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.

In this two-semester teaching research project, the students worked together with the research team from the Professorship of Sociology of the Economy on economic, social and cultural transformation dynamics in rural areas of Brandenburg.

Financing/funding/scope

• The Professorship's own funds
• Förderkreis of the Viadrina
• Faculty of Economics

Term

Summer 2021 - February 2024

Cooperation partner

Municipal council and mayor of the analysed municipality of Falkenhagen (Mark)

Description

At the beginning of 2021, the team from the Professorship of Sociology of the Economy led by Prof Dr Sascha Münnich was encouraged by the municipal council and the mayor of Falkenhagen (Mark) to take stock, form an opinion and create a social portrait of the municipality of Falkenhagen (Mark). The municipal council wanted to review and, if necessary, improve its own communication strategies. For the Viadrina team, this led to the plan to investigate three further social science research interests in an extensive one-and-a-half-year study of the standardised and non-standardised in-depth survey of Falkenhagen residents:

A. Images of the village and the place of residence: How do the residents of Falkenhagen (Mark) describe the village in which they live and its inhabitants? Where do they see the greatest advantages, but also problems and challenges in their lives in Falkenhagen? What roles do references to the difference between town and country play in this?

B. Social structure: How are their personal relationships in and around the village structured, how do they organise their professional life and their leisure time? Where do they see group lines, conflicts, opportunities and limits of community building?

C. Political attitudes: How do residents assess the current political situation in Germany and Brandenburg? What do different groups of residents think about current issues in federal and state politics? What attitudes do the residents of Falkenhagen (Mark) have towards current issues such as mobility, the future, infrastructure, politics and the environment?

The three research interests were outlined in a standardised questionnaire sent to all residents and then explored in more depth in qualitative interviews with some residents, whereby topic A was discussed with all residents, while topics B and C were only discussed with some of the residents in the interview. There was a fourth topic at the beginning of the study, which related to specific socio-political challenges in the community, but the results were not valid enough to be reported here.

The results of the study show that although the urban-rural dichotomy continues to have a high symbolic significance in everyday life and the political attitudes of the population, from a social science perspective, rural areas should be seen as a multidimensional space in which the challenges of economic, social, political and ecological transformation, which affect urban and rural areas equally, overlap in an area affected by multiple structural problems. Furthermore, it is a social space in which the personal relationships and autobiographical fates of small groups form the opportunities but also the limits of social adaptation and the recovery and re-intensification of a village community.

Teaching

Summer semester 2022: TEACHING RESEARCH PROJECT (semester 1 of 2): "Fundamentals of standardised survey methods - social living conditions in Brandenburg".

Winter semester 2022/23: TEACHING RESEARCH PROJECT (semester 2 of 2): "Qualitative Interviews - Social Living Conditions in Brandenburg".

Publications

Final report - Life and future orientation in Brandenburg. Available at: https://mycloud.europa-uni.de/s/PTbobRJezyYmFSa or as a download here

Project management and employees

Project management: Prof Dr Sascha Münnich; Jonas Rietschel, M.A.

Collaborators: Viktoria Hrynek, Maren Romstedt, Daniela-Johanna Grigoleit, Jutta Angelmaier, Karolin Sander, Katja Konrad and Sophia Recht. As well as many M.A. and B.A. students of the European University Viadrina in various study courses of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences. Here you can read an article about the project in the Viadrina Newsportal

Seminar description: Anyone who has been commuting between Berlin and Frankfurt (Oder) on the RE1 for some time will have noticed how, depending on the time of day or night, the train at the previously less frequented Fangschleuse station suddenly fills up or empties and how diverse the people who board or alight there now are. The change in meaning of Fangschleuse is just one effect of the first "Tesla Gigafactory in Europe" in Grünheide, Brandenburg. The planning, construction and commissioning of this global company plant have evoked conflicts, challenged policy-making and will probably change a lot socially. It is always particularly interesting for social science research to analyse socio-economic or cultural conflicts and processes of change. Many questions therefore also arise around "Tesla Brandenburg". We are taking "Tesla Brandenburg" as a hitherto little-researched subject for an application-orientated seminar on qualitative social research. The aim is to identify various fields of research through whose prism "Tesla Brandenburg" can be analysed and to formulate research questions that arise from the examination of different perspectives on our complex object of research. Those who are primarily interested in the content of "Tesla Brandenburg" are also invited to attend. However, the focus is on learning and developing research strategies, methods and concepts of scientific theory with the help of which we can approach this subject and open up thematic sub-areas. Specific content relates to basic elements of scientific theory, strategies for finding and narrowing down topics, typologies of questions as well as the theory and application of participant observation, guided interviews or the development and evaluation of questionnaires. It is therefore about competences that are relevant for any social science-oriented work at BA and MA level. The seminar is thus also intended as a bridging project for the BA and MA study courses of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences into regional and local issues and public debates. The requirements for the respective BA and MA students differ in the level expected in the development of the research designs/exposés.

Here you can read an entry about the research seminar in the Viadrina-Logbuch

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