Authoritarian discourse politics turns society into a language laboratory where the boundaries of what can be said – and thus thought – are tested. It manifests in battles over words that are adopted, emptied, or redefined, and in the introduction of new vocabulary. The project explores the function, the cultural semantics, and the historical depth of such terms. It also examines how discourse politics relates to science. Currently, academic institutions are attacked from the right and declared a battleground for discursive hegemony. Conversely, the university is an arena for leftist activism, which turns students into a contested revolutionary subject. By analyzing (historical) scenarios of demarcation, corruption, and entanglement, the project engages with existing possibilities – above all, with the aim of enabling situated agency and of finding the right words in moments of struggle.

Associate Researcher at ifk

Jeannie Moser works in the fields of literary and cultural studies with a focus on intersections of language, science, society, and politics. In 2024, she completed her habilitation with a thesis on the literary and epistemic history of the power of mistrust, much of which was written during a research position funded by the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur. She was a faculty member of the TU Berlin (post doc) and the University of Vienna (prae doc), where she earned her PhD with a dissertation on the concept of the Neurochemical Self shaped in scientific and countercultural drug research. She led the section Artificial Feelings: Rituals, Drugs, Performances at the ifk Summer Academy, was an ifk Junior Fellow, a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University, and a fellow at the Konstanz Graduate School The Figure of the Third. Most recently, she held a visiting professorship endowed by the Fonte-Stiftung at FU Berlin, combining Gender Studies with research on the Early Modern Period.