Collaborative Research in the Study of Culture

Abstract

, the "Futurium" opened its doors to the public in Germany's capital, Berlin, and extended an invitation to reflect on the possible futures we imagine for our world. This new building illustrates several key characteristics of our thinking about the future, futures, and futurity in this volume as well. First, in its spatial interplay of exhibition, forum, and lab, the Futurium demonstrates that thinking about futures requires a variety of dynamic spaces. Second, as Stefan Brandt, director of the Futurium emphasizes, it invites us to think about the future in the plural (Checchin 2019). Third, located in the government quarter of the capital and sponsored by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research as well as by several foundations and companies, this 60-million-Euro project reminds us of the role that infrastructure, politics, and economics play in our thinking about futures. Fourth, its architecture, a result of a 20-year planning and building process, presents a fundamental dilemma that all collective and institutional thinking about possible futures faces: Behind its concrete walls and its glass façade, this edifice, built with today's materials and envisioned by yesterday's architects, hosts visions of tomorrow. While limited by its conventional materiality, it displays in its interior exhibitions on an envisaged future architecture that uses crab shells, bamboo, fungi cultures, brick clay, and recycled materials (see Richter 2019). Fifth, inside the Futurium, visitors find a space Note: As mentioned above in the Preface and Acknowledgements to this volume, our texts were conceptualized, written, and edited well before there were any signs of the current global covid-19 pandemic that has rapidly brought death, fear, and unforeseen challenges to individual lives and cultural systems. In light of the current global pandemic, experts are expecting that the covid-19 crisis will change the future of our health systems, our political systems, and more generally, our culture. Although we are only at the very beginning of this pandemic, it can be predicted, that, in many ways, these developments will also have unforeseeable consequences for the higher education system in general and the study of culture more specifically. Just as the crisis already has changed our perspectives on health, social interaction and distance, our notions of home, our organization of the private and public sphere, it will change the ways we organize our classrooms, our research, travels, meetings, and conferences, our interactions with colleagues, fellow researchers, and students. As leading economists at the I.M.F. expect the global economy to face the worst slump since the Great Depression, many higher education institutions and humanities departments might have to deal with major budget cuts in the near future.