Coordination Funds

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With the following proposal, we are applying for a second funding period of our research unit “FOR 2983: Voluntariness.” In this second funding period, we will continue to unite historical, philosophical, and sociological analyses. Our major claim is that voluntariness is more than volunteer work and engagement, but rather a driving force of social and political practices in the past and present. Our major research interest addresses the conditionality of voluntary practices and their effects in social and political life. In the first funding period, we have focused on the antinomies of voluntariness, and on how voluntariness operates as norm, resource, and discursive strategy in liberal societies. We have also taken first views on illiberal and colonial societies. Following up on this, in the second funding period we seek to achieve three major aims: First, we continue to examine conditions of voluntary practices and explore how in social reality in the past and present, in most cases the driving force of human action lies somewhere between what might be seen as unconditional voluntariness on the one hand and coercion on the other hand. Second, we will put an emphasis on researching ethical dimensions of voluntary practices and explore to what extent the characterization of actions as voluntary contributes to their positive or negative connotation, how this connotation depends on context and perspective, and what its effects are. Third, we will foreground global dimensions of voluntary practices, take on analytical perspectives inspired by postcolonial studies, and examine how the conditions and possibilities to act voluntarily differ depending on who acts. Methodologically we are inspired by governmentality studies and praxeology, which provide us with analytical perspectives and tools to research practices and their motivations in their variable historical and social contexts and conditions. Across the group, we follow a shared approach, but at the same time allow for room for methodological flexibility according to discipline and research topic. In the second funding period, we focus on the 19th to 21st century, take a global perspective in each subproject, and research voluntariness with regard to the climate crisis, to health practices of former slaves, to decolonization and gender, to the restitution of Indigenous remains from colonial contexts, to migration regimes and civic engagement in West and East Germany, and to how room for voluntary engagement depends on the reproductive labor of others. To be able to pursue our research goals, we have developed an integrated, three-stage work program with interconnected elements. With this program, we continue to pursue the successful work structure of the first funding period.