Head of Department: Univ.-Prof. Mag. phil. Eva Maria Stadler
The Institute of Arts
and Society consists of five departments - Art and Knowledge Transfer, Social Design, Cross-Disciplinary Strategies, International
Programmes in Sustainable Developments and Artistic Strategies. Each with their own specific requirements address issues related
to society and, even more, the constitution of society itself. The concept of society, distinguished by the dynamic of order
and difference since the Enlightenment, is subject to constant transformations, which need to be analysed, contemplated, and
shaped.
At the beginning of the 1990s, when Bruno Latour declared, “We have never been modern,” he revoked a notion
of society that assumed the dichotomy between nature and culture and in its strive for autonomy and difference separated the
fields of action from overarching social contexts. Latour, in contrast, speaks of hybrids, social actors, non-social entities
and objects as a real network, which he conceives as society. Multifaceted relationships between people and things, according
to Latour, would generate new modes of socialisation through complex interconnections, a network that cannot be subjected
to systematic or territorial boundaries.
