Eva Schürmann (Magdeburg/Bonn): The Law and its Mediation

Abstract

Cultural practice lives in a constant state of tension between facticity and interpretation. Controversial claims to validity clash in competing interpretations and their representations. Disputes over interpretations are battles for the correct construal of reality. Here, it can probably not be emphasized enough that interpretations are generally no matters of private exchange, but are made possible and limited through a socially shared practice that is subject to multi-layered conditions of cultural convictions, technical possibilities and media embodiments.

The fact that issues of justice and injustice depend on interpretative processes and their presentation in media like language and picture has been discussed as a rhetorical matter of interpretation and narration in law. A media theoretical investigation of legal practice though intends to analyze the interpretative patterns that are formulated in and by certain activities of presentation and figuration. The analytical focus of critical media  theory does not just insist on the individual figures, but generally takes into account the operation of figuration itself. It investigates who presents what when, how and for what purpose.

Prof. Dr. Eva Schürmann

Curriculum Vitae

Eva Schürmann studied Philosophy, Art History and Modern German Philology as well as Comparative Literature and Theater, Film and Television Studies at the University of Bochum, where she obtained her Magister degree with a thesis on Spinozas Ethik in 1994. In 1998, she completed her doctoral thesis at the University Witten Herdecke, which was published by Fink Verlag in 2000 under the title “Erscheinen und Wahrnehmen” (“To Appear and Perceive”). From 2001 to 2009, she was Researcher at the Institute for Philosophy of the Technical University of Darmstadt. Following a Guest Professorship at the University of Chicago, she completed her habilitation in 2007 with a thesis on the practice of visual perception. In 2009, she became Professor for Cultural Philosophy and Aesthetics at the HAW Hamburg. In 2011, she moved to the University of Magdeburg, where she holds the Chair for Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Culture and Technology. Since January 2014, she is Managing Director of the University of Magdeburg’s Institute for Philosophy. In March 2014, she was awarded the Science Prize of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung. Since October 2014, Prof. Schürmann is Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”.