During the ongoing winter semester, Prof. Dr. Barbara Mittler, PI of the Heidelberg Worldmaking project, is co-organizing the university’s annual lecture series on the topic of “Freedom?! The University as a Space of Discourse”, thereby taking up the 2024 motto of the BMBF’s “Wissenschaftsjahr Freiheit”. On November 4, Dr. Xiang Biao, prestigious scholar and director of the department for Anthropology of Economic Experimentation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, came to Heidelberg to deliver a lecture on “The Structure of Freedom and the Structure of Responsibility: Navigating the Relations between Science and Politics”. In his talk, Dr. Xiang reflected on the public role of universities in times where different social groups are no longer bound by what he called a “common ground”, i.e. commonly shared values and beliefs. Against an observed tendency to publicly advocate for specific political causes, he calls on universities to adopt a nuanced approach toward social responsibility and academic freedom. Universities as institutions should adopt a stance of political neutrality, refraining from public expressions of solidarity, while vigorously defending the right of academic staff and individual university institutes to voice their opinions on matters of social and political concern. Admitting the difficulty of remaining neutral as an institution deeply entangled in wider societal and political networks, Xiang hopes that striving for neutrality might enable universities to better navigate the swiftly shifting political landscapes and preserve the campus as spaces of open debate.

 

Accompanying Xiang Biao’s lecture, the Heidelberg Worldmaking team was happy to organize an additional workshop together with the local Konfucius Institute and thereby create more opportunities for an in-depth discussion of his ideas and concepts. Bringing together graduate and doctoral students, the workshop took place on November 5 and revolved around the topic of “Scales of Freedom”. The workshop took inspiration from a selection of Xiang Biao’s writings in which he had developed conceptual tools to come to terms with living in increasingly polarized and fragmented societies. He proposes “the nearby” (fujin 附近 in Chinese), for example, as an intermediate scale for creating mutual understanding and taking collective action. The participants embraced the opportunity to critically reflect on Xiang Biao’s conceptual contributions and the intricacies of creating such spaces when many students have only recently moved to Germany and therefore struggle to find opportunities for meaningful encounters with the people in their nearby.