Reading Group 'Imaginaries and Modernities'

In a monthly reading group, the Knowledge Lab explores the relationship between visions of the future and processes of modernization. How do visions of social order circulate between science, politics, and the public sphere – and how do they shape institutions and knowledge production? Concepts such as sociotechnical imaginaries (Sheila Jasanoff / Kim Sang-Hyun) offer points of departure, but are also critically examined with regard to their presuppositions and limitations.

The reading group contextualizes such approaches through classical perspectives from conceptual history and the history of ideas. At its core lies the tension between multiple modernities and universalist narratives of progress: What implicit notions of order are embedded even in those theoretical frameworks that seek to critically engage with Western models?

The exchange among researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds generates productive interferences: Participants do not merely read texts, but engage with them anew, together. In doing so, asymmetries in global knowledge production become visible – for instance, when Japan remains underrepresented in comparative studies or when regional expertise is structurally marginalized in disciplinary journals.

The Knowledge Lab thus enables a contextualization that reflects both the genesis of the concepts under examination and the prior orientations of the researchers themselves. Reports on each session document this collective process of inquiry. In the process, epistemic risks also come into view – those that arise when concepts are transferred without attention to their situatedness.