Vergangene Veranstaltungen

ConTrust Speaker Series

Lecture by James Tunde Yeku (HU Berlin)

My talk examines to what extent digital humour mediates encounters of public conflict and trust between internet subjects and the state in Nigeria. Specifically, I reflect on how the country’s police apparatus functions as a mirror of the neurosis and antinomies of the Nigerian state itself, demonstrating how citizens reproduce and respond to the banalities of police power through strategies of what I describe as cultural netizenship, the most immediate and condensed mode of cultural and political commentary on social media. Using online humour that ‘polices’ and keeps a close guard on various official sites of corporeal violence in Nigeria,  I am interested in how Nigerian cultural netizens respond to the institution of the police and its notoriously extrajudiciality which, itself, produces the conditions for mistrust (James Tunde Yeku).

Also via Zoom. Please register in advance: office@normativeorders.net

A standard assumption of research is that trust and conflict stand in opposition and exclude one another. The ConTrust Speaker Series questions that assumption and inquires into the dynamics of trust and conflict in various contexts of social life. Can trust arise in, manifest itself and be stabilized in conflicts rather than apart from them? What are the conditions for that?

For further information: Click here…

ConTrust Speaker Series

Lecture by Tatjana Hörnle (Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Kriminalität, Sicherheit und Recht, Freiburg i. Br.)

Also via Zoom. Please register in advance: office@normativeorders.net

A standard assumption of research is that trust and conflict stand in opposition and exclude one another. The ConTrust Speaker Series questions that assumption and inquires into the dynamics of trust and conflict in various contexts of social life. Can trust arise in, manifest itself and be stabilized in conflicts rather than apart from them? What are the conditions for that?

For further information: Click here…

Veranstalter
„ConTrust. Vertrauen im Konflikt. Politisches Zusammenleben unter Bedingungen der Ungewissheit“ – ein Clusterprojekt des Landes Hessen am Forschungszentrum „Normative Ordnungen“ der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

ConTrust Speaker Series

Lecture by Keith Breckenridge (University of the Witwatersrand)

Also via Zoom. Please register in advance: office@normativeorders.net

A standard assumption of research is that trust and conflict stand in opposition and exclude one another. The ConTrust Speaker Series questions that assumption and inquires into the dynamics of trust and conflict in various contexts of social life. Can trust arise in, manifest itself and be stabilized in conflicts rather than apart from them? What are the conditions for that?

For further information: Click here…

Veranstalter
„ConTrust. Vertrauen im Konflikt. Politisches Zusammenleben unter Bedingungen der Ungewissheit“ – ein Clusterprojekt des Landes Hessen am Forschungszentrum „Normative Ordnungen“ der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

ConTrust Speaker Series

Lecture by Adam Kelly (Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin)

In the famous 2008 paper announcing the invention of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto justified the new currency on the basis of a need for Internet commerce to eliminate the problem of trust. “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,” Nakamoto wrote, “allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.” The key innovation behind Bitcoin was the blockchain, a distributed ledger technology that ensured that the record of all transactions using the currency would be ineradicable and shared. Ever since the inauguration of this technology, its implications for the problem of trust – in but also well beyond the arena of online commerce – have been heavily debated. Some titles of recent books indicate how close the connection between blockchain and trust has become: The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust (2018); Building Decentralized Trust: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Design of Blockchains and Distributed Ledgers (2021); Searching for Trust: Blockchain Technology in an Age of Disinformation (2022).

This paper examines the implications of blockchain for, and through, a much older technology that retains an intimate link with the trust architecture of human life in modern societies: the literary novel. Responding to the virtual absence of literary studies from the otherwise rich interdisciplinary debates on trust over the past few decades, the paper summarizes work in the discipline on the novel’s historical importance for embedding social trust in liberalism, a modern political and economic regime that, according to Niklas Luhmann, “attempts to shift expectations from confidence to trust.” Connecting this shift in expectations to the debates around blockchain, the final part of the paper will conduct a reading of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (2022). Egan’s novel offers a thought experiment about how the blockchain could impact human life, and how the novel’s own architectures of trust might respond to that impact.

Adam Kelly is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin, having previously taught at the University of York and Harvard University. His second book, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age, is forthcoming in 2024 with Stanford University Press. His articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Literature Studies, American Literary History, Studies in the Novel, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is Principal Investigator on “Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025,” a four-year project funded by the Irish Research Council for the period 2022-2026.

Please register in advance: office@normativeorders.net. Participation via Zoom is also possible.

Veranstalter:
„ConTrust. Vertrauen im Konflikt. Politisches Zusammenleben unter Bedingungen der Ungewissheit“ – ein Clusterprojekt des Landes Hessen am Forschungszentrum „Normative Ordnungen“ der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main