Monique Scheer is a full professor of historical and cultural anthropology at the University of Tübingen, where she currently also serves as Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Diversity. Among her research interests are religion, secularity, and cultural diversity in modern Germany, the history of emotions, and cultural theory. Recent publications include Enthusiasm: Emotional Practices of Conviction in Modern Germany (Oxford UP 2020), Secular Bodies, Affects, and Emotions: European Perspectives (edited with N. Fadil and B. S. Johansen, Bloomsbury 2019), and The Public Work of Christmas: Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies (edited with P. Klassen, McGill-Queen’s UP 2019).

Roundtable “Cultural Diversity?”

 29th May 01.00 – 02.30 pm | Monique Scheer, Boris Nieswand, Michael Boiger, Thomas Stodulka, Moderation: Birgitt Röttger Rössler

In contemporary academic writings the term culture, which is not only central to anthropology but also to the social and cultural sciences in general, increasingly appears only in word compositions such as “cultural plurality/multiplicity/variety”, “cultural diversity”, “cultural heterogeneity”, or “multiplicity of cultural orientations”, “diversity of social and cultural backgrounds” etc.

The roundtable provides a platform to discuss what these adjectival collocations denote precisely? Provocatively, it asks whether culture as adjectival becoming has transfigured into a leftover-category that lumps together the conceptually uncanny and empirically enigmatic? Invited scholars from sociology, social and cultural anthropology, cultural psychology and cultural studies will critically debate the analytical value of the terms “culture” and “diversity” and their entanglements from different disciplinary perspectives. Furthermore, they will pay attention to the affective dimensions of living in “culturally diverse settings”.