„Borders“ (Grenzen) is the topic of this year history competition of the state president of Germany by the Körber Foundation (Netzwerktagung zum Geschichtswettbewerb des Bundespräsidenten 2024/2025). To kick start the event, Sara Keller and Sebastian Dorsch have been invited to give an impulse talk at the preparatory workshop of the Körber Foundation…
Sara Keller, postdoc with the Religion and Urbanity group, on the link between waste infrastructures and urban lifestyles. Not just prestigious fountains in large public squares, luxurious bath houses and monumental stepwells are outstanding expressions of urbanity: latrines also can contribute to the production of an urban, cultured and sophisticated way of life.
Our 9th City Walk engaged with the topic of temporalities of which we discussed three aspects: the question of multiple memories with the visit of the new Synagogue in Erfurt, spatial unity and temporal multiplicity at the St Ägidien church, and, finally, hierarchical temporality with the Christmas market as a significant urban manifestation of the Christian temporality.
In the 1980s, the significant paradigm shift in humanities and social sciences, better known as “spatial turn”, opened up discussions connecting geographical space and socio-cultural variables. From now on, space was not only perceived as a given physical and geographical entity, but it gained recognition as an essential social player: space is “produced” (Rau 2019: 2, see Lefebvre’s “production of space” 1974).
Our last city walk took us on an exploration of the atmosphere of Erfurt’s squares. Atmospheres, we concluded, are as fascinating as they are ephemeral and difficult to grasp…
Can we perceive Erfurt’s urbanity on its squares? In this hope, we hunted for perceptible atmospheres, attitudes and aspirations while other Erfurters went shopping, picked up their children or enjoyed the sun. The working hypothesis of our research group on “Religion and Urbanity” is that urbanity1 can be defined as a “way of life that emerges because of the size, density, diversity, mobility, instability, and transparency of a settlement or the people living there” (Rau 2020).2
Diversity is one of the distinctive features of urbanity as we define it in our research group. The plural character of urban life acts as a stimulating force enabling large-scale endeavours and remarkable achievements…
In pandemic times, some people call on pharmaceutical labs to rapidly defeat the virus, others directly address the disease. In India, informal devotional practices for a female deity called “Corona Mātā”…
28 March 2020 Sacred water can be anywhere. That...
Our core group experienced urbanity and religion in the...
We are interested in the connections between urbanity and religion.
This blog is connected to the DFG-funded Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779). We are based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University.
