Research Programme

REPARATION AND IRREPARABILITY

Many harms and damages, such as the destruction of cultural heritage in colonised regions, the trauma of war, or the consequences of climate change, cannot be undone. Such irreversible harms often trigger complex processes of negotiation that reshape cultural identities and entire worlds. They raise the question of how to build a shared future in which we and others can live despite a past scarred by violence, injustice, and the destruction of natural resources. Creating such a future will require not only economic and responses, but cultural practices of reparation.

CULTURAL PRACTICES OF REPARATION

The Käte Hamburger Centre CURE is dedicated to studying such cultural practices of reparation. We define reparation as a process of shaping the future with an awareness that past damage can never be fully undone. Repairing something always means that the traces of destruction remain – whether visible, felt, or understood. In our view, cultural practices of reparation encompass a broad range of responses to the awareness of damage: oral and written forms of narration, linguistic and non-linguistic rituals, music, scientific practices, visual art, poetry, historiography, films, theatre, exhibition practices, styles of public discourse, and more. These practices aim to develop possibilities and scenarios for the future, even in the face of enduring harms. Our goal at the centre is to collaboratively develop theoretical approaches to these practices.

We are interested in how expressions of culture, in various forms and media, can change our perception of the world, shape our self-conceptions, and alter the ways in which we and others live. We also ask how and to what extent cultural practices can foster reparation: How does visual art respond to the loss of natural habitats, and what vision of a shared future does it manifest? How do the sciences and other fields of knowledge imagine that humans will view themselves in the future? How does literature create stories of human co-existence amid unresolved historical conflicts? We also consider how processes of reparation are negotiated, experienced, and reflected upon in these cultural practices: What is understood by “reparation” in different contexts? How does reparation relate to the problem of irreparability? What relationships do cultural practices develop toward material forms of reparation?

Through this research, we aim to foster reflection in a globalised and damaged world and thus help build a foundation for living together in the future. We seek to uncover how cultural practices, across historical, media, and cultural contexts, can help shape a reparative future.

RESEARCH FOCUS AREAS

The fellows and members of the Käte Hamburger Centre CURE focus their engagement with cultural practices of reparation in three main areas of research: history, experience, and nature/culture. The research focus on history addresses memory politics, examining how various cultural practices respond to historical traumas. These include events such as colonisation, genocides, wars, or pasts that have been suppressed by official forms of collective memory. The research focus on experience is concerned with experiences of loss and damage, such as physical and psychological injuries resulting from the experience of war, or the alienation caused by political displacement. This research area also aims to investigate new forms of subjectivity and community. The research focus on nature/culture explores changes in our relationship to nature and the perception of the loss of security and future prospects for the world as a space in which we and others can live. Questions pursued here include cultural-ecological issues or critical approaches to humanity’s image of itself through new information technologies. One crucial aspect of all three areas, however, is that they are closely interconnected: we seek perspectives in which questions about history, experience, and nature/culture intersect, generating possibilities for the future from the points where they overlap.

Complementing these three areas of research focus, the first phase of funding for the Käte Hamburger Centre CURE is organised around four annual themes that guide our work: theory (2024/2025), society (2025/2026), body (2026/2027), and things (2027/2028).