RESEARCHER AND LECTURER
Dr. Leander Scholz
Leander Scholz will be visiting professor to the chair for Geschichte und Theorie künstlicher Welten [History and Theory of Artificial Worlds] at the Fakultät Medien of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar during the winter term 2011 and the summer term 2012.
Leander Scholz studied Philosophy, Art History and German Literature at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the Université de Paris-Sorbonne and at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. His doctoral thesis on the history of political prudence received the award of the University of Bonn (GEFFRUB). He is the author of several novels and cofounder of the publishing house Tropen Verlag. Additionally, he works as a freelancer for the radio station Deutschlandfunk. From 1999 to 2008, he was a research fellow at the Research Institute »Media and Cultural Communication« of the University of Cologne. Since 2008, he is a researcher and lecturer at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, as well as editor of the Journal for Media and Cultural Research (ZMK).
Research Project: Media theory and political philosophy
In terms of discipline, the research project on media theory and political philosophy is situated at the interface between media studies, aesthetics and art history, and practical philosophy. At the centre is the relationship between media theory and political theory: the research project examines political philosophies since the modern period for the media theories which are implicit in each one, and attempts by means of a cultural studies analysis to reconstruct the techniques of visualization which first make it possible to define the space of the political as such and to identify and/or address the political actors. Historically, the research project is divided into three periods to be investigated. The first part is concerned with the way in which, in the modern period, the political act of constitution was separated from the lines of descent of a royal dignity, and the imagination thus released was contained by theories of perception. The second part analyses the prominence of the aesthetic around 1800 as an attempt, in conditions of increased temporalization, to integrate into the order of visibility those variables of the political which elude the grasp of representational techniques. The third part examines the conversion of founding models based on social contract theory into asymmetrical scenarios of origin, in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, as a reaction to an epistemology which counts on fundamentally invisible actors.
Research Project: Media theory and political philosophy
In terms of discipline, the research project on media theory and political philosophy is situated at the interface between media studies, aesthetics and art history, and practical philosophy. At the centre is the relationship between media theory and political theory: the research project examines political philosophies since the modern period for the media theories which are implicit in each one, and attempts by means of a cultural studies analysis to reconstruct the techniques of visualization which first make it possible to define the space of the political as such and to identify and/or address the political actors. Historically, the research project is divided into three periods to be investigated. The first part is concerned with the way in which, in the modern period, the political act of constitution was separated from the lines of descent of a royal dignity, and the imagination thus released was contained by theories of perception. The second part analyses the prominence of the aesthetic around 1800 as an attempt, in conditions of increased temporalization, to integrate into the order of visibility those variables of the political which elude the grasp of representational techniques. The third part examines the conversion of founding models based on social contract theory into asymmetrical scenarios of origin, in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, as a reaction to an epistemology which counts on fundamentally invisible actors.
Research Areas
- Political Philosophy
- Culture and Media Philosophy
- Theory of Aesthetics and Democracy
- Doctrines of Prudence
- Cultures of Protest