• Transforming Infrastructure – Cultural Perspectives

    The interdisciplinary research initiative “Transforming Infrastructure: Cultural Perspectives” investigates both the cultural dimensions of infrastructure and the infrastructures of culture. Conceiving of infrastructure as the support systems of human sociality, the initiative addresses pressing questions regarding infrastructure’s relevance in times of global, technological, cultural, and climatic transformation.

    Three complementing research axes provide the means to investigate the cultural dimensions of infrastructure: Literary studies and Philosophy impart insight into concomitant imaginaries; Sociology, Anthropology, and Media studies identify associated practices; while History leads analyses related to processes.

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Current news

'All which it inherit shall dissolve': Ecodramaturgy and the cultural infrastructure of Shakespeare's "The Tempest"

At the invitation of the research initiative and core topic of the Centre of Cultural Inquiry, "Transforming Infrastructure: Cultural Perspectives", Elizabeth Freestone, theatre director and climate activist, will speak about her 2023 production of Shakespeare's The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of a seminar on "Resetting Shakespeare". Anyone interested is cordially invited!

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Rohre und Bagger

ZKF Public Talk: Cultural Infrastructure Studies

For the past two years, the research initiative „Transforming Infrastructures. Cultural Perspectives” has engaged with the field of infrastructure research. The talk will give an overview on what has been achieved so far and discuss the prospects of this research initiative.

Old photo of a man sittting in one of the first build cars.

People, cars and the elements

It contributed to a whole new perception of nature and yet soon became an environmental problem: How automobility changed people’s relationship to the environment and how this is reflected in American road literature is the subject of the ERC project of literary scholar Timo Müller, professor of American studies at the University of Konstanz.

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