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Humanities & Social Change

Communication technology could help humanity collectively mitigate the onrushing environmental catastrophes, but it is being used to distort information and increase division. We need to release its potential for beneficial societal change.

ANN COPESTAKE, CO-INVESTIGATOR, GIVING VOICE TO DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES, CAMBRIDGE

Responding to social change inevitably involves deferring to experts with specialist knowledge and experience. But who counts as expert, on what, and to what extent, are questions squarely in the province of humanities.

ANNA ALEXANDROVA, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, EXPERTISE UNDER PRESSURE, CAMBRIDGE

Critical Theory, according to Max Horkheimer’s statement in 1937, forms the intellectual side of emancipation. To keep it alive, we have to relentlessly analyze the crises which shape our present and inform our emancipatory hopes.

Rahel Jaeggi, Center Director, Berlin

Consciously to effectuate social change is the modern ambition. But after nearly 250 years, we still need to understand better what possibilities and perils are involved in transmuting fundamental institutions.

Christian Schmidt, Fellow, Berlin
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To promote Social Change it is crucial to unmask and analyze the hidden social structures in individual psychic suffering.

Sabine Flick, Fellow
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What appears in modern society as atomisation is at the same time the creation of all-sided dependency. Social theory is indispensable for shedding light on this contradictory social constitution.

Jonathan David Klein, Fellow
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The founders of critical theory taught that the domination of nature implies the domination of people and vice versa. Understanding how this works concretely, in the past and the present, should be the task of a massive research effort.

Andreas Malm, Fellow, Berlin
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Isette Schuhmacher

Historical change in line with a hegelian-marxian tradition comes about and runs through contradictory processes and crises. Given that currently emancipatory transformation is in a crisis, we need to uncover the inconsistencies, debris and hardenings that block its proceeding.

Isette Schuhmacher, Research Assistant, Berlin
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What we need today is to take a closer look at the bigger picture. The humanities provide the lense for recalibrating our perspective on the crises we currently face.

Lea-Riccarda Prix, Doctoral Candidate, Berlin
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The economical constellation of our time should be evaluated through its immanent contradictions.

Aldo Beretta, Fellow, Berlin
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Charles Taylor, Benjamin Chair 2019
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Andrew Arato, Fellow
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Jean Louise Cohen, Fellow
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Theoretical thinking has always been an indispensable moment within the efforts to change social reality.

Zhang Shuangli, Fellow, Berlin
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Allison Weir, Fellow
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Nikolas Kompridis, Fellow
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Our goal is to build a framework in which insights from humanities-based subjects and non-technical disciplines can have a real impact in the development of new technologies.

BILL BYRNE, CO-INVESTIGATOR, GIVING VOICE TO DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES, CAMBRIDGE

I am engaged in how humanities can produce expertise on experts to help qualify, uncover and check the power of ideas.

CLÉO CHASSONNERY-ZAÏGOUCHE, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, EXPERTISE UNDER PRESSURE, CAMBRIDGE

Subaltern communities have often developed highly effective strategies to respond to the multiple current crises. The rest of the world can learn from them – not the other way around.

Daniel Loick, Fellow, Berlin
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Law coins our social grammar. Social change needs legal utopianism.

Bertram Lomfeld, Fellow, Berlin
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We live in a complex world. Disciplinary boundaries need to be broken and unusual alliances formed to shift attitudes for change.

EMILY SO, CO-INVESTIGATOR, EXPERTISE UNDER PRESSURE, CAMBRIDGE
Erck Rickmers, Chairman

The world is in escalating crisis. We need an interdisciplinary effort to understand its underlying problems and inspire change.

Erck Rickmers, Founder
Eva von Redecker

My thirst for theory has always been driven by a desire to see more, and with more than my own eyes: multiple perspectives, complex interconnections, and revolutionary possibilities.

Eva von Redecker, former Deputy Director, Berlin
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Creating social knowledge often involves taking sides on philosophical questions concerning the nature of responsibility, freedom and morality. Experts should bear this in mind when advising decision makers.

FEDERICO BRANDMAYR, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, EXPERTISE UNDER PRESSURE, CAMBRIDGE

The actual importance of a topic often appears more clearly when it is not shown in full light, but illuminated from the side or from oblique angles. This is what I try to do in my writing.

Andrea Roedig, Arts & Media Fellow, Berlin
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Everyday critique can be seen as an attempt to regain a sense of order in an otherwise uncertain or irritating social reality. Understanding critique thus means uncovering the shared images of a normative social order that form its basis.

Frank Schumann, Fellow, Berlin
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Expertise is under increasing scrutiny. This scrutiny needs to be embraced and understood if we are to resolve this age of disinformation.

HANNAH BAKER, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, EXPERTISE UNDER PRESSURE, CAMBRIDGE

‘Giving Voice to Digital Democracies’ has an extremely timely, indeed necessary, role to play in bringing the traditional values and expertise of the humanities to bear to resolve the human dilemmas the modern information age has created.

IAN ROBERTS, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR, GIVING VOICE TO DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES, CAMBRIDGE
Jan Dutkiewicz

As a political economist, I find in the humanities the intellectual and moral tools necessary to study social change in a world increasingly in thrall to market forces.

Jan Dutkiewicz, Dissertation Fellow 2017/18, Santa Barbara
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Karen Ng

The humanities help us understand and explore the potentialities of the human form of life. How can we transform human societies such that the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all?

Karen Ng, Fellow, Berlin
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Lexi Neame

I study how facts become authoritative in public life. For me, the task of the humanities is comprehension, or as Arendt put it: facing up to–and, where necessary, resisting–reality.

Lexi Neame, Dissertation Fellow 2017/18, Santa Barbara

There is an urgent need to develop more ethical and trustworthy AI technologies that can effect positive social change in modern digital democracies.

MARCUS TOMALIN, SENIOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE AND PROJECT MANAGER, GIVING VOICE TO DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES, CAMBRIDGE
Massimo Warglien, Board Member

Text analysis offers huge opportunities to improve how we understand and predict conflict.

Massimo Warglien, Board Member, Venice

The political contestation of experts and their knowledge is one consequence of the profound turbulence affecting governance in the current era. The question now is whether the democratisation of expertise might also be harnessed by those seeking to re-invent public policy in the age of disruption.

MICHAEL KENNY, CO-INVESTIGATOR, EXPERTISE UNDER PRESSURE, CAMBRIDGE
Nina Rismal

I am concerned with visions of utopian societies and their value for effecting desirable social change. Desire and hope for a better future lie at the core of my work in Humanities and Social Change.

Nina Rismal, Hamburg
Pierre Fasula

Philosophy of literature aims not only at interpreting the world, particularly the way fiction forms our moral and political beliefs, but also, doing so, at changing it.

Pierre Fasula, Postdoctoral Scholar 2017/18, Santa Barbara
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Sabrina Marchetti, Board Member

As a feminist scholar, I believe in the power of art and of the Humanities in changing our understanding of society, culture and economic life. I am happy to be part of this project.

Sabrina Marchetti, Board Member, Venice
Shaul Bassi

Cultural difference can push people apart; art and the humanities can bring them together in a sustainable world.

Shaul Bassi, Center Director, Venice

Language is the means by which ideas, information and culture are communicated. For communication technologies to contribute positively to society and democracy, we must account for how trustworthiness and credibility are encoded and interpreted.

SHAUNA CONCANNON, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, GIVING VOICE TO DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES, CAMBRIDGE

As modern technologies become more and more intertwined with our professional and private lives, it is vital that we take a critical look at linguistic and ethical concerns in relation to our handling of these artificially intelligent systems.

STEFANIE ULLMANN, POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, GIVING VOICE TO DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES, CAMBRIDGE

To be human is to use tools, and we have always been homo technicus. We aim in CRASSH to make sense of the new ways in which, acting on the world through new technologies, we also remake ourselves.

STEVEN CONNOR, CENTER DIRECTOR, CAMBRIDGE
Thomas Carlson

To answer the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture, reactive extremism in religion and politics, and radical transformations of life by technology, we need the humanities.

Thomas A. Carlson, Center Director, Santa Barbara

As  a scholar of Asian Studies, I am deeply invested in collegial work that has the potential to have an impact across disciplinary, regional and national boundaries within Asia and beyond. At the Center for Humanities and Social Change, I am committed to nourishing projects and collaborations that critically examine the radical interconnectedness of the modern world and illuminate our multiple configurations of place, time, matter and meaning.

Francesca Tarocco, Board Member, Venice

Democracy is in peril. The scope and severity of the present predicament has reached an unforeseen level. We need proper theories to grasp this multi-layered crisis adequately.

Ulf Bohmann, Berlin
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In an age of rapid technological and social change we find ourselves at a crossroads. The center’s interdisciplinary teams are engaged in groundbreaking research, seeking answers that will guide us along the right path. I am excited to be a part of this initiative.

UNA YEUNG, CENTER ADMINISTRATOR, CAMBRIDGE
Volkan Çıdam, Berlin
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William E. Goggin

Dramatic social change presents an interpretive challenge: a gap between changes occurring in society, and our ability to assess the significance of those changes. We want to interrogate that gap.

William E. Goggin, Dissertation Fellow 2017/18, Santa Barbara
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If history is valuable for understanding fascism, it is not because it enables us to describe what happened, but rather because it allows us to deduce from a specific combination of elements the effects that similar constellations are likely to produce today.

Zeynep Gambetti, Senior Fellow, Berlin
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Zoë Sutherland

As poetic making informs how individuals come to know and value each other in the early modern period, so for me it opens up questions of freedom and equality in our own.

Zoë Sutherland, Dissertation Fellow 2017/18, Santa Barbara
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