European Societal Challenges in German Culture: Exploring Ageing and Climate Change in Tandem

Welcome to our DAAD-funded project “European Societal Challenges in German Culture: Exploring Ageing und Climate Change in Tandem”.

This project will analyse ageing and climate change in tandem and pay special attention to the ways in which both challenges are intertwined in the media and cultural manifestations such as literature, film, television and visual art. Here, genres like speculative, dystopian and crime fiction/film lend themselves to a particularly fruitful analysis.

Our aim is to analyse contemporary German-langauge cultural representation of ageing and climate change in a European context and explore if and how these representations confirm or challenge binary opposition based on chronological age, e.g. by proposing models of intergenerational solidarity to solve ecological problems or by challenging clear-cut age binaries and ageist stereotypes.