We live in a world at risk, an unstable world full of political, economical, and environmental uncertainties and insecurities. Having learnt the lessons of poststructuralism well, we approach this world with theories that emphasize unpredictability, opacity, and fragmentation. Simultaneously, however, globalization urges us to take the totality of the world that we inhabit into account and to acknowledge and address its full complexity. Ignoring the ban on grand narratives, Hardt and Negri boldly speak of Empire, Glissant poetically refers to the world-totality, and ecocritics such as Heise insist on the need to develop nothing less than a planetary consciousness. How do we negotiate these two, both ethically and politically laudable, but divergent, theoretical options? Where many scholars opt for a reconciliation of the two, we propose to linger in this position of suspension, this position of doubt, and to explore its potential.

Doubt is at stake in our work not only theoretically – as the tendency to waver between different approaches and perspectives, and as a concept taken on by many thinkers, not least in relation to scepticism and religious faith – but also on an institutional and professional level: neoliberal discourses and associated employment practices have cast doubt on the position of the humanities within the university and society at large, and have rendered academic careers much more precarious.

To engage with these different forms of doubt, we need to ask what this notion entails. Doubt appears to be a more definite condition than uncertainty; it is not satisfied with the celebration of ambiguity and chaos, but neither is it interested in the embrace of an (imaginary? illusionary?) totality. Rather, it identifies specific options between which it hesitates. Doubt is a state where action is needed, but postponed. Doubt is opened to a future, yet forestalls it. Is doubt something that always needs to be resolved or assuaged, or can it be made productive as doubt?

During the 2012 NICA Winter School we set out to explore the epistemology of doubt as well as on the imagination of doubt. What are the theoretical and methodological approaches that we use to explore the middle ground between a hesitative inarticulacy and firm statements? In how far is doubt a productive alternative position from which to navigate and negotiate between fundamentalism and moral relativism (Berger and Zijderveld 2009)? What is the role of uncertainty in the practice of cultural analysis, and how do we resolve it, or refuse to resolve it, and make it work for us? If we want to move beyond the celebration of plurality and uncertainty, when and how does doubt (as a more specific intellectual position of in-betweenness) enter our work.