Sacha Jérôme KaganUniversity of Hildesheim · Center for World Music
Sacha Jérôme Kagan
Doctor of Philosophy
P.I. of DFG research project "Queering Jewish Cultural Heritage" at Uni Hildesheim, and Privatdozent at Leuphana Uni
About
83
Publications
54,402
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Introduction
09.2022 - 08.2025: Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project "Queering Jewish Cultural Heritage in Europe", based at Center for World Music, University of Hildesheim (Germany); and Privatdozent at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
For writings freely available online, see also my private website at: http://sachakagan.wordpress.com/writings/
Additional affiliations
October 2022 - present
Position
- Privatdozent
Description
- Privatdozent (teaching the so-called "Titellehre" at Leuphana - i.e. unpaid work as per an archaic German exploitative tradition affecting habilitated non-professors...)
April 2019 - March 2022
Position
- Lecturer
Description
- Teaching seminars/courses and workshops at BA and MA-level across the university's Faculties and for PhD candidates at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, especially on sensory-ethnographic and arts-based empirical research methods, on queering research methods, and on the cultural dimension of sustainable urban development.
May 2005 - February 2018
Education
November 2006 - March 2011
September 2003 - August 2004
September 1999 - July 2003
Publications
Publications (83)
This article contributes to an exploration of the relations between culture and policies for sustainable development in cities. It discusses the potentials to advance a cultural approach to sustainable urban development by enabling urban "spaces of possibility", relating them to institutional (social, cultural, and political) innovations. Based on...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt.
Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initia...
The special issue of World Futures on “queer convivialist perspectives for sustainable futures” focuses its attention on the potential insights that queer approaches may bring to sustainability research and to the search for sustainable futures. It suggests a queering of conviviality, reaching beyond the anthroponormative limitation of the Convivia...
This book exposes the potential to advance a cultural approach to sustainable urban development. It explores urban "spaces of possibilities" and links them to the seized or missed opportunities for innovative forms of transversal partnerships throughout the city and of culturally sensitive urban policies.
The call for sustainability brings with it...
Convivial Futures are about living well together in a hyper-diverse world. Convivialism shall find critical inspiration in a queering process: Queer futuring and queer futures are oriented to deviations, troubling lines of development, and staying with the trouble of complexity. They open up critique and dream at horizons of experience. The critica...
Sacha Kagan’s chapter approaches the works of artist Yeon Sook Lee as instances of sustainable place-making. Places are not simply found, but made by collectives of human and non-human beings, and they form a "meshwork" through assemblies of sentient beings and objects. The complexity of places goes beyond physical spaces and involves sensory and e...
Creativity is a central feature of educational processes that aim for an artistic communication of sustainability challenges in the city. The study reported in this article empirically explores the deployment of social creativity in cultural initiatives struggling with issues of (un)sustainable urban development in their city (Hanover, Germany). On...
kumulativen Habilitationsschrift / cumulative Habilitation Script, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
The texts gathered in this cumulative Habilitation offer a largely congruent set of insights on the cultural dimension of sustainability and on the important functions of the arts in relation to the cultural dimension of sustainability, not only in so...
The playful, game-based exercises discussed in this chapter, invite participants to train their social creativity and experience complex systems through embodied movement games. On the basis of an earlier "Systems Thinking Game" by Linda Booth-Sweeney and Dennis Meadows, known as the "Triangles" game, the new “Village Triangles” game was developed...
Through an autoethnographic and transdisciplinary discussion of BDSM practice, the article articulates BDSM as a performative playful space with high potential for experiential learning, where conventional ways of sensing, feeling, thinking, valuing and acting, and social rules and hierarchies are rendered uncertain, negotiable and full of possibil...
This paper describes and analyses the potentials and limits of Design Thinking in Sustainability Jams, claimed increasingly to contribute sustainability solutions and changed practices for desired futures. With an in-depth case study, we show how the current application of “Design Thinking” coming from the management context (where Design Thinking...
The chapter explore parallels between some of the author's urban research insights from a project on the “City as Space of Possibility (empirical research in the city of Hanover, Germany), and some of the reflections and perspectives offered in William Lim’s book publication "Incomplete Urbanism" (which focuses on urban development in East Asia). T...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Sustainability research has set itself the double-challenge of uncovering the complexity of a globally, locally and historically unsustainable development path, and of contributing to a search process for more sustainable development paths for humanity.
La ciencia de la sostenibilidad está marcada por un cuarto de siglo de desarrollo conceptual y metodológico. A pesar de la expansión exitosa y las experiencias prometedoras, hay limitaciones a considerar. Este artículo argumenta que las nuevas metodologías y métodos deben desarrollarse y emplearse para comprender mejor la complejidad cualitativa de...
Engaging in a chronological retrospection of my professional and personal transdisciplinary practice of walking-based research over the past decade, and embedding some elements of arts-based writing into the article itself, I articu- late the influence of walking art, transect walks by urban researchers, and especially of Sarah Pink’s sensory ethno...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Eine interdisziplinäre Gruppe von Forscher*innen der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg hat sich in den Jahren 2015 bis 2018 zusammengefunden, um zu untersuchen, welche Beiträge kulturell, künstlerisch, sozial oder alternativ wirtschaftend engagierte Akteur*innen zu einer nachhaltigen Stadtentwicklung leisten, welche Hinweise, Ansatzpunkte und Möglichke...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Zu Zeiten einer anhaltenden Urbanisierung stehen Fragen urbaner Nachhaltigkeit zunehmend im Mittelpunkt, zum Beispiel nach dem Verhältnis von Mensch und Natur, von Staat und Zivilgesellschaft und hinsichtlich der Kulturen des Zusammenlebens in der Stadt. Mit einem besonderen Schwerpunkt auf kulturell-künstlerischen sowie kreativ-innovativen Initiat...
Urban “spaces of possibility” for sustainable urban development are constituted to a significant extent by the spaces opened up for imaginative processes, enriching urban imaginaries with potentially radical imagination pointing towards possibilities for urban transformation. Spaces of possibility are both spaces of imagination and spaces of experi...
Over the past two decades several discourses around sustainable development and sustainability introduced a cultural component. Among the main clusters of discourses that emerged are (1) establishment of culture as a “fourth pillar of sustainability” and formulations of a “cultural sustainability”, (2) identifications of “culture(s) of sustainabili...
The search for decisive actions to remain below 1.5 C of global temperature rise will require profound cultural transformations. Yet our knowledge of how to promote and bring about such deep transformative changes in the minds and behaviours of individuals and societies is still limited. As climate change unravels and the planet becomes increasingl...
Artistic and arts-based research, and artful learning more generally, hold specific qualities that can contribute to the development of transdisciplinary hermeneutics. This article reviews these qualities and advocates for an artistic turn in sustainability research, as well as for a turn to a queer-convivialist life-art, enhancing the transdiscipl...
In the summer of 2016, I curated a symposium entitled “EMBODYING ENLIVENMENT – Queer, SM and Eco-Sexual Perspectives” at the “Xplore” Festival in Berlin – probably one of the most original and deeply inter- and transdisciplinary festivals I ever encountered.
With the Xplore Symposium, held in parallel to and as an integral part of the Xplore Festiv...
While the potential of creativity and of the arts for societal transformation towards sustainability has gained attention over recent years, a specific focus on music is lacking in sustainability science. What are the specific potentials of music, and why should we care? Collective musical practice enhances group cohesion, and musical improvisation...
The ESA Research Network Sociology of the Arts hereby announces its 9th Midterm
Conference (ESA-Arts 2016) which will take place from 8th to 10th September 2016 at
the University of Porto - Faculty of Arts and Humanities, in Portugal. Since 2000, the
Network has organised a biannual conference on Sociology of the Arts. A key aim of
these conference...
Das »Konvivialistische Manifest« (2014 auf Deutsch erschienen) hat die globale Debatte um die Frage neu formatiert, wie wir das Zusammenleben angesichts von Klimakatastrophe und Finanzkrisen gestalten wollen und müssen. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes eröffnen nun die Diskussion um die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Manifests im deutschsprachigen Raum: W...
[ The IETM publication is freely vailable online at https://www.ietm.org/en/system/files/publications/ietm-art-for-the-planets-sake_jan2016_0.pdf ]
Taking a wider view, departing from the specific case of the Hamburg exchange between artists and climate scientists, this comment envisages some radical potential for the collaboration of artists and climate scientists: moving beyond the traditional boundaries of social systems, artistic research and climate science may engage in a shared transdis...
The genre of " ecological art " , as originally conceived in the 1990's on the basis of practices that emerged from the late 1960's onwards, covers a variety of artistic practices which are nonetheless united, as social-ecological modes of engagement, by shared principles and characteristics such as: connectivity, reconstruction, ecological ethical...
L'« art écologique » est un genre établi dans les années 1990 sur la base de pratiques qui ont graduellement émergé depuis la seconde moitié des années 1960. Il couvre une variété de pratiques artistiques qui, par-delà leurs différences, constituent des modes d'engagement sociaux et écologiques unis par des principes et caractéristiques partagés :...
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This article consolidates critical urban sociology with the understanding of cultural sustainability towards urban development. Whereas the latter demands a ‘culture of complexity’ based on self-organized creativity as stipulation for a sustainable creative city, the former provides theories for analyzing unsustainable creative cities. By combining...
What could a “transcultural science” look like? I will explore this question through a discussion of an inter- and transdisciplinary project that I coordinated at the Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2008 and 2009: the so-called “Karamoja campaign” - dealing with issues of unsustainable development in a semi-pastoral region of East Africa. I will es...
Contemporary western societies are marked by symptoms of a culture of unsustainability, rooted in problematic modes of knowing reality , across social systems, whether in the sciences, arts or other fields. Transdisciplinary researchers across the world are already aware of these issues and working on resolving them. To contribute to these efforts...
What is the cultural dimension of sustainability? This book offers a thought-provoking answer, with a theoretical synthesis on »cultures of sustainability«. Describing how modernity degenerated into a culture of unsustainability, to which the arts are contributing, Sacha Kagan engages us in a fundamental rethinking of our ways of knowing and seeing...
The city today is increasingly conceptualized using terms such as creative cities or creative class and stressing the importance of culture. The effects this development can have on cities and neighbourhoods has been criticised within the wider field of sociology. We explore this critique and place it in the context of the analysis of a culture of...
Contemporary developments around the search for ‘sustainability’ offer an insightful approach to the question of an emerging global mindset change. In its cultural dimension, the search process for sustainability fosters a paradigmatic shift in world views and ways of life, breeding a sensibility to the “pattern that connects” (as coined by Gregory...
Under the light of theoretical insights on unsustainability at the late stage of Modernity, i.e. the technological system, disjunctive knowledge, autopoïesis and phenomenological numbness, and given the relevance of some of these symptoms in the art worlds, Richard Florida's 'Creative Class' appears as a highly problematic discourse for urban cultu...
In the framework of the 'Karamoja campaign' coordinated by ACTED, an exploratory research process was carried out with students from the universities of Lüneburg, Bordeaux, Groningen and Prague. The goal was to establish a systemic, transdisciplinary diagnosis of the contemporary development situation among pastoralist communities of Karamoja (Nort...
The search for sustainable futures calls forward a cultural change process. The cultural dimension of (un)sustainability stands at the core of the global crisis, pointing at the roots of unsustainable development and exploring alternatives. While sustainability offers an inspiring research field for artists and other cultural actors, the arts and o...
