While the subproject (SP 2) in the first funding period focused on general aspects of the interaction between medical innovations and conceptions of a good life over time, the subproject in the second funding period (SP-B) aims to examine the (potential) intergenerational and social differences, as well as the multiple temporalities of the related concepts and narratives that emerge from these differences.

Films, television series, and documentaries go beyond individual case histories as exemplary, symbolically condensed narratives: in order to address a broad audience, the individual fates depicted must be of general significance, relevance, and expressive power. Mass media thus exert a considerable influence on our conceptions of a good life over time. Film, television, and streaming platforms thereby acquire a guiding and exemplary function. As mediating instances between individual and social—i.e. intersubjectively shared—conceptions of the good life within the horizon of modern medicine, they also perform important normalizing functions.

Supra-individual dimensions of conceptions of a good life over time are also relevant at the level of the content of audiovisual texts. Based on insights from the first funding period, two central and closely interrelated sets of questions have emerged as urgent desiderata for the orientation of the second period: (1) the question of (inter)generational agreement, transmission (SP-A, Philosophy), and (dis)continuity (ZIP, Medical Ethics) of medically grounded and evoked experiences of temporality and expectations of a successful or fulfilled life; and (2) the question of the relationship between social (dif)ferentiation and experiences of temporality with regard to diversity-related aspects such as class, race, and gender. Of particular interest to the subproject is the media-narrative interplay between generativity and diversity.

Generativity and diversity—this is our basic assumption—function as supra-individual dimensions of the good life that stand in a relationship of tension, often with heteronormative implications. From a temporal perspective, intergenerational relations can be understood as historically vertical forms of social differentiation (with reference to the earlier/preceding and the future/succeeding), whereas diversity primarily refers to forms of horizontal (present/simultaneous) social differentiation.

Since the subproject investigates how the three practice fields of the Research Unit are represented under aspects of generativity, diversity, and narrativity in the sense of a popularized medicine (and medical ethics), it is thematically in close exchange with SP-C (Psychocardiology), SP-D (Ethics of Reproductive Medicine), SP-E (General Practice), and SP-F (Ethics of Geriatric Medicine). Methodologically, the subproject is directly linked to SP-C and SP-D through its focus on (illness) narratives. At a more fundamental, theoretically grounding level—particularly with regard to questions of intergenerational temporality and the (dis)continuities of the good life—it relies on collaboration with SP-A (Philosophy) and the ZIP (Medical Ethics).

The subproject is based at the Institute for German Literature at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Senior Researchers:

Prof. Dr. Claudia Stockinger 
Dr. Christian Hißnauer

Student Assistant: 

Richard Fisch