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A topic that is controversial both socially and politically is currently being examined in the humanities and social sciences at Heidelberg University. In the Collaborative Research Centre “Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations” over 60 researchers are exploring the question of why and how “Heimat“ (home / belonging) – and associated topic areas like being at home, community, mother country / fatherland or nation – make up a significant part of our social, territorial and individual bonding and location in the world.
Press Release
Heidelberg, 3 February 2025
How “Heimat” Constitutes a Key Part of our Location in the World
Collaborative Research Centre “Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations” has started work
A topic that is controversial both socially and politically is currently being examined in the humanities and social sciences at Heidelberg University. In the Collaborative Research Centre “Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations” over 60 researchers are exploring the question of why and how “Heimat“ (home / belonging) – and associated topic areas like being at home, community, mother country / fatherland or nation – make up a significant part of our social, territorial and individual bonding and location in the world. The consortium, led by musicologist Prof. Dr Christiane Wiesenfeldt, was approved last year by the German Research Foundation and has meanwhile started work in 24 sub-projects. The goal of CRC 1671 is, from an interdisciplinary perspective, to weigh up the diversity and dimensions of home and the discourses about belonging and foreignness both in their historical depth and their global breadth.
“Our German word ‘Heimat’ references a complex semantics, which has changed in many different ways since the Early Modern Age and is by no means unequivocal, especially as ‘Heimat’ is flanked and permeated by semantically related terms and its relatives in other languages and cultures,” explains CRC spokesperson Christiane Wiesenfeldt. In order to get to the bottom of the home / belonging phenomenon in its historical and global relevance, the work in the Heidelberg CRC starts from a model-theory approach: “We understand ‘Heimat’ as a transcultural, dynamic model, which has been present since antiquity up to the present and can be observed and analyzed from differing disciplinary perspectives. On the basis of many different model-related objects we look for common points of reference in different societal, media and cultural contexts in order to relate the various historical and global ideas of home to one another,” says Prof. Wiesenfeldt.
CRC 1671 links up a host of disciplines at Heidelberg University for this model-theory approach; history, musicology and art history, theology as well as classical and modern philologies are researching the myriad forms of social, territorial and individual bonding reaching far back into antiquity. Area Studies are devoted to examining transcultural dimensions from regional perspectives and investigating specific home / belonging constructs particularly in East and Southeast Asia, in North and Ibero-America, and in Europe. With a discourse-analytic and empirical approach, political science, anthropology, geography and law are engaged in modeling current concepts of home / belonging. Three of the 21 academic sub-projects are located externally at Freie Universität Berlin, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the University of Marburg; a further, overarching sub-project is in hand in collaboration with the Heidelberg-based Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research (FEST).
CRC 1671 also comprises three service projects, for instance on research data infrastructure and multilingual modeling, as well as on “Home(s) in the Public Space”. “Via many and varied event formats, our internet presence and social media we will deliberately seek to interact with the public at large. Music will also play a central role here,” explains Prof. Wiesenfeldt. The official opening event is scheduled for the 2025 summer semester. For the first funding period of Collaborative Research Centre “Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations” the German Research Foundation is providing finance of approximately 12.9 million euros until the end of June 2028.
Contact:
Heidelberg University
Communications and Marketing
Press Office, phone +49 6221 54-2311
presse@rektorat.uni-heidelberg.de
http://www.sfb1671.uni-heidelberg.de/en – CRC 1671
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Cultural sciences, History / archaeology, Language / literature, Music / theatre, Social studies
transregional, national
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