IKGF Humanities Festival

The Humanities Festival organized by the IKGF with the topic “What will be? A Look into the future” will take place from October 15th to 25th in Erlangen and Nuremberg at different locations. During the festival days there will be a scientific conference, workshops and evening lectures as well as a series of events from the fields of literature, medicine, art, ecology, technology and business.

Date: 15. - 25.10.2021

Time: 5pm - 10pm

Title: IKGF Humanities Festival 

Event Type: Other

Event Category: BMBF

Organisor: Internationale Kolleg für Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschungen (IKGF)

Ort: Erlangen und Nuremberg

Regardless of whether you are an epidemiologist, meteorologist, election researcher, demographer, economist, sociologist or climatologist - they all deal with, among other things, making future predictions. Scientific prognoses today and traditional forms of prediction differ greatly in their methodology and the underlying worldview, but they also show similarities: in their function for politics and society as well as their charismatic claim to validity. Many of the traditional forecasting techniques reflect the world understanding and know-how of their time and the cultural context in which they are embedded.

Just as some of the ancient forecasting techniques now appear to us to be superstitions, future societies may at some point see some of the established techniques of our time as archaic. The aim of the project is to hold a humanities festival in the context of the focus area “Creating design and development spaces for science.”

The IKGF Humanities Festival 2021 purpose here is taking the topic “What will be? A Look into the future” in focus. It is therefore dedicated to the topic of prognosis and its social and political dimensions in the past, present and future. In addition to the European cultural area, the non-European area, in particular East Asia, should also be heard.

In view of the current corona pandemic, in which prognosis has repeatedly come to the fore of public interest, this topic seems not only scientifically interesting, but also excellently suited to addressing the general public and attracting a great deal of media attention .

We are planning the first Humanities Festival in Erlangen in 2021 as a networked series of events with two pillars. Pillar 1 is a series of accompanying events with a popular science character at various locations in the Erlangen-Fürth-Nuremberg metropolitan region, which in their range cover various levels of access and approaches to science communication.

Pillar 2 is a two-day transdisciplinary public conference, the Erlanger Prognostik-Tage, with well-known participants from science, politics and practice, which is also accessible to a broadly interested general audience and contains public event formats.

The following formats for the accompanying series of events with a popular scientific character are in preparation, in which we are looking to collaborate with various cultural and educational institutions such as the Erlangen adult education center, cultural centers such as the E-Werk in Erlangen, the Deutsches Museum Nürnberg, the children's museum and the city youth council: Lectures, round tables, film screenings, book readings, video installations and performances, comic exhibitions, pop-up exhibitions, IKGF workshops, science slams and political talk.