"Moving Normativity", the Graduiertenkolleg's first international conference, was held on May 11 and 12 at the Uferstudios in Berlin. Bringing together researchers from Philosophy, Law, Political Theory, Religious Studies, and several disciplines from the Arts, the conference sought to create a space for a genuinely interdisciplinary approach to pressing questions on normativity, agency, and social change. In addition to the announcement text below, a PDF containing the full conference program may be found here.

In recent years, new ways of engaging with action and agency have emerged. In humanities, social sciences and artistic practices, much intellectual work has focused on the emancipation of historically marginalized subjects. We witness a provincializing of classical frameworks and a redefinition of rights around the embodied categories of sexuality, race, and class. The normativity of individual agency has expanded and condensed under these conditions. Even the category of agency itself, classically understood as a form of activity, has come under scrutiny: Theory and artistic practice have explored the generative potential of passivity, paralysis, and rest. The interdisciplinary Graduiertenkolleg “Normativity, Critique, Change”'s conference investigates agency as the site of a tension between contestation and confirmation across a range of disciplines in the arts, law, and humanities. According to a general premise of our research, action is based on norms on the one hand, and only possible through a distance from norms on the other. In this understanding, critique is inherent to normativity. The conference sheds light on the various sites of tension inherent to agency, normative action and critique in four panels and twelve talks, to which all abstracts may be found here.

In the lead-up to the conference “Moving Normativity – Agency between Confirmation and Contestation”, two additional events with artistic perspectives by Gulzat Egemberdieva and Choy Ka Fai will take place at the Uferstudios. These Artistic Interventions - a film screening and a lecture with a demonstration followed by talks with the artists and academics - aim at exploring and expanding the thematic issues of the conference programme. 

Concept: Friederike Allner, Johanna Baumgardt, Marlena Jakobs, Ina Karkani, Marta Lietti, Rodrigo Maruy van den Broek, Andrea Messner, Yon Natalie Mik, Lisa Paland, Ben Seel, Deborah Mühlebach, Jochen Schuff, Tobias Wieland, Georg W. Bertram