Biographies

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.