Futures of Sustainability: Modernization, Transformation, Control

人文学科高级研究中心“可持续发展的未来”追求理论驱动的分析，询问社会如何在不同的可持续发展模式下发生变化。近几十年来，可持续发展已成为社会变革的指导性概念和基本上不可避免的参考框架，但它所传达的未来目标和愿景差异很大。该中心分析了现代化，转型和控制作为三个不同的可持续发展路径-每一个设计不同的社会变革，并通过不同的做法，（基础设施）结构和未来的建筑物形成。在该中心的第一个资助阶段，这三条轨迹主要在三个不同的社会领域进行定位和研究：经济领域的现代化、公民社会的转型和国家领域的控制。在第二个供资阶段，我们越来越关注这些领域和轨迹之间的相互联系和重叠。一方面，我们追求的论点，控制的路径在目前的努力，以治理可持续发展中发挥着越来越重要的作用。这导致我们调查如何控制为基础的材料和实践也达到现代化和改造的项目。另一方面，我们认为，目前对可持续未来的斗争主要是在围绕具体问题形成的一些社会领域展开的，并跨越了国家，经济和公民社会之间的区别。它们围绕着参与、集体决策和合作（参与竞技场）、基本权利和集体义务的重新谈判（法律竞技场）、新出现的公共和私人分类、估价和评价系统（分类学竞技场）以及对世界的文化和宗教解释问题（意义创造竞技场）等过程形成。在这些领域，可持续性的未来是通过具体问题谈判和预测的。最后，三个总体概念的角度将指导我们的理论建设在未来四年。第一种观点致力于人与自然之间社会关系的多样性，并认为可持续性只能通过分析作为多种可持续性来充分把握。第二部分着重于权力和支配问题，并审查生态紧急情况和特殊政治局势如何加剧现有的不平等，以及可持续性辩论如何建立新的强大的不对称。第三个集中在灾难面前的未来的预言和预喻，并概念化失败主义，设计乐观主义和开明的灾难主义之间的斗争。

The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability” pursues a theory-driven analysis of the present that asks how societies change under different imaginaries of sustainability. In recent decades, sustainability has become a guiding concept of social change and a largely unavoidable frame of reference, but the goals and visions of the future it informs vary greatly. The Centre analyses modernization, transformation and control as three distinct paths of sustainability – each of which designs societal change differently and is shaped by different practices, (infra-)structures and imaginaries of the future. In the first funding phase of the Centre, the three trajectories were primarily located and investigated in three different social fields: modernization in the economic sphere, transformation in civil society, and control in the realm of the state. In the second funding phase, we place the focus increasingly on interconnections and overlaps between these fields and trajectories. On the one hand, we pursue the thesis that the path of control plays an increasingly important role in current efforts to govern sustainability. This leads us to investigate how control-based imaginaries and practices also reach into projects of modernization and transformation. On the other hand, we assume that current struggles over sustainable futures primarily unfold in a number of social arenas that form around specific issues and cut across the distinction between state, economy and civil society. They take shape around processes of participation, collective decision-making and cooperation (arena of participation), the renegotiation of fundamental rights and collective obligations (arena of law), emerging public and private systems of classification, valuation and evaluation (arena of taxonomies) and questions of cultural and religious interpretation of the world (arena of meaning-making). In these arenas, futures of sustainability are negotiated and prefigured through concrete problems. Finally, three overarching conceptual perspectives will guide our theory building over the next four years. The first perspective is dedicated to the diversity of social relations between humans and nature and holds that sustainability can only be adequately grasped analytically as multiple sustainabilities. The second focuses on questions of power and domination and examines how ecological emergencies and exceptional political situations exacerbate existing inequalities, but also how sustainability debates establish new powerful asymmetries. The third focuses on imaginaries and prefigurations of the future in the face of catastrophes and conceptualizes the struggle between defeatism, design optimism, and enlightened catastrophism.