How do societies develop common images?

Carmen Pereyra approaches the topic through literature. She analyses how authors from Latin America and Central Europe talk about crises and how they imagine the end of the world in dystopian novels. She is focussing on these two regions because they are linked by a shared colonial history. "Many works are currently being written in Latin America that analyse how colonialism has led the individual states and societies to where they are today and whether it has influenced perceptions of current and future crises," reports the Argentinian. These texts question Eurocentric notions of progress by exposing modernity as an unfinished, often violent project. Recent Latin American fantastical fiction, for example, employs narrative funds such as time loops and historical flashbacks, forcing characters and readers to confront the unresolved ghosts of colonialism. By examining these literatures, Pereyra argues that dystopian works, as cultural expressions of social imaginaries, go beyond merely reflecting contemporary anxieties. Instead, they actively participate in creating and reshaping future possibilities and have material implications for the ways in which societies perceive, prepare for, and even resist crises.

Biology and Medicine

The colonial past also plays a central role in Jenny Merker's project. She investigates how colonial knowledge practices influenced 17^th and 18^th century zoology and what long-term effects it had on the perception of nature. Naturalists did not classify newly discovered animal species neutrally, but within colonial knowledge systems that privileged European patterns of interpretation. Imaginative practices were not only a product of colonial structures, but actively contributed to their emergence and consolidation. They determined which animals were considered significant, how they were named and which cultural attributions they received. The doctoral student analyses how zoological descriptions were interwoven with colonial logics of order, on which sources of knowledge they were based and how collection objects - such as taxidermied or otherwise preserved specimens - were arranged in European natural history cabinets and cabinets of curiosities. She examines how these collections not only reflected colonial hierarchies, but also actively contributed to the construction of colonial claims to knowledge and power.

Images are the very specific subject of John Norrman's research. He is investigating how caricatures visualise the ideas of crisis during the European revolutions of 1848 and 1849. "Caricatures represent the social imagination like almost no other medium," explains the Swedish historian. "You can practically observe directly how it happens as a practice. Caricaturing means observing something objectively and then transforming it into something subjective." Norrman is particularly interested in how this "trans-European mass medium" understood the revolutionary crises of the mid-19^th century as a suitable time for social change and not just as a kind of social illness that needed to be cured. "I have already done a lot of work on how representations function in images - how they are used as propaganda, for example, or how they address the understanding of gender images. The new environment, the exchange with colleagues and the current research on this topic in Jena will expand my range of methods enormously," says the doctoral student, formulating his expectations of the new research training group.