The Volkswagen Foundation awards Freigeist Fellowships to outstanding and bold young researchers from all disciplines. Dr. Elena Vogman prevailed over 100 other submissions with her project and will be one of nine new Freigeist Fellows to be supported from June 2021. She will primarily contribute her expertise in the highly topical field of »media ecology« to the Department of Media Studies within the Faculty of Media at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Media ecology examines the role that media play in our environment, but also shows how they can help us to address ecological issues. 

The role of media and art in institutional psychotherapy

The starting point for the project is the assumption that media significantly shape and transform the milieus in which we interact: from geopolitical landscapes to technical infrastructures to our most intimate environs. This assumption will be examined with a view to the tradition of »institutional psychotherapy«, a psychiatric reform movement primarily rooted in France. The defining feature of this movement was the use of media in the treatment of the mentally ill – from newspapers through photographs to theatre and film.

Psychiatrists of the likes of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury as well as the educator Fernand Deligny and political activists such as Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari adhered to the institutional psychotherapy approach. Back in the 1950s, for example, Guattari used a tape recorder to record and evaluate conversations with his patients.

Drawing on newly discovered archives, the research group led by Dr. Elena Vogman will explore the role of media in clinical contexts. At the same time, they will investigate how these media-milieu practices affected philosophy and humanities discourses in postwar Europe. The project outcomes will be documented in publications as well as in an exhibition that will present previously unseen film and image material.

Media ecology as the binding link

»Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe« aims to contribute to the development of a critical media ecology. Dr. Vogman therefore plans to collaborate with Weimar academics affording similar interests during her time with the Faculty of Media. These include Dr. Henning Schmidgen from the Professorship for the Theory of Media Worlds who has already worked extensively on Guattari, Dr. Bernhard Siegert from the Professorship for the History and Theory of Cultural Technique who leads a research project on Computation and the Ecologization as well as Dr. Christiane Voss from the Professorship for the Philosophy of Audio-Visual Media who is currently the spokesperson for the »Media Anthropology« DFG research training group.

About Elena Vogman:

Dr. Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of » Sensuous Thinking: Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method« in 2018 and published »Dance of Values. Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project« in 2019. As a postdoctoral researcher, she was involved in the »Rhythm and Projection« DFG research project of the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the Free University in Berlin and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s international research institute for cultural techniques and media philosophy (IKKM). She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at New York University in Shanghai.

About the Freigeist Fellowship:

With this fellowship, the Volkswagen Foundation supports young researchers who not only afford outstanding specialist expertise, but also look beyond the boundaries of their own discipline and combine critical analytical skills with new perspectives and approaches.

» More information on the Volkswagen Foundation’s Freigeist Fellowship:
www.volkswagenstiftung.de/en/funding/our-funding-portfolio-at-a-glance/freigeist-fellowships 

» More information on the website of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar:
www.uni-weimar.de/madness-media-milieus