The CRITICAL AGENCY research group is funded by the DFG Emmy Noether programme and consists of Dr. Deborah Mühlebach (PI), Dr. Antoine Louette (postdoc), tbd (PhD student), Prof. Quill Kukla (Mercator Fellow) and Emilia Kleo Mertens (student assistant).

We explore what circumstances promote or inhibit critical agency, i.e., the capacity to form and put forward critique that is actually taken up as critique. A special focus lies on the roles that understanding and ignorance - on the part of the critic(s), the addressee(s), and the bystanders - play in critical encounters. With the help of ethnographic resources we develop a political epistemology of critique that is deeply rooted in our real-world practices.

We are the organisers of the Berlin Ethnographilosophy work-in-progress group.
We also collaborate with PEP Berlin - the politically engaged philosophy work-in-progress group.