Dorothy Noyes

Aufenthalt

Mai 2022

Forschungsthema

»Trust and Suspicion in Interdisciplinary Knowledge-Making« | »Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics«

Projektbeschreibung

I will help the researchers at ConTrust to reflect on their own culture of interdisciplinarity, developing a reflexive account of trust and suspicion as complementary dimensions of knowledge production. Recognizing the sources of tension inherent in research collaboration, we can identify strategies to generate learning from conflict. Preliminary results of the work will be documented in a concept paper.

I will also draw on the research group’s expertise to further my own monograph on exemplarity in liberal politics. Drawing on key episodes from the eighteenth century to the present, I describe a trajectory in which the mediation necessary to mass societies has extended the reach and availability of symbolic politics as an instrument. Facilitating the amplification and emulation of acts deemed exemplary, mediated transmission encourages the competitive escalation of gesture, while undoing the context of interpersonal answerability that can guarantee follow-through.

Wissenschaftliches Profil

Dorothy Noyes is College of Arts [&] Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, with a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Studies, at the Ohio State University. Noyes studies political performance and the traditional public sphere in Europe, with an emphasis on how shared symbolic forms and indirect communication facilitate coexistence in situations of endemic social conflict. She also writes on folklore theory and the international policy careers of culture concepts. Her current book projects are Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics and, co-edited with Tobias Wille, The Global Politics of Exemplarity. In summer 2022 she will begin an appointment as Director of Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• »Talking About the Weather: Common Sense, Common Sensing, Commonplaces«. In: Journal of American Folklore 134,532 (2021),S. 272-291.
• »Blaming the Polish Plumber: Phantom Agents, Invisible Workers, and the Liberal Arena«. In: Journal of International Relations and Development 22 (2019), S. 853–881.
• (with Regina Bendix and Kilian Bizer), Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy,Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2017.
• »Gesturing Toward Utopia: Toward a Theory of Exemplarity«, in: Narodna umjetnost: Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore 53, 1 (2016), S. 75-95.
• Humble Theory: Folklore's Grasp on Social Life, Indiana University Press 2016.

Forschungskontext

Dorothy Noyes ist auf Einladung der Frankfurter Forschungsinitiative »ConTrust. Trust in Conflict - Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty« zu Gast am Kolleg. Während ihres Aufenthaltes arbeitet sie mit Tobias Wille, wissenschaftlicher Koordinator von »ConTrust«, zusammen. Am 9. Mai 2022 hält sie einen öffentlichen Vortrag auf dem Campus Westend der Universität: »The Clemency Scenario: Trust and Scale in European Political Drama, 1787–1830«.