Violence and Security profile initiative
The profile initiative Violence and Security at Universität Hamburg sheds new light on violence and uncertainty arising from the increasing destruction of resources essential for existence. We would like to recruit an Open-Topic professor with a focus on violence and security in a planetary age to lend the initiative a stronger thematic and international profile. The goal is the contemporary diagnosis of planetary uncertainty in the Anthropocene, in which crises and catastrophic events have become the norm and human existence on Earth is endangered.
Against this backdrop, questions of certainty and violence gain new urgency: What does security mean when life on Earth grows ever-more precarious and unstable and the conditions for our collective survival increasingly disappear? How can we empirically research and theoretically conceptualize violence that “only” indirectly impacts people and communities (for example, the destruction of resources, the disastrous effects of which often become clear only much later—known also as “slow violence”)?
A scientific perspective on the Anthropocene requires us to study human beings, nature, and technology as an interconnected whole. Whoever fills the Open-Topic professorship should ideally have interdisciplinary skills, for example in science and technology, environmental humanities, critical security studies, future studies, and catastrophe research or at the interface between of subjects such as cultural anthropology, human geography, informatics, law, sociology, political science, economics, literature studies, or philosophy.
Possible areas of focus include (but are not limited to) the following interdisciplinary fields:
Imagination and the future
The end of human life on Earth and the collective experience of catastrophic events has fundamentally changed our imaginations and ideas of the future. What ideas and temporal concepts emerge in the way a society handles violence and uncertainty in the Anthropocene and what are the consequences?
Responsibility and justice
What expectations and dilemmas arise with regard to responsibility and justice in the context of planetary uncertainty and destruction?
This encompasses the legal and social negotiation of responsibility for the destruction of the natural basis for existence, the ways we deal with in/justice and in/equality with regard to securing goods that are scarce and fragmented due to increasing existential threats, as well as ethnic and legal perspectives on the use of AI and digital technologies.
Un/certain technologies and infrastructure
What is the destructive power and constructive potential of technology, from surveillance technology and drones to catastrophe-warning apps, in the face of planetary uncertainty and societal and economic debate surrounds their use?
More about the profile initiative Violence and Security
The Violence and Security profile initiative is a cross-faculty core research area at Universität Hamburg, combining expertise from 35 professorships. The security research focal area brings together sociology, political science, criminology, communications, informatics, and geography to illuminate new threats and threat narratives as well as emerging security arrangements in the context of growing political and societal polarization, rapid digital transformation, and the ongoing destruction of vital resources. Of particular interest is the relationship between security and democracy in light of growing anti-democratic trends around the world. Furthermore, informatics research makes significant contributions to IT security and privacy, information governance technologies, and IT ethics.
The violence research focal area combines history, law, linguistics, cultural anthropology, archeology, Protestant theology, and smaller subjects in the Asien-Afrika-Institut, with a particular focus on resources, temporality, and violence. A research group looks at “time” across the ages, as a negotiating resource in war, pogroms, occupations, and attacks and thus the relevance of temporality for action and the experiences of those involved, both victims and perpetrators. Further areas of focus lie around the cultures of memory, with analyses of the genocides in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, colonialism, National Socialism, and Communism, and how violence is transformed under each of their ideologies, rhetoric, conditions of possibility, routines, self-empowerment, and changing of norms. Moreover, from a legal perspective it is primarily the systems by which we ensure peace and collective security that are of interest.
In case of questions
- Prof. Dr. Christine Hentschel: christine.hentschel-2"AT"uni-hamburg.de