Previous Research Unit (Funding Period I)

Coordinators:

Principal Investigators:

In the first funding period, the research unit Temporality investigated how the liberal script had been shaped by a specific understanding of time as linear, uniform, future-oriented, and tied to ideas of progress, productivity, market efficiency, and rational time allocation. It examined how this liberal time regime had structured modern states, industrial labour, life courses, and global hierarchies, while also producing tensions such as short-termism in markets and politics, unequal control over time, and the marginalisation of alternative cultural understandings of temporality. The research unit analyzed contemporary contestations arising from sustainability movements, critiques of endless growth, demands for slower and more meaningful lives, gendered and racial inequalities in time use, and the disruptive effects of digitalisation on work, social relations, and democratic decision-making. It also explored endogenous causes such as contradictions within capitalism and technological change, as well as exogenous causes rooted in competing non-Western and postcolonial temporalities. Finally, the RU assessed whether these challenges could have been addressed through reforms within liberal societies or whether they had pointed toward new social cleavages and alternative models of political, economic, and ecological order centered on sustainable development.

Research Projects

Varieties of Diversity Scripts
Prof. Dr. Gülay Çağlar, Prof. Dr. Yasemin Soysal, Prof. Dr. Kathrin Zippel
Sep 01, 2022 — Aug 31, 2025 Objects from Afar and Sustainable Liberal Identity - The Contestation of Material Representation in National Museums of the Global North
Prof. Dr. Philipp Lepenies, Prof. Dr. Marianne Braig, Prof. Dr. Gülay Çağlar, Prof. Dr. Andreas Eckert, Prof. Dr. Jessica Gienow-Hecht
Nov 01, 2022 — Aug 31, 2025 Negotiating the Future of Education: The UNESCO’s Futures of Education-initiative and the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030-initiative
Prof. Dr. Florian Waldow, Prof. Dr. Tobias Berger, Prof. Dr. Marcelo Carus, Walter Fritsch, Ana Werkstetter Caravaca
Feb 01, 2021 — Feb 14, 2024 ‘Transformative Constitutionalism’ and the Borderlines of Liberalism
Prof. Dr. Tobias Berger, Prof. Dr. Philipp Dann, Vikram Aditya Narayan, Uday Vir Garg
Jan 01, 2020 — Dec 31, 2023 Gender, Borders, Memory: Contestation of the Liberal Script in the Catalan Separatist Movement
Prof. Dr. Marianne Braig, Prof. Dr. Gülay Çağlar, Prof. Dr. Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Johannes Heß, Tobias Klee
Sep 01, 2020 — Aug 31, 2023 High Hopes and Broken Promises: Young Adult Life Courses in Senegal
Prof. Dr. Anette Fasang, Dr. Noella Binda Niati
Aug 07, 2020 — Aug 06, 2023 Debating the Legitimacy of Borders: How the Admission or Refoulement of Refugees is Justified Across the World
Prof. Dr. Marianne Braig, Dr. Daniel Drewski, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gerhards, Prof. Dr. Steffen Mau
Oct 01, 2019 — Sep 30, 2022