The Common as Imagination and Practice: Infrastructuring toward the Common Good from a Legal Anthropological and Gender Theoretical Perspective

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The project centres around the idea of the common good, a rhetorical and practice-generating concept that refers to a ‘common’ and, at the same time, creates it. While the first funding period showed how the individual legal design of equality and anti-discrimination law shapes collectivisation processes and gender relations in a specific way, the second funding period concentrates on references anchored in the concept of the common good and asks how imaginations of a larger whole that transcends the individual are articulated in law-related discourses and practices. Of interest are which notions of a ‘common’ or even ‘general’ are thereby updated, mobilised, or even rejected. The common good is conceptualised as situated and variable, produced in sayings and doings. It constitutes itself through its mobilisation and at the same time has mobilising effects.The question of the embattled general and new common is dealt with in the form of ethnographic case studies using the example of the implementation or restructuring of urban transport infrastructures (Case Study A: Mobility Turnaround (“Mobilitätswende”)) and midwifery care (Case Study B: Birthing Justice (“Gerechte Geburt”)). In both research fields, processes of public welfare-oriented infrastructuring are analysed with a view to the interrelation of law, politics and morality with their situational and intersectionally-gendered politics, rhetorics and performances. The ethnographic research is intended to gain insights into the ways in which routines are (re)organized in processes oriented towards the common good; material and immaterial foundations for living together are provided; user groups are called upon and simultaneously constituted; and space-time arrangements are created. The project draws upon practical theoretical considerations on infrastructuring, according to which technical and social systems overlap: Infrastructures (co-)constitute and organize routines, subject positions and (partial) public spheres. From a perspective of moral anthropology and gender theory, the project aims to identify implicit and explicit mechanisms of inclusion in and exclusion from the common good, omissions and possible alternative conceptions of participation. It will be examined whether and how work on/for the common good is connected with a specific handling of material and immaterial resources, leading to intersectional differentiations of social spaces and infrastructures.