Mareike Gebhardt

Building PT, Room 3.1.30
Phone +49 941 943-3550
Mareike1.Gebhardt@politik.uni-regensburg.de

Research Interests

Political thought of Hannah Arendt

Political Theory and Sociology of Juergen Habermas

Democratic Theory and postmodern thinking

Modern Contractualism and Republicanism (Rousseau, Kant)

Curriculum Vitae

From 2001 to 2007 Mareike Gebhardt studied political sciences, sociology and philosophy at the universities of Trier, Wuerzburg and Regensburg. Her main foci were on Political Theory and Philosophy, the History of Ideas as well as Political Sociology. She wrote her Master´s thesis in 2006/07 on “The Citizen’s Power – Kant´s denial of a right to resist analyzed in the framework of deliberative democracy”.

Between 2008 and 2013 Mareike Gebhardt worked on her doctoral dissertation on “Political action in a postmodern world. The relation between anonymity and citizenship in the works of Hannah Arendt and Juergen Habermas”.

In 2010/11 she worked as a research assistant for the German-Israeli Research Project “Narrative, Dreams, Imagination – Israeli and German Youth Imagine their Future” of the University of Regensburg, the University for Applies Sciences of Karlsruhe and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Since October 2010 Mareike Gebhardt has been a research and teaching assistant at the Chair of Political Philosophy and the History of Ideas at the University of Regensburg

PhD project: Political action in a postmodern world. The relation between anonymity and citizenship in the works of Hannah Arendt and Juergen Habermas

The dissertation asks about the relation between democratic rule and genuine political action under postmodern conditions and starts with the diagnosis of politics in crisis that Arendt and Habermas share. To analyze this crisis the thesis focuses on the correlation between the possibility of political action, a growing lifeworldly dominance of economics and increasing individualism. Regarding the main menaces of the political – economics and individualism – the question is how to heal the political realm of contemporary western democracies from those pathological tendencies? And furthermore, is the reign of individualism necessarily the end of political engagement?

Located at the crossroad of modern and postmodern argumentation the PhD-project understands itself as a contribution to a critical approach to democratic theory relying on methods from both, phenomenology and critical theory.

Publications

Mareike Gebhardt. “On Dreaming Public: Between the Irony of the Self and the Recognition of the Other.” Narrations, Dreams, Imaginations: Israeli and German Youth Imagine the Future. Ed. Karlfriedrich Herb, Eva Marsal, Jen Glaser, and Barbara Weber. Münster: Lit Publisher, 2013. Print.

---. “Von Göttern und Engeln: Die Republik zwischen Ideal und Utopie bei Immanuel Kant und Jean-Jacques Rousseau.“ Rousseaus Zauber: Lesarten der Politischen Philosophie. Ed. Karlfriedrich Herb and Magdalena Scherl. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. 19-31. Print.