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Frühjahrstagung 2022

Conference Report „Rituals and Resonances of Interdisciplinary Research”, February 23-24, 2022, online

The annual spring conference of the International Graduate School "Resonant Self–World Relation in Ancient and Modern Socio-Religious Practices" this year put the practices within the IGS centerstage. We started from the assumption that our conferences had to serve a multitude of functions: to advance the academic program of the IGS; to develop results that could be published prominently; to seek the interaction with international experts, and to offer enough possibilities of participation between all members involved in the IGS, doctoral researchers and PIs.

To this end, we had originally planned to come together for a full week’s intense cooperation at Haus Hainstein in Eisenach, a plan we had to cancel due to the ongoing CoVid-19 pandemic. The conference was therefore moved to an online format and whittled down to one and a half days meetings. The program did, in difference to other conferences, not include a slew of invited guests, but focused instead on in-group communication and discussion. Two keynote or impulse presentations, however, were presented by Rubina Raja (Aarhus) and Antonietta Di Giulio (Basel) to explore the topic of the conference, interdisciplinarity, from a practical and from a theoretical-methodological point of view.

In preparation for the conference, all participants, which were this time restricted to the members of the IGS, were paired up in tandems and asked to explore, from their personal perspectives and in dialogue, what interdisciplinarity meant for them: (how) do we do interdisciplinarity? How does interdisciplinary exchange shape individual research (projects)? How does a disciplinary approach develop within the group? To discuss these questions further, the tandems were joined by other tandems to discuss, in continuously changing and enlarging groups, their results and findings, their questions and approaches. In a final session, all members of the IGS returned in a plenary session to bring together and consider what they had discussed in the smaller groups earlier.

By bringing together people from different career stages and different disciplines in different groups, we put the focus very much on inner-group communication at this conference, also in response to the limited possibilities for exchange during repeated spells of the pandemic, which certainly changed the approach and outcome of a number of research projects. In the conversations, we found that some questions were common to various groups, such as power relations between persons, but also between disciplines and institutions. Other questions included, how do we approach ritual and resonance theories: as methods, theories, or as a phenomenon which we find (and describe) in different historical contexts? How do we develop a common language that allows us to talk to each other and arrive at a shared synthesis instead of merely incorporating data from other disciplines and interpret them from our own individual perspectives? As a graduate school, the question of further academic careers, publication strategies and audiences also came into play, as well as the status of interdisciplinarity within academia with a view to funding bodies: is “interdisciplinarity” a mere catchword to ensure funding? Does it deter funding? What skills and abilities does it advance?

The conference indeed ended with many questions, the answers of which are still in the making. It opened, however, a means of communication within the IGS between its first and second funding phase that made it possible to both look back on what has already been done and achieved and to look forward and formulate what we still hope to achieve and how to develop and better the project in the future. One result that could be stated immediately, though, was the necessity and pleasure of open and intensive discussion, of providing spaces and tools of communication, within and beyond the elements of the program that are already at hand.

To intensify and solidify the impressions of the spring conference, the IGS will come together to a writers’ retreat in July, where aspects of this conference will be picked up and concretized. There, we also plan to finalize the editing of the papers that had been prepared for and were discussed at this conference and which are to be published as a collection of case studies in an Open Access format as prominently as possible, with all members of the IGS as co-authors. At the retreat, an introduction and conclusion are to be formulated based on the intensive discussions at both February and July meetings, to systematize what we do and how we do it and to provide insights into what we do beyond the disciplinary boundaries within which the individual projects are currently still located.

 

Organizers

Rafael Barroso Romero, Elisabeth Begemann, Enno Friedrich, Elena Malagoli, Felipe Perissato, Jörg Rüpke, Ramón Soneira Martínez, Jutta Vinzent, Markus Vinzent

Koordination Erfurt

Dr. Elisabeth Begemann

Mobil:+49(0)361/737-2808

Koordination Graz

Dr. Anna-Katharina Rieger

Mobil:+43 (0)316 380 - 2391

DoktorandInnenstellen für das Studienjahr 2023/24 ausgeschrieben! Frist verlängert (Ende April).

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