Selection completed — the following seven projects were selected for 2025:

1. Dr. Katharina Friege & Prof. Enrico Stolzenburg: Was gibt’s da zu lachen ? / A Comic Twist on Memory? Humour in Postwar German-Language Theatre 

This project uses theatre to think critically about the postwar era in Germany and Austria in new ways. To what extent did playwrights, actors, and audiences process or suppress the consequences of Nazism and World War II in the space of theatre? More specifically, we explore the role played by humour in war-related plays from 1945 to 1961.

2. Prof. Patricia Kingori, Prof. Kathryn Eccles & Prof. Christiane Kühl & Prof. Chris Kondek: Can the fake help us identify the real?

As fakes become more sophisticated, the real is more elusive. Traditional sources of reliability have become questionable, especially with the rapid rise of generative AI, which challenges the authenticity of all documents –text, sound and image alike. While we value the real, we do not seek to dismiss the fake outright. Instead, we propose directly engaging with it as a methodological and conceptual tool, to understand what provides confidence in the authentic. By focusing on strategies used by fakes, scams and hoaxes, we will explore the possibility of producing a “mockumentary” (fake documentary) to examine the everyday interplay between real and fake, including affective responses.

3. Dr. Tim Middleton & Prof. Dr. Susanne Hauser & Hannah Strothmann: Building Visions: Theology and Architecture in Deep Time

How do we imagine the built environment in the long-term future? How do theologies inform, or even constrain, our architectural anticipations of the future? – This project seeks to explore the double meaning contained in its title. On the one hand, we are interested in visions of buildings — the practical details associated with the architecture of the future. On the other hand, we also want to explore how visions are built — what worldviews, political assumptions, and social imaginaries lie behind specific suggestions of how things might be. The aim of this project is to explore novel interdisciplinary thinking at the intersection of theology and architecture. In particular, we are interested in investigating how both theologians and architects envision built environments in deep time.

4. Prof. Patrick McGuinness & Prof. Dr. Dirk Hohnsträter: Forms of Attention: Mapping the Everyday in Oxford and Berlin

The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to develop a vocabulary and a framework for examining everyday life that allows to better understand the loss of ‚normalities‘ in times of growing uncertainty. We need the everyday, and yet we do not perceive and value it until it is endangered or proactively explored by artists, social scientists and thinkers all of whom de-automatise our perception of the everyday and thereby open up possibilities to reflect on it and imagine its future form.

5. Prof. Alan Grafen & Dr. Katja Lehmann & Prof. Timothée Ingen-Housz: Dwelling across scales

The project is engaging with current issues social fragmentation by digging in the dust beneath our feet. Reflecting issues of urban soil health, we´ll encounter the „hidden half of nature“,  exploring how aesthetic practices can be interwoven with care strategies to expand the notion of dwelling across multiple scales of interactions between human and microbial worlds. A soil listening and broadcasting performance will be staged on the grounds of Teufelsberg´s historical spying station, coupled with and speculative workshop exploring the educational potential of a „soil society“.

6. Dr. Jessica Goodman & Prof. Mathilde ter Hejne: Dropping In and Out

DROPPING IN AND OUT is an interdisciplinary research project initiated by Dr. Jessica Goodman, Prof. Mathilde ter Heijne and Vanessa Gravenor,  exploring how artistic legacies of women and non-binary people are shaped by historical and geographical contexts, and how their contributions can be recovered and reimagined today. The project addresses erasures in feminist genealogies and fosters cross-temporal solidarity by starting a conversation about personal experiences of participants, and commissioning new works from contemporary artists and texts from theorists and historians. Artists and scholars examine how to narrate gaps in knowledge through feminist and decolonial perspectives.

The project reframes career interruptions not as failures but as integral to creative life, challenging dominant ideals of uninterrupted artistic production and complete archives. It offers a platform for early- and mid-career artists and researchers to engage with histories of exclusion and continuity, and to imagine alternative models of practice and recognition.

Findings will be shared through a website, online conversations, and in a second phase, an exhibition.

PROJECT KICKOFF

May 5–7, 2025, University of Oxford

Interviews and conversations

CONFERENCE

July 7-8 2025, Berlin University of the arts

Hybrid Conference with participants, guests and invitees

PUBLICATION

November 2025

7. Prof. Christine Gerrard & Prof. Kathryn Eccles, Prof. Michelle Christensen, Prof. Florian Conradi & Prof. Gesche Joost: Intersectional Bias in AI: Composing Cyborgs – Per/Forming Critique

AI systems threaten to extend the hegemony of binary heteronormative gender conceptions and western values across the globe, colonising the internet with perceptions, practices and probabilities. As these systems increasingly automate and reinforce histories and futures of intersectional exclusion, this project explores how the critical humanities and practice-based artistic research methods can intervene, disrupt and challenge such systems – prototyping counternarratives. A series of critical design experiments apply tactics from techno-feminism, alternative datasets and female writing. These experiments form the base for an interdisciplinary seminar, as well as a collaborative more-than-human theatre play that blurs the boundaries of human/machine and audience/acting.