Blogs

The DFG Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” engages in a number of blog projects. Each blog (series) serves as a cooperative tool and public outreach for scientific and social debates, aiming at a broader public.

Boasblogs -A cooperative platform in the spirit of public anthropology

https://boasblogs.org

The boasblogs (founded in 2016) are a series of topic-related blogs that take up current issues relating to the anthropological sciences, discuss them in their controversiality in a wide circle of contributors, and at the same time ask about the public role and social relevance of anthropological knowledge.

All boasblogs, as public anthropology, aim to make scientific findings accessible to a broader public in order to make a critical-constructive contribution to current social debates and to help shape social relations on various political, social, and everyday levels.

Every boasblog is curated, published and organized by different and independent editors and international researchers. There are blogs on the restitution and decentering of ethnological museums, on the Covid-19 pandemic, examined from different perspectives (Witnessing Corona, Curare Corona Diaries, Fieldwork meets crisis), on the renaming of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde (German Society for Ethnology) to Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie (German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology).

The name boasblogs refers to the German-born ethnologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), who is considered one of the founders of US cultural anthropology and was a ‘public anthropologist’ avant la lettre. He is well-known for his cultural relativist thesis that every culture forms its own history and development, making a hierarchisation of cultures impossible. This thesis was the occasion for the first boasblog, which took the article “Dschungelmärchen” (“Jungle Tales”), published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, as a starting point to discuss the relationship between “cultural relativism and enlightenment”.

In the wake of this controversy, the boasblogs have since taken up other topics related to cultural studies and made them accessible for a broader public. Selected discussions on a particular topic are also made available online and in print in the form of boasblogs papers.

The blog series is funded and co-produced by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen, the interdisciplinary and collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WoC) at the University of Bremen and the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne.

The boasblogs have been a central part of the research program of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1187 “Media of Cooperation” since the first funding phase (2016-2020). The blog series is funded and co-produced by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, the interdisciplinary and collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WoC) at the University of Bremen and the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne. Editors are Christoph Antweiler (Bonn), Michi Knecht (Bremen), Ehler Voss (Bremen/Siegen) and Martin Zillinger (Cologne).

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences (HiPhiLangSci)

https://hiphilangsci.net/

A podcast on linguistic diversity: How and why does language change? This is the question that linguist and language historian James McElvenny of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC 1187) “Media of Cooperation” and other linguists address in his blog hiphilangsci.net. Their aim is to highlight and promote the diversity of linguistic topics and issues. Part of the blog is the podcast series History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences, in which McElvenny and his guests discuss the history of linguistics and communication studies, from grammar in the works of Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm to Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism.

James McElvenny is a researcher at the CRC “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen and works in subproject P02 “Media of Praxeology II: History of audio-visual sequence analysis as a methodology”. The goal of this research project is to reconstruct the prehistory and early history of sequence analytical data practices, as well as their consolidation, reception, adaptation, and methodification. This history is connected to different disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies, but also the history of documentary film. James McElvenny’s podcast is an integral part of the project, each new episode explores a new topic.

Former Projects

Interface Blog

The interface blog was part of the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation“. It explored a variety of topics and issues that emerge at the intersection of digital media technology and society, such as the normative, technological, legal and political foundations of digital culture and publics. The editorial team consisted of Asli Telli Aydemir, Jason Chao, Pip Hare, Sarah Rüller and Fernando van der Vlist former and current researchers at the CRC 1187.