The Constellation Cultural and Social Critique deals with issues of conflict and crisis in both material and symbolic collective orders. It unites different research groups (Engaging Method, What’s Queer Here?, Reading Rancière, Exclusions Circumference, Social Autonomy, Religion and Spirituality, Critical Cultural Theory and others). The main focus is on the question of the methodology of criticism.

Which kinds of normative criteria do we have to evaluate social and cultural crises? Where are they taken from and how can they be justifies? How can strategies of critique take our own involvement into account? How shall we conceive of the relation between the analysis and the evaluation of social and cultural phenomena? And: At what point does theory and analysis become a form of intervention – a form of critique – itself? All these questions are addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective, applying the methods of social criticism to concrete phenomena.