The project is directed towards the normalisation of discomfort in culture, which has emerged as a general state of individuals and collectives after the first cracks and ruptures in the grand humanistic narratives, and has intensified due to new civilizational threats such as cybernetic, pandemic, and climate crises on the planet. Collaborators on the project will examine cultural concepts of (ab)normality and discomfort from various folkloristic, anthropological, cultural studies, psychoanalytical and interdisciplinary perspectives, in both diachronic and synchronic horizons. Innovative theoretical, ethnographic and textual research will focus on phenomena of “new (ab)normality,” cultural norming of social functionality and mental health, narrative normalization of experiences of natural disasters, social injustice and discrimination, as well as the pervasive “discomfort in culture” of commodification, toxicity, and precarity. Special attention will be paid to modes of overcoming discomfort, anxiety, trauma, violence, and vulnerability through modes of resistance/resilience that are reactivated from the fields of self-regulatory cultural knowledge and (ritualized) practices directed towards (self)restoring individuals and collectives.
