The project 'Familiendinge. Familienfotos 1960-1980 in mentalitätsgeschichtlicher Perspektive' operates on three levels: teaching family history in the EUKLID B.A. and M.A. courses of study at KIT; holding small exhibitions, accompanied by narrative café events; preparing for a European comparative case study as a third-party-funded project.

Teaching in the EUKLID Study Program: One of the special features of the history of science at KIT is the close interweaving of the history of technology and general history. In the context of already held courses in general and political history on family history, electives from the modules of cultural history of technology as well as political history on the topic of the family since the second half of the 20th century will be correlated to each other thematically. For this purpose, perspectives on everyday life, consumption, media, social history, and mentalities, among others, are offered in both areas. In this course, which is aimed at both students in the B.A. program and advanced students in the M.A. program, interest is to be awakened in the multifaceted cross-sectional field of family history and concretized with a view to mobilizing students into their own research activity.

Exhibitions: In the courses, students will be given the opportunity to prepare small exhibition formats on family history since 1960.

Third-party funded project: With student participation and integration of final theses on individual topics, selected family-photo traditions with artifact references in the Netherlands and in the Federal Republic between 1960 and 1980 will be compared and subjected to a dense family-history interpretation aimed at the contextualization of exemplary material culture against the socio-historical developments in the Netherlands and in West Germany. The project partner for this is the WWU Center for Dutch Studies. Individual topics may include: Family artifacts of mobility, vacations, intergenerational toy worlds.

The textbook on family history (Rolf-Ulrich Kunze, Lehrbuch Familiengeschichte. Eine Ressource der Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart 2018) explores some questions about the relationship between family history and the social history of things. At issue are strategies for deciphering the narrative coding of family history through a close-up view of its artifacts captured in the photograph.