Doctoral School: Cultural Conflicts – Conflict Cultures

The doctoral school promotes interdisciplinary research, cross-disciplinary approaches, and integrated doctoral studies in the fields of cultural studies, media studies, literary studies, history, philosophy, art history, Jewish studies, and political science, which – viewed from a Franco-German perspective – deal with the relations of culture and conflict in a broad sense. The increasing disintegration of societies due to conflicts that are deemed as "cultural" (Islamist terrorism, climate-related issues, Identitarian movements, refugee crisis, etc.) has become an everyday reality all over the world. The dual connection between the concepts of "culture" and "conflict" is a highly charged and controversial field in theory and practice: The question of cultural conflicts and cultures of conflict that has been raised refers to the internal cultural conflicts and their forms of expression in art, language, literature, and history – both from a historical perspective and with regard to current phenomena – that have arisen as a result of cultural exchange, migration, flight, immigration, and the radicalisation of individual population groups. The discriminatory conditions of the cultural connection to Europe demanded "transversal" thinking, a constantly new localisation of minority culture, and clarification of the relationships between the paradigms of minority culture and the European. Thus, the approach of a "histoire croisée" accentuates the interdependencies beyond possible asymmetries in cultural relations; in particular, translational studies analyse the cultural translation achievements of the actors, whereby the categories of hybridity, conflict and contradiction, which play a major role in current cultural studies debates, are discussed in the projects of the doctoral candidates. This programme addresses not only successful mediation processes but also and especially the interferences and competitive relationships, the crises and the failures as well as those fruitful misunderstandings that accompany every transfer.