Modeling Nature

The profile initiative “Modeling Nature” brings together current research approaches that, starting from cultural perspectives on the elusive but precisely therefore so revealing subject area of nature, pursue its artistic, scientific, technical, and social ramifications. Nature plays a major role in contemporary debates in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences. Further developments within political ecology, the reception of the geological concept of the Anthropocene, and cultural studies approaches such as eco-criticism, the material turn, and cultural animal studies are just a few prominent examples. The profile initiative aims to take up these impulses, review the current state of discussion, and enrich it through the joint analysis of global social and artistic practices.

The research center “Naturbilder” (2013–2018), funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, had already focused on the connection between visual representations and abstract (scientific or philosophical) conceptions of nature. The profile initiative builds on this and at the same time brings together current research approaches at the UHH that are currently centered in the two DFG research groups “Imaginaria of Force” (since 2019) and “Futures of Sustainability” (since 2019, based in the WiSo Faculty). The research group “Imaginaria of Force” explores conceptions of natural forces from antiquity to the early modern period. The research group “Futures of Sustainability” examines visions of the future and goals in connection with ecological action, crisis management, and modernization. It also incorporates cultural studies research approaches from archaeology and ethnology, which examine visualizations of human impact in a historical and global perspective and, in the sense of environmental pluralism, the relationship between everyday knowledge and scientific knowledge.