A session led by Jana Vargovčíková ‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. Now, heaven knows, anything goes.’ (Cole Porter). Far from being anomalies or mere accidents, transgressions are conditioned and given meaning by norms. Subsequently, norms repeatedly reaffirm their legitimacy and meaning in contrast to transgressions. What is … Continue reading Studying the State through the Scandal: On the Epistemic Value of Transgression →

A session led by Mátyás Erdélyi The present seminar session investigates how social statistics were created, comprehended, and used for commercial and public purposes in Dualist Hungary. It explores different modes of quantification, the inter- or pre-disciplinary sights of scientific production, and power relations between competing expert and nascent professions. Central to this line of … Continue reading Inventing the Right Numbers: Social Statistics, Commercial Reason, and the Public Good →

A session led by Edita Wolf While grand narratives constructed by the means of metaphysical philosophy legitimate the modern condition of knowledge, incredulity toward metanarratives characterizes the postmodern condition. In his seminal text, Jean-François Lyotard explores the process of de-legitimation of knowledge claims vis-à-vis the end of grand narratives and the parallel emergence of a … Continue reading The Notion of Interdisciplinarity in The Postmodern Condition →