Research projects

This interdisciplinary working group initiated by Dr Amelie Kutter aims to exchange and create synergies on research related to climate crisis, sustainability, the anthropocene and the relationship between nature and culture in the social sciences and the humanities. The working group is currently in the consolidation phase. 

The ‘Human & Planet’ Talk Series based at IFES also provides a platform for teaching, research and transfer on issues relating to the socio-ecological crisis and climate change from a multidisciplinary and broad perspective. The series welcomes contributions from colleagues and students who are interested in relevant topics.

The Human & Planet Talk Series aims to provide a platform for teaching, research and transfer on issues related to the socio-ecological crisis and climate change in a multidisciplinary and broad perspective. Based at the Viadrina Institute for European Studies, this open series welcomes contributions from colleagues and students interested in topics including but not limited to 

 

• Global warming and climate change: social, economic and political dimensions
• Environmental disasters: loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, changes in hydrological cycles (floods, droughts, dying rivers)
• Sustainability, mitigation & adaptation, de-growth: the diversity of frameworks aimed at addressing the current crisis at the levels of politics and civil society
• Extractivism, capitalism and global North-South inequalities
• Human-nature and/or culture-nature dualism: historical, anthropological and philosophical approaches
• The Anthropocene in the humanities, literature and the arts: ecocriticism and the search for languages for nature crisis and loss.

This series provides a permanent but flexible format for ongoing reflection and exchange on teaching and research on these topics. We are happy to co-organise related activities, to host reading groups and seminars, and to serve as a hub for connecting projects from the Viadrina.

Dates in the summer semester 2025:

09.05.2025, 18:30-20:00 pm: The Reality of Ghosts: Haunted Landscapes in the Anthropocene
Juliane Rebentisch (Hamburg/Princeton)

Dates in the winter semester 2024/25:

27.11.2024, 17:30-18:30 pm: Climate protection after Baku: Reimund Schwarze in conversation
Reimund Schwarze (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research)

17.12.2024, 16:15-17:30 pm: Reflections on the Past and Future of the Kakhovka Hydropower Plant Area (KHPP)
Tetiana Gardashuk (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), in cooperation with the Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukraininan Studies (KIU)

6.01.2025, 16:15-17:45 pm: European Values in the EU's Developmental, Energy and Climate Policies
Randall Halle (Pittsburgh University), in cooperation with the Jean Monnet Policy Network ValEUs

Project funding: German-Polish Science Foundation
Term: November 2020-April 2021
Leadership: Dr. Anja Hennig, Institute for European Studies at the European University Viadrina

Project partners: 
Prof. Dr. Jörg Hackmann, Institute of History at the University of Szczecin
Prof. Dr Krzysztof Ruchniewicz, Willy Brandt Centre for German Studies at the University of Wrocław

1. INTERDISCIPLINARY – TRANSNATIONAL – REGIONAL
The transnational project emerges from the field of interdisciplinary public history research. Our starting hypothesis is that contemporary interpretations of history can be read as positioning in favour of or against the liberal-democratic project. Based on this assumption, we will analyse the role of the local or regional level in terms of places, actors and policies in the conflict over liberal democratic perspectives, asking how it relates to national and transnational historical narratives.

2. WORKSHOPS PUBLIC DISCUSSIONS
The project is explorative and participatory in nature. It is based on three thematically focussed historical-political workshop discussions, which will take place between November 2020 and April 2021 in Frankfurt (Oder), Wroclaw and Szczecin. They will each consist of an internal and a public event part, in which perspectives from academia, politics and cultural (memory) practices can be discussed with regard to connections of regionality and public history in the dispute about liberal democratic principles.

3. NETWORK FOR RESEARCH AND TEACHING
The project aims to stimulate a German-Polish research and teaching network which takes into account the fundamentally different war experiences, memories, and politics of remembrance in Poland and Germany. In order to explore shared mechanisms and trends in contemporary historical interpretations, these will be placed within the broader context of international discourse. The initiative seeks to unite students and educators from both countries who share similar interests, fostering collaboration in teaching and learning, including innovative online formats.

 

 

 

 

The current understanding of "Europeanisation“ is still characterised by teleological and linear ideas, increasing integration and progress. However, moments of intensive European development are and have always been characterised by ambivalence and contradiction. The research project "Ambivalences of Europeanisation“ aims to understand and systematise these ambivalences as the core of Europeanisation.

The starting hypothesis of the project is that modernity and Europe have been closely linked concepts since their common genesis in the 18th century. Since ambivalences represent the necessary complementary counterpart of modernity as an order, they also constitute the core of Europeanisation. In this sense, it was not peaceful moments, but rather crises, conflicts, resistance and indeterminacy that have significantly influenced the historical development of Europe.

Tendencies of homogenisation and differentiation, integration and disintegration as well as synchronisation/acceleration and desynchronisation/deceleration are simultaneously present and form the motor of a fundamentally non-linear Europeanisation. Ambivalences are analysed in the project in three dimensions as empirical phenomena: symbolic meanings, historical complexity and institutional practices are the focus of a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and non-teleological understanding of Europeanisation.

The collective volume Ambivalences of Europeanisation. Beiträge zur Neukonzeptionalisierung der Geschichte und Gegenwart Europas, edited by Timm Beichelt, Clara Frysztacka, Claudia Weber and Susann Worschech, was published by Franz Steiner Verlag in 2020.

Project editors: Timm Beichelt, Clara Frysztacka, Claudia Weber, Susann Worschech