Must Study?

What was and is leisure, how was and is it negotiated and practiced? In the special research area 1015 "Muße. Grenzen, Raumzeitlichkeit, Praktiken "14 faculties of the University of Freiburg work together in an interdisciplinary research network. Due to the newly added subjects in the second funding phase - i.a. cultural anthropology - the present - day relevance of research and the social importance of leisure are becoming more prominent.

The cultural anthropological subproject G6 "Must learn?" Is assigned to the project area "Borders" and deals with everyday practical approaches to leisure learning and leisure experience in the context of competitive and competitive society as well as self-optimization. Have social actors lost their leisure time in the face of the challenges of the meritocracy? Or do they particularly fall back on idleness practices and leisure experiences in these times? In order to pursue these questions, the sub-project investigates course-oriented and ethnographic courses of a growing leisure market (yoga, meditation, forest bathing, etc.), in which people want to acquire leisure and practice leisure.

In their descriptions, these courses promise to be counter programs to a society characterized by performance and competition ideologies. The project examines how the providers and participants deal with these ideologies and how the participants practice optimization within the respective offers ('performing relaxation exercises best', 'settling faster', etc.). The idleness of the actors is assumed to be essentialist and normative ('meaningful', 'healthy', 'right' ways of dealing with leisure). It is to be deconstructed and put into a constructive field of tension with the analytical concept of idleness developed in the Collaborative Research Center. But not only the discursive negotiations of leisure are considered, but also the sensual-emotional and physical experience of leisure and their real manifestations in the course.

The seemingly dichotomic juxtapositions of work and leisure, action and contemplation, performance and inaction are to be examined for their cross-border character. Following the insights and perspectives of the Collaborative Research Center, we also ask for idleness practices that defy performance ideologies and resort to concepts such as freedom, inaction, and unproductiveness.

In addition to the subproject, the transfer of the research results of the Collaborative Research Center to a broad public is to be made possible by the cooperation in the transfer project "Museum of Leisure and Literature" in Baden-Baden.

Project leader: Prof. Dr. Markus Tauschek

Project Assistant: Inga Wilke, M.A