of a legitimation crisis, namely Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Wolfgang Streeck, Charles Taylor and Hauke Brunkhorst. The goal is to develop respective profiles with strengths and weaknesses in order to have a sound theoretical toolkit. Furthermore, I’m examining in which way and to which degree the diagnoses of a legitimation crisis are valid for our present society. Finally, I will enquire if an integrative approach is possible and convincing.

Frank Schumann is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the social psychology department of the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin (IPU Berlin). His research interests revolve around the questions of how social reality is perceived subjectively and how this experience shapes social and political practices. To answer these, Schumann draws from psychoanalysis, social psychology, critical theory, sociology of critique, theories of social practices and sociology of knowledge.

In 2017, he finished his dissertation on the concept of social suffering in the history of the Frankfurt School which was published as Leiden und Gesellschaft [Suffering and Society] (Bielefeld 2018). He currently is working on a project that aims at reconstructing how sympathizers of social movements articulate and justify their political critique, and which notions of a social order are thus implied.

Christian Schmidt is a philosopher. After receiving his PhD in 2005 he worked as team leader at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, and as Dilthey Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation in the Philosophy Department at University Leipzig. He held positions as temporary chair for social philosophy at Goethe-University Frankfurt and for practical philosophy at University Leipzig. Research stays led him to University Paris 1 Sorbonne-Pantheon and the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. He received the habilitation in 2016 with a thesis on Problems of Autonomy (unpublished). The Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities appointed him as a member of the academy’s Young Forum in 2018. Major publications are: Karl Marx zur Einführung (Junius 2018), Können wir der Geschichte entkommen? (Campus 2013) and Individualität und Eigentum (Campus 2006).

Volkan Çıdam is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boğazçi University, Istanbul. Since January 2019 he is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Philosophy at the Humboldt University with the support of PSI of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research interests lie at the intersection of democratic theory, German Idealism, social and political thought of Marx and Marxism and Critical Theory. His publications include Die Phänomenologie des Widergeistes: Eine Anerkennungstheoretische Deutung von Marx’ normativer Kritik am Kapitalismus im Kapital, Nomos Verlag 2012 and 2016, “Historical Method and Critical Philosophy”, Philosophy at Yeditepe, Special Issue: Method in Philosophy. During his stay in Berlin he worked on a project on the relationship between the failure to coming to terms with past state crimes and the rise of Neo-Fascism through a reevaluation of Adorno’s thoughts on the same topic.

He published in 2020 an article on “Adorno’s two-track conceptualization of progress: The new categorical imperative and politics of remembrance” at the International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory – Constellations.

Andrea Roedig is a freelance journalist in Vienna. She obtained her doctorate degree in philosophy and was research assistant and Freie Universität Berlin. In 2001 until 2006 she managed the arts section of the weekly journal Freitag. Since 2007 she lives and works in Vienna and publishes cultural essays, reportages of daily life and scientific articles for serveral German, Austrian and Swiss media (NZZ, Woz, Standard, Freitag, Psychologie Heute, Radio Ö1; Deutschlandfunk, etc.). She is co-publisher of the literature and essay magazine Wespennest. Her last book publications are „Über alles, was hakt. Obsessionen des Alltags“, Klever-Verlag 2013; „Bestandsaufnahme Kopfarbeit“ (together with Sandra Lehmann), Klever-Verlag 2015.

During her stay at the Humanities and Social Change Center she wrote an essay on “Dünnes Eis? Ach was! Vier Thesen in Verteidigung des Puritanismus” which was published at INDES – Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft.

Bertram Lomfeld is professor for private law and the foundations of law (philosophy, sociology, economics & anthropology) at Free University Berlin. His research focuses on the legal construction of basic insitutions of private law (like contract, property or the corporate form), their constitutive power for modern societies, their plural political justifications and possible future shapes. Bertram’s critical approach aims to analyze how legal institutions coin the social grammar of human development and to reveal the ethico-political battles behind legal regulation. Besides he works on the general structure and procedure of legal argumentation, the nature of (legal) judgements and legal emotions. His authored and edited books include “Die Gründe des Vertrages” [The Reasons of Contract] (Mohr Siebeck: 2015), “Reshaping Markets: Economic Governance, the Global Financial Crisis and Liberal Utopia” (CUP 2016) and “Die Fälle der Gesellschaft: Eine neue Praxis soziologischer Jurisprudenz” [The Cases of Society: A New Practice of Sociological Jurisprudence] (Mohr Siebeck: 2017). During his HSC fellowship 2018/19 he worked on his actual book project “The Grammar of Property” and published a paper on “(De-)Liberating Property: A Political Grammar of Property Law“.

Isette Schuhmacher is a research assistant at the Center for Humanities and Social Change at Humboldt-University, Berlin.

Her research interests are in social and political philosophy, critical theory, social theory, and philosophy of history.

In her dissertation she develops a philosophical concept of crisis, building on Theodor W. Adorno’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of dialectics and social transformation. This concept sheds light on the temporal as well as spatial dimensions of crises. It aims to grasp firstly the protracting effects, and secondly the multi-dimensional structure of crises specific to capitalist societies. A particular focus in analyzing present social contradictions lies on the ecology crisis.

Lea is a research assistant at the Center in Berlin. Since April 2018, she has also been a scholar of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. She finished her masters degree in Philosophy in 2017 at Humboldt University. In her doctoral dissertation, entitled The Second Work, she develops a concept of labor as reproduction, responding to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Hegel’s dialectic of master and servant in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

Current sociopolitical discourses take up a range of themes which are often viewed as part of the “crisis of work” or of today’s work-oriented society: these include digitization, the aging society, the organization of care work and the question of basic income. Lea’s dissertation project interprets these discourses as an expression of a crisis in the concept of work. Against this background, she is concerned with a new understanding of the concept of work which opens up a different perspective on these sociopolitical developments.