One University – One Book: »Resonance«

Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmaus, Bianka Mieskes, Prof. Willem-Jan Beeren

One University – One Book: »Resonance«

That books play an important role in the life of a university is nothing unusual. However, if all areas and levels, artistic and academic degree programmes, students, lecturers, and staff engage intensively with a particular book over the course of a year, then there is more behind it.

In 2020/21, Alanus University is participating in the “One University – One Book” project. It received an award for its concept from the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and the Klaus Tschira Foundation and is being funded as one of ten universities in Germany. At the centre is the work of sociologist Hartmut Rosa: “Resonance – A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World”.

Through engaging with Rosa’s multifaceted work, Alanus University aims to raise awareness of the resonance potential within the university community, develop it, and bring it into society. This takes place in reading circles, workshops, lecture series, courses, artistic transformations, exhibitions, inter- and transdisciplinary projects, as well as other activities by students and staff.

So far, the coronavirus pandemic has mainly allowed digital formats. After two intensive opening events in June 2020, an initial highlight was the lecture series “Resonances in the Context of Art and Therapy,” which took place in autumn and winter 2020. Students were able to engage particularly thoroughly with the book and the topic of resonance. Now in the fourth semester, several courses are being offered on the subject, opening up different perspectives and approaches.

After many digital meetings, it was a special event for the university community to be able to hold the university dialogue on the topic of “Encounter” on site in autumn 2021, with a variety of workshops and resonance exercises. The potential of what Rosa describes in his book became especially apparent here.

Persons responsible: Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmaus, Bianka Mieskes, Prof. Willem-Jan Beeren

Application video

Project overview

When relationships affect and touch us, when a landscape or a work of art speaks to us, when sparks fly in an encounter – then sociologist Hartmut Rosa speaks of “resonance.” In his book of the same name, he develops in a versatile and multilayered way the thesis that such experiences, in which the world responds and, in a sense, begins to vibrate, are crucial to leading a good life. All of us, according to the author’s diagnosis, are searching for resonance.

Set against this, however, is the opposite experience of alienation. The common “axes of resonance,” such as family, friendship, and politics, or work, school, sport, religion, nature, art, and history, seem increasingly to be falling silent. We live in a time marked in many ways by competition, rivalry, and acceleration. And one major challenge of social distancing during the coronavirus crisis is not to sever our “resonance wires” to the world. For present and future society alike, it is particularly important to create more spaces of resonance: structures that invite, enable, and foster experiences of resonance – while also knowing that these experiences ultimately elude control.

Such a task seems ideally suited to an art university that also helps shape alternative social, educational, therapeutic, and economic models. Alanus University therefore wants to use the funding of 10,000 euros to deepen its resonance potential.

Hartmut Rosa’s “Resonance” is a book that connects us. This guiding motif will run through the various events and measures we are planning for 2020/21. On the one hand, it is about relationships formed through our shared reading, from which we as a university community want to draw inspiration, but which we also want to engage with critically. We want to enter into dialogue about it from our different perspectives and build on it individually and collectively, within disciplines as well as inter- and transdisciplinarily. Secondly, this is connected not only with the goal of reaching an understanding about the phenomenon of resonance, but also of having resonant experiences ourselves. Since these cannot be produced but are ultimately unavailable by design, the point is not to “create” a resonant university, but rather – in both a literal and figurative sense – to create and cultivate spaces in which we come into contact with one another in such a way that resonant connections can become possible. But this also implies discovering and discussing tendencies toward alienation in order to be able to resolve them.

Because resonance cannot be controlled, the clearly defined formats are deliberately accompanied by others that remain open and are linked to a call for proposals. We are convinced that engaging with the book will open up possibilities that have not yet been envisaged. It is important to us that these can still be taken up during the course of the project. The formats that have already been established were developed in an open process that went hand in hand with a call for ideas in autumn 2019. They were not prescribed, but emerged – like the goals of this project – from suggestions made by the university community.