Professor Johannesa Mosera (Institut für Volkskunde/Europäische Ethnologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) delivered a public lecture “How should one live in the city? Urban Ethics – a research agenda” on 26 May 2017 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb.
Professor Moser was a guest lecturer of the City-making project and the Platform for Mobility and International Cooperation of Ethnologists and Cultural Anthropologists.
Abstract: The Munich research group on Urban Ethics deals with the question how people should live in the city. Urban dwellers in a growing number of social fields are looking for new creative answers to this age-old question. Judging from our observations, over the past two decades this question has been increasingly linked to questions concerning what constitutes good and proper ways of living in the city, i.e. ethical issues: Whether availability and affordability of housing, ecology, the economical use of natural resources, how to deal with historic buildings and the stories they remind us of, the evaluation of diversity and heterogeneity in the urban everyday life, or new forms of communal organisation, there is hardly a field of city life or politics which has not become the subject of ethical problematisation! We thus understand ethics as the negotiation of the good and proper conduct of life, which urban dwellers engage in both through debates and through their purposive action in everyday life.
JOHANNES MOSER studied European Ethnology in Graz (M.A. 1987; PhD 1993), did a postgraduate study in Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (1990-1992) and his Habilitation at the University Frankfurt am Main 2002. He worked as a researcher at the Bureau for Social Research in Graz; as assistant professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology in Frankfurt. He headed the Department of Volkskunde at the Institute for Saxon History and Volkskunde in Dresden. Since 2006 he holds the Chair for European Ethnology at the LMU Munich. He is President of the “Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde” and speaker of the Urban Ethics Research Group. His research interests include – among others – urban anthropology, everyday live, transformation processes in European societies. We have selected a few among numerous volumes that professor Moser co-edited: Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte (with S. Hess and M. Schwertl), 2013; Mein München. Interventionen im Münchner Stadtmuseum (with U. Eymold), 2012; Dinge auf Reisen (with D. Seidl), 2009; No integration?! Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Integrationsdebatte in Europa (with S. Hess and J. Binder), 2009.
