Research group: Birgit Emich, Roland Hardenberg, Hartmut Leppin, Xenia von Tippelskirch, Alina Wilke (Support)
Duration: 01.01.2025 - 31.12.2025
Funding: Anschubförderung der Goethe-Universität
Website: https://reltox.hypotheses.org/
The research group will examine the actions that contribute to contamination or are perceived as such, as well as the societal consequences of such actions and perceptions. These processes will be referred to by the term Toxification. These processes initiate countermeasures for dealing with the “toxic,” which are in turn referred to as Detoxification. The connection of both processes is referred to as De:Toxification.
To this day, the terms “Toxification” and “Detoxification” are hardly established as concepts in the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies.
One of the few programmatic texts on “Toxification” is by R.S. Neilsen (2015). The author proposes that “toxification” as a concept could assess genocidal processes. For her, Toxification is associated with perceiving others as “fundamentally lethal,” leading to the drive to eradicate them completely (Neilsen 2015, 86-87). However, the complete eradication of perceived threats and their agents is only an extreme variant of how societies deal with Toxification.
Therefore, the research group aims to adopt a broader definition: It examines the normative designation of something as “toxic” and the processes of De:Toxification that create, reproduce, and transform socio-religious relationships.
