The research impulse "Shaping Future Society" (SaFe) focuses on the question of how communities adapt to crises with the help of everyday practices that are orientated towards alternative visions of the future. To this end, SaFe is focussing on established and new communities that are already implementing crisis-resilient concepts for the future. The aim is to better understand the connection between communitarisation and forward-looking practices.

Late modern societies are characterised by a variety of uncertainties that are often perceived as crises. SaFe takes this social volatility as a starting point and analyses different social actors who react to these crises with alternative visions of the future and future-oriented practices.

Community is seen as a constitutive element of social order that structures possibilities for action and at the same time acts as a catalyst for the development and stabilisation of future-oriented practices.

SaFe pursues an empirical access to basic theoretical research into current, forward-looking and prefigurative approaches. in terms of methodology, both ethnographic approaches and standardised procedures are used. SaFe also integrates basics and applied research in a transformative and transdisciplinary framework.

Overall sociological conception

In the classical sociological view, community was contrasted with society. Tönnies saw community as natural, traditionally anchored, emotional and characterised by caring relationships. He saw this form of life as threatened by the cold, rational and artificial "modern" society based on a social contract. More contemporary approaches, particularly in the American debate on theories of justice, question this clear distinction between community and society. Following Rawls, the laws and duties of people in different communities are seen as conditions for modern, just societies.

Focusing on the importance of communities and on decision-making processes even in modern liberal societies, a new perspective on the German dichotomy of "society vs. community" expands the connection between the two through the social practices of subjects. Thus, modern forms of community are understood as pillars (Rosa et al. 2010: 52) of modern democratic societies. Community is no longer based on common descent or exclude territory, but on an intersubjectively shared horizon of values that enables solidarity and connectedness. These "communal" forms of relationship as well as social forms of relationship based on abstract respect and recognition as a subject are both necessary types of social relationships.

Based on these considerations, Honneth developed a "minimal understanding" of community (1995: 262), which is embedded in a normative theory of democracy. His "post-traditional communities" are not based on traditional customs, deep emotional ties, shared values, common life practices, ancestry or territorial demarcation.Rather, post-traditional or liberal communities (Honneth 1995: 260) are characterised by shifting collective bonds, mutual support in often temporary, issue-specific networks or even mutual sympathy as part of selective, occasional or more or less permanent connections that are strengthened by appreciative recognition rather than distanced tolerance of other individuals.

Hitzler, Honer and Pfadenhauer (2008) develop the concept of post-traditional communities further by emphasising voluntary, individual participation in temporary communities. They also raise the possibility of communities that define themselves in an authoritarian way, with social integration acting as a unifying force. Furthermore, research on belonging (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2012; Gerharz 2014) and ethnicity (Brubaker 2002) shows that supposedly primordial bonds continue to be constructed in relational and reciprocal relationships. Communities must therefore be actively established and nurtured, even if they appoint themselves to seemingly given or natural traditions. They promise individuals, who have been released from binding and reliable patterns of thought and action, at least a temporary and relative security as well as unquestionability (Hitzler et al. 2008: 30).

Current community research therefore comprises a constructivist perspective that focuses on processes of boundary-making (Rosa et al. 2010: 173), as well as a communitarian perspective that analyses community and communitisation as an everyday process of social participation. Building on these insights, SaFe conceptualises communities as concrete places where sociality unfolds - a process we refer to as communitarisation.

Forward-looking practices and communitarisation are mutually constitutive outcomes of political, social and cultural discourses that take place in the present on an everyday level with varying degrees of formalisation and explication. SaFe benefits from passing research on "intentional communities" (Kunze 2020), i.e. forms of experimental collective coexistence based on shared interests and principles to which individuals voluntarily commit themselves (Grundmann/Kunze 2012). Intentional communities serve as spaces in which visions of the future are put into practice (Krämer 2019) or anticipated (Monticelli 2021). Alternative lifestyles are a constitutive dimension of these communities, whereby commonality and reciprocity are understood as core elements of belonging (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2012). Intentional communities are also often concerned with specifically testing and practising social change. They see themselves as real-world laboratories or experimental spaces (Schneidewind/Scheck 2013).

Since intentional communities are characterised in particular by a communal approach to imagining and practising a specific, different way of life, which is often based on an alternative vision of the future, this particular form is at the centre of SaFe's interest. At the same time, our analysis is not exclusively excluded from communitarisation that emerges from future-imagined practices, but also examines how passing communities develop new forms of communitarisation out of the logic of their everyday needs.