By Maria Framke
What motives led to voluntary humanitarian aid by Indians during the two world wars? What possibilities for voluntary engagement or charitable giving existed under colonial power relations, which often confounded or even obstructed those efforts? Historian Maria Framke, who specializes in modern South Asia, explores these questions in this blog post.
By Jürgen Martschukat
Since the seventeenth century, the idea of the human being as a self-owning, autonomous, voluntarily acting agent has become deeply embedded in liberal political thought. In the neoliberal age of the last fifty years or so, this notion has shaped political and everyday action more than ever before, becoming even more profoundly entrenched in the concept of ideal subjecthood. However, this so-called Lockean subject has come in for criticism…
By Mitchell Dean and Jürgen Martschukat
In Summer 2023, Australian sociologist and Foucault expert Mitchell Dean joined our research unit as Mercator Fellow. Since then, he and our group stayed in contact and he also participates in a workshop with former Mercator Fellow Alexandra Oeser in Paris-Nanterre this month. In the meantime, he and Jürgen Martschukat once more talked about joys and challenges of researching voluntariness in our second interview with visiting scholars in Erfurt.
