Junior Researchers Launch Research Programmes
16 July 2009
The directors of the four junior research groups within the Cluster have started their work. The internationally outstanding junior researchers are expected to enrich the Cluster's research programme by their innovative approaches and interdisciplinary research designs.
Junior Research Group 1: Crisis and Normative Order
Within the research group “Crisis and Normative Order – Varieties of ‘Neoliberalism’ in Transformation” Dr. Thomas Biebricher and his doctoral fellows examine the complex and controversial phenomenon of ‘Neoliberalism’, understood not only as a factual but also a normative order. Employing a comparative historical approach the project sets out to highlight the varieties of ‘Neoliberalism’ as well as the diverse dynamics of (trans-)formation in the the United States and in Germany, up to the current socio-economic crisis and restructuring.
Dr. Thomas Biebricher, born in 1974, studied political science, economic policy and public law at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. He received his PhD in Freiburg with a dissertation on Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault in 2003. From 2003 to 2008 he was a DAAD visiting assistant professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he continued to work as a visiting assistant professor until May 2009. His research focuses on issues in contemporary political theory as well as comparative politics.
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Junior Research Group 2: Transnational Genealogies
The research project of Dr. Stefanie Michels explores the mobility of actors, objects, techniques and ideas between Africa and Europe, and in particular the question how normative orders in different places are transformed by this mobility. . The researcher group focuses on actors and on their actions and reactions to normative orders and narratives of justification. Tensions and conflict, resistance, counter-narratives and subversive extraversions of normative orders are at the focus of the research, as well as the plurality of narratives of justification and their interdependence. Through the study of (pan-)African, Atlantic and cosmopolitan actors the group asks how European imaginations of existing normative orders (e.g. colonialism, development and migration policy) change when viewed from a different perspective.
Stefanie Michels, born in 1971, studied African studies, history, anthropology, economics and geography at the University of Cologne, FernUniversität Hagen and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London where she received her Master in African Studies in 1998. After receiving her PhD from the University of Cologne in 2003 (with a dissertation about the construction of colonial power in Cameroon), Dr. Michels was research assistant for African history at the University of Cologne (2002-2006) and the University of Hannover (2007-2009). Her research interests are the German-African entangled history, Atlantic mobility, (post-)colonial topographies of memory; oral history/tradition and visual history (as methods).
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Junior Research Group 3: The Change in Transnational Economic and Labour Law
The Research Group of Dr. Florian Rödl aims to analyse the changes of trans- and international economic and labour law in the era of "globalisation". The twofold focus of the group’s research consists in (1) the internal practices of and struggles for normative justification in these two legal fields; and (2) the social function of these fields in and for the so-called post-national constellation. The groups’ research projects set out to take into accountinsights from research in social sciences, concerning "the changing form of the state" or "the transformation of the state", and to apply them for a critical understanding of legal ordering of economies intertwined across national borders.
Dr. Florian Rödl, M.A., studied law at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main and philosophy and political science at Freie Universität Berlin. He obtained his doctoral degree in law in 2008 from the European University Institute in Florence with a thesis on the foundations of private international law. Before joining the Cluster, he was a research fellow at the Centre for European Law and Politics (ZERP) at Bremen University.
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Junior Research Group 4: Knowledge and Information about Africa
The research group „Knowledge and Information about Africa“, directed by Dr. Benjamin Steiner, focuses on the question: How were science and information employed in European enterprises of discovery, exploration and colonization since the 15th Century, as part of the efforts to overcome the difference and contradictions between cultural environments in Africa and Europe? The doctoral and postdoctoral research projects of the group examine the history of knowledge of Africa from the perspective of various historical agents and institutions. Furthermore, the research projects study the specific systems of knowledge and information, which serve as conditions to constructing justification narratives for the particular claims to authority and power over other cultures, human beings, systems of norms and values and by that over orders of inequality.
Dr. Benjamin Steiner, born in 1977, studied history and philosophy at LMU Munich, Hiram College (Ohio, USA) and Université Paris IV, Sorbonne. In 2007 he received his PhD from LMU Munich with a dissertation about historical tables in the early modern period. Dr. Steiner worked as DAAD-research fellow at Warburg Institute in London and as research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center “Reflexive Modernization”at LMU Munich before becoming a junior research group director at the Cluster of Excellence.
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