When we question things that are supposedly self-evident, we start to see the world differently. How do we know what we should and shouldn’t feel? Why do bodies take on meaning? Helen Ahner researches the dreams, stories, actions, rules, and structures that shape our lives by placing everyday, normal things under the magnifying glass. She is currently studying feelings in sport and investigating how female ambition has changed over the past hundred years.
Looking through archives, Helen Ahner came across newspaper articles from the 1920s debating whether women were suited for competitive sport. From a modern-day perspective, this is an irritating debate – which is why she started researching the historical context and the change in sporting performance standards and in people’s feelings about them. Her aim is to better understand contemporary everyday life and its historical roots. Taking the example of female athletes, Helen Ahner shows how changes in body perception and the feelings associated with it eventually led to people questioning societal rules and changing them.
Ahner’s feeling of irritation acts as a signpost to new questions. Her research subject – the everyday and the supposedly mundane – harbors its own potential for irritation. She constantly finds herself having to explain why popular culture, rituals, or everyday objects are relevant research topics. And yet it is precisely the little things that reflect the bigger picture and make it tangible. Soccer boots that pinch because they were made to fit standard male feet, jokes about aerobics-mad housewives that disparage enthusiasm for sport as a self-indulgent pastime, and “girlboss” accessories that commercialize the female drive to achieve, treating it as a lifestyle, speak volumes about how social participation and ambition are negotiated every day.
In collaboration with Die Junge Akademie
Helen Ahner
Helen Ahner is an assistant professor at the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. She conducts research on feelings, bodies, things, and experiences in historical and contemporary contexts. Ahner studied and completed her PhD at the Ludwig Uhland Institute of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. She subsequently spent three years at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, working on the history of feelings. She has been a member of Die Junge Akademie since June 2024.
Registration
Please irritate me! on May 6, 2025, 7 pm (doors open 6:30 pm). The event will be held in German.
Notice to audience regarding film and photographic recordings
Please note that our events are digitally recorded and/or photographed. By attending, you acknowledge and agree to grant Wübben Stiftung Wissenschaft and its partners the right to digitally record, film, photograph, or capture your likeness during the event and to distribute, broadcast, use, or otherwise disseminate such media in perpetuity without any further approval from you.
Please irritate me! discussion series
In this discussion series we look forward to being irritated, alongside our audience, by unusual research questions, original approaches, and the latest research findings. As well as delving into individual research topics, we are interested in exploring the fundamental question of how new ideas are born in science and research. Join us to meet researchers who are following new paths, who challenge us with their research, and who offer up fresh perspectives on growing scientific knowledge.
Credits: picture alliance / REUTERS | Jason Cairnduff