Opening Conference of the Centre - a successful start

29 November 2019

The opening conference on 29th of November 2019 with the title "Imaginations of Sustainability" had a successful start. Around 80 participants followed the lectures with great interest and took the opportunity to get to know the Centre and it's premises in the Gorch-Fock-Wall in person. The discussions were focused on collective, social imaginations of sustainability and the question of which future designs and related lines of conflict are currently growing.

Following the greetings by Sighard Neckel (Head of the College) and Gabriele Löschper (Dean of the WiSo Faculty) as well as the introduction of Frank Adloff (Head of the College). Albrecht Koschorke (University of Konstanz) gave the opening lecture on the topic: “Fear of the future and close expectations. About current end-time scenarios and their conflicts." This provided deep insights into the different structures of sustainability narratives and apocalyptic narratives, as well as the associated political polarizations. The Fellows Peter Wagner (Universitat de Barcelona) and Gerard Delanty (University of Sussex) commented this lecture.

This was followed by a lecture by our fellow Suzi Adams (Flinders University) on "Castoriadis, Social Imaginaries, and Ecology: Modernity and its Futures", in which she discussed, in relation to the conference theme, the work of one of the most influential thinkers in the field of "Social Imaginaries". Aurea Mota (Fellow, Universitat de Barcelona) and Frank Adloff commented on this input. The final panel discussion "The Social Sciences between Disaster, Normalization and Confidence", in which various representatives of the College participated, was about conceptual questions of temporal breaks and continuities as well as the role of the social sciences in relation to current future Imaginations in the context of sustainability.